“Hello, how may I help you?”
Before few years, call centers were reverberating with this line; often heard from customer care executives. What followed was hours and hours of haggling, questioning, bargaining and resolving issues.
Thanks to the advent of Customer Relationship Management Software, the phone buzzes at call centers died down and customers started resolving issues on their own. This shift and evolution in customer services happened due to a reason – Customers want to resolve their issues NOW. And if you do not give them the answers in real-time, they will find someone who will.
Realizing this, several business owners joined the bandwagon of customer portal users as it helped them enhance their services and brand image. The self-service customer portals give customers with an immediate access to information. Not just that, they also facilitate the customers to personalize accounts by saving their time and efforts.
If you use a CRM, you must have heard the word Knowledge Base. For those who are unaware, it is an important resource of information for your customers. Or you can say, a hub where your customers can hangout, get information about your company and resolve their issues.
The best part? It promotes simple interactions, is active 24/7 and above all, it’s free!
So, what all can you do using the Knowledge Base and how can it help your customers? Let’s check out:
Create and Publish Articles
Every other day, you might have an update in your product/services which you want your customers to know about. Now, you can’t possibly write/email about it to each one of them.
Knowledge base of your CRM enables your team write, maintain and publish articles for your customers. You can also share your business and product information through your CRM interface, transfer details from a support case and publish articles for internal reference or externally for your customers.
While publishing this information, you must take care of the fact that you break down the instructions and use simple vocabulary. The biggest tip – avoid using short-forms and jargons as they might make your customers feel less connected with your brand. Even if you do, don’t overuse them.
Get Organized
The utility of knowledge base is not limited to your customers. It offers your representatives with a quick and streamlined access to information and enhances your organization’s ability to offer real-time customers service.
This means no fretting over information of different customers and regretting over not being able to connect with them on time. As your sales representatives can have a quick access to relevant information and solutions, you will observe a reduction in the average time they take to offer customer service.
Knowledge base can be divided into different categories/sections making it easy for your customers to find answers and information pertaining to a particular issue. Take product installations, for example. If you are a product oriented company, you can have a section explaining each product and how to install it.
Similarly, you can create different knowledge based entities based on your business.
Lessen Repeated Queries
When different customers ask the same question to your team, it can get quite frustrating for them. It also takes a toll on their productivity. To avoid this, a general FAQ can be created in your CRM.
A Forrester survey proved that customers prefer to use the FAQ page on a website more than talking to a customer support executive. You can add FAQ link to your customer service portal and enable customers to find answers to their questions without having to struggle much.
If you can turn inquiries into knowledge articles, well, nothing like that! They will definitely reduce the number of repetitive questions and free up channels for high customer engagement. Also, if there is a database of knowledge articles and step-by-step guide, representatives will be able to resolve problems in a much better way. It also boosts first contact resolution (FCR) rates.
How Does Knowledge Base Work?
Here’s a step-by-step glimpse into the working of Knowledge Base:
- The CRM admin writes a knowledge base article and uploads it in the CRM
- Users get an access to that article through the CRM
- They can go to the knowledge base module through the portal and find the list of articles and read the knowledge base article based on the information they need
The only limitation of the portal is that users cannot view a module for which they do not have sufficient rights or if the admin has disabled it.
On the last note…
The CRM users need to understand that customers of today prefer self-service over all other forms of support. And it will be of real help to your customers if you make it user-friendly for your customers.
So, make sure that your knowledge based FAQs are easily accessible, updated from time to time and are as interactive as possible. Last but not the least, you also need to ensure that the content available in your self-service portal is device responsive.
Knowledge base is a great way to resolve customer queries effortlessly and keep them happy!
Do you have any insights on Customer Service Portal? Feel free to share with us.
