A business should provide its customers with a way to decrease dependence on customer service. In other words, customers should be self-sufficient in solving small queries and problems. This is where an effective knowledge management strategy comes into play.
Knowledge management helps customers find answers to their everyday questions and queries, saving them the hassle of contacting customer service every time. A well-maintained knowledge helps a business prevent overflow of queries and tickets, leading to better ticket management.
If you are also a business owner mulling over an effective knowledge management strategy, here’s a post for you. In this post, you’ll learn about the benefits of knowledge management, steps to build a knowledge base, best knowledge management solutions and practices, and more, in detail.
Overview of Knowledge Base Management
Knowledge management is a process that businesses use to gather, organize, analyze, and share their knowledge with customers. This knowledge can include technical resources, FAQs, help articles, training documents or videos, etc.
It can also contain user forums, white papers, case studies, directories or glossaries, and virtually anything that helps customers understand your products or services and use them. Knowledge management often requires a centralized collection of all the knowledge base easily accessible to different types of users.
Advantages of Knowledge Base Management
A strong knowledge management strategy helps build a valuable knowledge base for your organization that offers a number of benefits as follows.
Fills the Communication Gap
Some part of customer service is just a basic transfer of information your customer requires to achieve some goal. The knowledge base transfers that information faster without any need for customer service. It can address most of these basic questions easily and enhances customer experience.
For example, some queries like “How do I reset my password?” or “Why can’t I upload my file?” etc. are very common and repeated.
Customers Prefer Self-Service
Customers prefer self-service. They like to find answers to their questions themselves before reaching out to customer support. This is where you can help them with a foolproof knowledge management strategy to build a rich knowledge base.
Supports Different Learning Styles
While some customers may prefer reading tips, others may find tutorial videos more useful. Centralized knowledge management helps you accommodate knowledge in different forms. You can include text, video, audio, annotated images, FAQs, help articles, etc. This enables your customers to choose the way they can absorb the information they need most easily and instantly.
24/7 Availability and Accessibility
The right knowledge management strategy can get you a customer service agent to work for you round the clock in the form of your knowledge base. No matter where your customer is, they can find solutions to most of their queries on the go through it. This saves them the time and effort they would spend to call you at odd hours or wait for their turn during busy hours.
Deliver Knowledge Contextually
A well-planned knowledge management strategy also includes segregating the knowledge base well. Contextual segregation of knowledge helps customers not only find answers but save their time to search what they want. They can simply locate the piece of information they need via navigation in the relevant category or search.
Provides Valuable Insights
A knowledge management tool with reporting capabilities also helps get better insights into your customers’ needs. You can find what customers are looking for, the search terms they use, any possible gaps in your knowledge base, etc. Accordingly, you can use these insights to enhance your knowledge content and improve it.
Reduces Burden on Resources
The absence of a proper knowledge management strategy can put an extra burden on support agents. They may have to spend more time handling frequently asked questions and common queries. Hence, they may not get enough time and effort they need to focus on customers’ bigger and more complex issues. This can lead to a significant decrease in their performance and productivity. A good knowledge management system eliminates the need to tackle small issues as customers can tackle those themselves.
How to Create a Knowledge Base
Creating a knowledge base is a long-term project and requires a well-thought-out knowledge management strategy and set of steps.
Here are the five steps to creating a knowledge base:
1. Consider all that you need to cover
The first thing is to understand what you need to include in your knowledge base to make it serve the purpose. For this, you should collect the most common questions and queries that customers face and include them in your knowledge base using knowledge base software.
2. Leverage your existing information
Your knowledge portal is basically a collection of all the relevant information in one place. Probably, you may have almost all that you need to include already with you. The only thing is that this information may be dispersed in different places. They may be in the form of FAQs on your site, tutorial videos on YouTube, documentation, user manuals, and whatnot. Collect them all in one place and look for any inconsistencies and duplication that you can remove.
3. Organize your information
Structure your information and arrange that properly in different segments according to how customers would want to view it. The contextual arrangement of your information is a crucial aspect of a good knowledge management strategy that you can’t forgo.
4. Create new content
Find out if there are any gaps in your current knowledge base and fill them by creating new content. You can also take help from the relevant team members to know what’s missing in your content. You can consider building content in different formats ranging from videos, FAQs, to help articles, or anything similar. The new content must be unique and scanned through online tools like Check-plagiarism or Turnitin to ensure its uniqueness.
5. Keep updating your knowledge base
A knowledge base is not written in stone and needs changes. As you add new products or services to your business or update any; you should update the relative content accordingly. A good knowledge management strategy ensures that you have your content up-to-date at any point in time. For this, you should appoint a person or a team to revise the knowledge base on a regular basis and flag the content which needs changes.
If you are looking for a way to collect and manage all your knowledge centrally, our portal solutions can be the right fit for you. With our portal, you can not only handle your knowledge more seamlessly but also make access to it more secure with individual log-in configuration.
Best Practices to Enhance Knowledge Management Strategy
There is no doubt that a knowledge base is an asset. However, without a proper knowledge management strategy and the right practices, you can’t get the most out of it. Below are a few good practices that you can implement to bolster your knowledge management.
1. Know your audience
Before thinking of any knowledge management strategy, consider who your target audience is. Create buyer personas of your target audience and refer to them while collecting content for your knowledge base.
Keep your knowledge base interactive and easy to understand. This is essential as it will help your customers solve the problems themselves and find answers to their queries. If your content is a lot of technical jargon or is in a complex language, they may require to get in touch with your support team. This will defeat the very purpose of building it in the first place.
2. Match your content with brand
Your knowledge base reflects your brand. If you fail to keep your knowledge base in line with your personality and theme, it can lead to a decline in engagement. The customers may feel detached and may not take interest in that.
To avoid this, consider creating a style guide in your knowledge management strategy. This guide should have set rules for formatting and writing any type of content. This will help keep your knowledge base consistent and professional throughout.
3. Ensure easy accessibility
Your knowledge base content should follow some accessibility standards to boost findability, visibility and engagement. There are several things you can try. Make it a point to include alt text for all images, screenshots, images, and videos in your knowledge base. Check and remove any contrasting colors that customers may have difficulty viewing against particular backgrounds. Use large and clear fonts for headers and bullet points to break up your large piece of content.
Besides, you can add hyperlinked tables of content to make the navigation of long articles easier. You can also ascertain that your knowledge base is mobile-responsive before launch.
4. Share your knowledge base
A good knowledge management strategy also includes sharing your rich knowledge base wherever you can. Be it supporting marketing content, explaining sales presentations, or converting leads, your knowledge base can help.
For instance, if there is a blog that explains the steps to use one of your products, you can link that blog to your knowledge base article explaining the features of your product and a detailed step-by-step guide to using it. It will not only help increase traffic to your knowledge base but also provide more value to customers and elevate their experience.
5. Gauge the Effectiveness
Your knowledge base is useful only if it serves the purpose of helping customers serve themselves. There should be a way to assess whether it is actually helping customers or not. You should also have a way to find out if your content is on-point and valuable and provides everything customers seek.
To figure this out, consider including a single-question feedback survey at the end of each article as different companies like Microsoft or Google do. Ask them whether they find the article useful and let them choose between YES and NO. You can also provide an email address or support number that your customers can use for additional queries, issues, or feedback.
6. Consider the Right Knowledge Management Solutions
Yes, picking the right technology is also crucial. There are myriad portal solutions available out there that you can pick from to manage your knowledge base centrally and securely.
Picking the right portal out of various knowledge management solutions can sometimes be tough. Nevertheless, with a clear objective and requirements you want in your portal, you can pick the right fit for your organization easily.
If you are also looking to create your knowledge base and streamline your knowledge management strategy, our launch-ready portal solutions can help you out.
Hire CRMJetty – Upgrade Your Knowledge Management Strategy
If you are looking to create and maintain a knowledge base, CRMJetty can be your ideal choice. CRMJetty provides ready-to-launch, next-gen knowledge management solutions for various popular CRMs like Salesforce and Dynamics. Our portal solutions are industry-standard solutions equipped with all the cutting-edge features that you want in a knowledge base portal.
We also follow a modular approach to help you build your portal your way. Our development team first gathers your portal requirements and figures out whether our launch-ready solutions can fulfill them. If they can, we get your portal up and running in a matter of a day or two. We also find out if some minor tweaks and customizations can make our portal solutions match your business requirements. If it’s worth doing, our development team provides the required customizations. After handing over the solution to you, we also provide a limited-period support window to give you time to get familiar with the portal and its working.
If there is a huge gap between your requirements and features of the portal solution, CRMJetty’s still got your back. In such cases, we help you build your own unique portal from scratch and equip it with all the features specific to your business logic.
You can stay assured with us on your side as we hold an excellent track record. So far, our 190-strong team has completed 14+ years in the portal development industry and served in 11+ countries.
So, let’s join hands to take your knowledge management strategy to the next level.
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