You might not even think how many benefits are coming from maintaining a good knowledge base for your online business. First and foremost, it serves as an amazing self-service option for customers who rather find the answers to their questions on their own.
Secondly, a good knowledge base is not only a source of information for customers but for your employees as well. It plays an important role in training new employees, providing them with a great source of information for convenient learning, and in the work of long-time employees as well, decreasing the time they need to spend searching for company information and increasing their productivity.
Thirdly, if your knowledge base is up-to-date, it can serve as an efficient library for an online AI chatbot in your customer service. The AI chatbot can learn the information from the articles, and answer incoming questions based on those.
And finally, if you have an extensive number of articles in your knowledge base, full of relevant keywords and information, your search engine optimization will get better, driving more organic traffic to your website.
So, now comes the big question: How can you maintain a good knowledge base to enjoy these benefits in your online business? We’ll show you how in just 5 steps.
Make a Plan for the Structure of Your Knowledge Base
As with many things in the business world, this process also starts with planning and structuring. You must ensure that the flood of information that might attack the user when trying to search for something in the knowledge base is reduced.
For this, you must categorize the different types of information about your business, whether that be the different products, features, account setup, payment methods, etc. Then, under these, create subcategories to make sure that your users find what they are looking for as easily as possible.
The main goal is to be transparent and easily understandable. Make your Help Center searchable for better customer experience, and guide your users to discover exactly what they need.
Choose the Language You Write in Wisely
If you have any experience in writing content for others, you know that the backbone of choosing the tone and style you write in is the target audience, your readers. Consider what type of language your users prefer, and take into account the nature of your product as well.
A good rule of thumb is sticking to the same technical terms, if they are needed, but mainly focusing on writing in a simple, easily understandable manner. In addition, make sure you don’t have any typos and include external resources or internal links to other articles to provide even further information on the topic.
Just be sure that you are concise and clear in your communication. The easier it is for your users to understand your products, the more satisfied they will be with your business in the end.
Include Helpful Visuals for Each Article and Each Step
Visuals are always great tools to guide users to take certain steps, to complete a process, or to understand different features better. Imagines, (mostly screenshots), videos, and infographics are most commonly used in knowledge bases. This is especially true for those businesses that have technical processes that require multiple steps to be completed.
If you have an online business, it’s good to provide visuals for every step of the way of using a specific feature or completing a process.
This ensures that the product or service is put into context for the customers, so they know what they need to see on their side of the platform. Thus, it ensures a better onboarding experience and faster issue resolution for the customers.
Keep the Information Up-to-Date
With every new feature or change in your business, your knowledge base must be updated accordingly. If you don’t pay close enough attention to the details and neglect the continuous revision of the knowledge base, you might find yourself faced with a loss of trust from customers. If something doesn’t work the way it is documented, frustration and doubt arise, leading to decreased customer satisfaction.
One way to keep your knowledge base updated is by making sure your team members collaborate with each other, and everyone lets know others if there are changes in the product. This way, the responsible person can immediately make the changes necessary in the documentation.
You can also offer a chance for customers to give feedback, and notify you if there are inconsistencies between your knowledge base and the way the product works.
In my conversation with Kamran Ahmed, Senior Lead Knowledge Manager at PowerSchool, he offered several great tips for maintaining a good knowledge base from his own experience: “As Knowledge Management, we just need to bridge the gap between what customers are searching for, and what is available.
We need regular audits, the most common being Quarterly or Half-Yearly reviews for all content, and promote the ones which customers have been using the most.
We need to have a constant tone and communication style, the best would be to have a pre-defined Style-Guide, and clearly follow the Accessibility Guidelines for Web.
And for the Knowledge Management team, the roles and responsibilities should be clearly defined as what the process holds and there should be an SOP for each process.”
Saffiya Tasneem, Knowledge Manager at PowerSchool, also offered some great advice for maintaining a good knowledge base: “I would suggest to always be up to date with the information. Keep a regular schedule to review and update KB based on users' requests. Organize your content such that they are both user-friendly and simple for others to access. Create a biweekly analytics report to pinpoint knowledge base improvement opportunities.”
Create Integrations with Other Tools
To make the knowledge base even more effective than just on its own, you can connect it with other tools in your business. Both the functionality and the user experience will be positively affected by such integrations.
You can connect your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool with your knowledge base, and enhance the workflow of your customer service agents so that they have immediate access to customer data for a better understanding of their needs and pain points.
Plus, you can also integrate your knowledge base with an AI chatbot for providing fast answers to common customer queries. In addition, the chatbot can provide links to articles that might help resolve the issues.
Conclusion
Maintaining a robust knowledge base for your online business is essential for customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Follow key practices such as structuring content effectively, using appropriate language, incorporating visuals, and keeping information up-to-date. Moreover, integrate it with other tools like CRM systems and AI chatbots so you can further enhance operations and improve user experience.
Your knowledge base is a valuable asset you want to keep being effective. How would you maintain a great knowledge base for your online business?
