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Today I’m pleased to share a guest post by Swaathishree Sridhar with Freshdesk.

Creating a memorable customer experience (CX) is not every brand’s cup of tea. Only a few brands ensure great customer experience throughout the customer journey. Of the many ways in which you can enhance the customer service experience, self-service is one of the least-explored options.

What is self-service?
As the name suggests, self-service is a form of customer support where customers help themselves find answers and solutions to problems with your product or service. There are different ways in which you can provide self-service as a form of support to your customers.

• Knowledge base
• Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
• Online forums and communities
• Interactive voice response (IVR)
• Chatbots

And of all these self-service options available, knowledge base is the most-preferred choice of self-service. In fact, millennials prefer using a self-service portal to talking to a support agent.

What is a knowledge base?
A knowledge base is a repository of information on the various aspects of an organization from its company policy to how-to solutions for its product and services.

In other words, it can be called an online library where your customers can find answers to questions that don’t require human support.

In this article, I’ll discuss five different ways in which you can enhance customer experience using a knowledge base.

1. Round the Clock Accessibility
Complete reliance on customer support agents without any alternatives can make way for a negative experience when things go wrong. Because it’s quite a task to deploy agents round the clock, especially during the holiday season and when your customers belong to different time zones. During these times, a knowledge base can be of great help when the customer is unable to contact your support team. They can get an instant solution from your knowledge base without having to wait for your support agents.

Being accessible in some way or the other is important for creating a good customer experience. Hence, make sure that your customers are able to find your knowledge base easily.

• Include the knowledge base as part of your Support page
• Add a Support button on top of your website

2. Creating Customer-Friendly Content
Customers these days prefer using a knowledge base to talking to a support agent. However, it’s not just enough to set up a knowledge base; it is also essential that the knowledge base content is user-friendly. Your customers should be able to find the solution in a single search. This leads to quicker resolution, in turn, providing a great customer experience.

A smart way to do this is to prepare a list of questions for making your knowledge base content-rich. Add solutions that are easily comprehensible to your customers. But, which questions? How do you decide?

• Ask your support agents for questions that are asked by many customers or go through your support tickets for the same.
• Take a look at your customer feedback and their online reviews.
• Ask your customers for suggestions.

3. Timely Solutions
While complex issues take time to get resolved, customers don’t want to wait in a queue to talk to a support agent for simple issues. Product-related questions like how-tos or setting up an account can be resolved with the help of an optimized knowledge base. Implement your knowledge base in such a way that your customers can find solutions quickly.

• Order the FAQs based on the number of customer searches.
• Include a search bar.
• Use explainer videos and screenshots to make the solutions easily comprehensible.

4. Repetitive Issues
When it comes to handling customer conversations, the support agents are required to resolve issues quickly while also providing  a pleasant customer experience. But that can be quite difficult, as a significant portion of an agent’s day is spent handling repetitive issues. This lessens their focus on the complex ones, thus missing out on creating a good customer experience.

In such situations, developing a knowledge base with solutions to those repetitive issues is the best way to quickly answer customers’ questions without direct assistance from agents. This reduces the ticket volume and allows the support agents to pay more attention to top-priority, more-difficult  issues. As a result, every support agent will be able to resolve their issues better and provide a great customer experience.

5. Training Your Chatbot
If there is a smarter version to a knowledge base, it’s none other than an AI-powered chatbot. Though many companies have started adopting the chatbot technology, not every chatbot does conflict resolution effectively. The reality is that many customers end up having a bad experience with chatbots.

In order for the chatbot to be intuitive, it needs to get trained, and a vast amount of data and information needs to be fed to the bot. This is because everyone ask questions in their own terms, and the chatbot must recognize and understand these nuances accurately. Here’s where an up-to-date knowledge base can prove to be a rich source of information. When your chatbot gets trained based on the information in your knowledge base, it is more likely to give relevant solutions to your customers. Though there’s more to creating a customer-friendly chatbot, your knowledge base will play a major role in training your chatbot and, in turn, providing great customer experience.

Conclusion
Among the many ways to improve a brand’s customer experience, self-service has rarely been utilized to its full potential. Even the brands that are ready to experiment with chatbots don’t sweat much on improving their knowledge base. But, with customers considering the support team as their last resort, it is imperative that brands offer the option to customers to help themselves. After all, who wouldn’t fancy a knowledge base software that provides the right solution in a single search?

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