Let’s start with the million dollar question – “What does it take to run a successful online business”? The answer is rather simple, you need to have a company that’s worth a lot and earns a lot of money, and to achieve that you need happy and loyal customers.
But here’s the more important question is – “How do you keep your customers happy and loyal”?The immediate answer that pops into the mind is – offer exceptional customer service! But then, doing so is expensive, is it not? After all, you need to hire a team of expert agents to answer customer tickets, or maybe even run a 24/7 call center! Offering outstanding customer service doesn’t have to be an expensive proposition, if you know about the right tools, and one such tool is a self-service knowledgebase.
So, what exactly is a self-service knowledgebase?
A self-service knowledgebase is an online portal where your customers can access online manuals, website FAQs, user guides at anytime and find answers for themselves.
All kinds of companies from manufacturing to marketing (check out some examples) need a self-service knowledgebase as it helps them offer better support.
While customers get answers instantly, without having to call support or raise a ticket, it also reduces workload of your agents.
Besides this there are a ton of benefits in using a self-service knowledgebase. Let’s look at some of them.
It’s cost efficient
If you want satisfied and loyal customers, you need to find a cost-efficient way to always be there for them, and help them solve their problems. One of the features that a self-service knowledge base has is the ability to act as a call center replacement. So, it simply cuts down on the costs that you would spend on either building or outsourcing call center services.
You might argue that a call center is a better option, because it’s important to talk to the customers directly, but this is not the case here. Call centers are only acting as a middleman that diverts the call to someone who is specialized and trained to handle the particular problem, and with a help center tool you simply cut out the middleman.
It’s time efficient
In order to be a good provider you need to act swiftly, and a self-service knowledge base allows you to bring that response time to a whole new level. When a customer needs an answer, chances are they will be able to find it on their own. A self- service knowledgebase is designed to help your customers get answers to an easy question or FAQ on your website, which gives your staff more time to address some more serious issues, should they come up. So, both customers with simple problems and those with more complex issues get to be served instantly.
It boosts engagement
When customers can reach you instantly, you become a more reliable provider. One of the in-built features of self-service knowledge base is live chat. This allows for the issues to be resolved quickly, and it gives a more personal touch to the communication, much like the one from the call centers. Furthermore, you can immediately ask your customers to leave a review, which helps your reputation in the long run.
Boosting engagement on your website has also become easier with new technologies such as chatbots, which help you to not only respond to customer questions but also automate tasks for them.
Improved workflow
Happy customers are not the only thing that makes your online businesses successful, you also need to think about the happiness of your employees. If you want to have happy employees, then a self-service knowledge base can help in this department as well. Since, there is an in-built ticket system, the software can do task distribution on its own, and with great accuracy. So, whenever a customer has a question or complaint, all that they have to do is leave an input that will redirect it to the right department to address the issue. This creates an environment that is highly organized, and employees will love it.
It’s easier to collaborate
When you have a neatly organized job history and an archive that is easily accessible, collaboration between workers and customers becomes a lot easier. Knowledge base software improves the workflow and productivity by allowing the information to be shared and accessed with ease.
It is a great tool for collaboration, and workers can even access it from their homes, or any place with internet connection for that matter. This gives them more flexibility, and gives everyone a clear overview of what their co-workers are doing. It also serves as a library of all previous work and documentation, so whenever someone needs a certain file again, it can be easily found.
Optimization and efficiency
Self-service knowledge base can provide us with some valuable input and metrics that you can put to good use. Merely observing metrics is useless; you need to act adequately in order to improve, so knowledge base software is here to help. These metrics can help you discover some of the most common questions of your customers, thereby helping you create FAQ pages that put the answers to these question upfront.
In other words, you can create template solutions, so that customers can easily access them without any need for support to intervene. It will also give you valuable insight into future product upgrades and updates.
It makes customer profiling easier
A customers is more likely to come back and become a regular if he or she feels appreciated. In order to give your regular customers the VIP treatment they deserve, you need to have their profiles. Self-service knowledge base can help you gather data, like location, birthday, shopping history etc. basically all you need to make customized offers that your customers will love. You can give them discounts during their birthday, you can notify them with relevant updates and wish them a happy holiday.
As you can see, there are many benefits of self-service knowledgebase, and it would be unwise to ignore this opportunity. First of all it’s cheaper and more efficient than the previous methods used for improving customer service, and for optimizing workflow. Just make sure you find the right software for your line of work; since there are many tools with different features, it would be ideal to sign in for a trial period, and see how you can manipulate data with a particular piece of software.
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