Business organizations face varied new challenges in terms of managing big knowledge data that has been piling up over the years. The u...
Business organizations face varied new challenges in terms of managing big knowledge data that has been piling up over the years. The use of paper is definitely becoming a thing of the past. Online documentation is available at any given time and that’s what everyone strives to have these days.
However, this electronic documentation has to be organized in order for it to be useful and that’s where knowledge management systems come into play.
A knowledge base software solution has many benefits for those who decide to implement it on their website. Predominantly, it is used on official websites of small, medium, or large business establishments.
Some of the benefits are: faster and effective on-boarding of new customers and employees, increased employee productivity and collaboration, increased website traffic and conversion rates, lowered expenses and a completely transformed customer support department.
Since many people think that implementing a knowledge base on their website is complex, let’s debunk this myth with these top 4 best tips and guide that will lead you towards successfully integrating these two.
1. What is the Purpose of a Knowledge Base?
First, you have to decide the purpose of having a knowledge base. It might be helpful to get familiar with the three basic functions – internal knowledge base, self-service help center, and documentation and manuals.
You should go for an internal knowledge base if you are experiencing business growth and customer support and customer relations departments are piling up vast amounts of data. This is also a good solution to store your own organization’s knowledge. In any case, an internal knowledge base increases efficiency and productivity and presents a unique way for employees to share information and collaborate.
A Self Service Help Center is an excellent way to utilize the experience of your customer support department and provide your customers with valuable answers. The great advantage of this type of help center is that it is searchable. The customers can get their desired information with just a few clicks. This is an excellent way to reduce costs and reduce tickets.
Another purpose of having a knowledge base implemented on your website is to provide customers with documentation and manuals. Unlike paper documentation, online docs can contain many images and videos.
2. Choosing a Knowledge Base Software
There are many knowledge base software solutions out there. Versions may vary from preinstalled ones to cloud-based ones. Aside from this big difference, these software solutions are also set apart by the features they pack.
Companies who tend to integrate their knowledge base with their official website choose to go with cloud-based solutions. This guarantees that their knowledge base will be accessible and available anytime. This option also saves extra costs for internal hardware or any other software.
The two important features of a knowledge base software are organization and searchability. When it comes to organization, the knowledge base software has to support the intuitive and clear taxonomy for the information we want to import. And searchability allows users to efficiently come to the information they need.
Being mobile friendly is another must have feature for a knowledge base. This will render all the documents, images and videos that are found in the knowledge base, accessible on all devices irrespective of the screen size or operating system.
If you want to provide a top-notch customer experience, knowledge base software that allows further customization of the content is always the best pick. By choosing the right colors and changing the appearance of the knowledge base content, it is much easier to integrate it with your branding efforts.
3. Content has to be Pristine
Once you have decided on the purpose of an online knowledge base, you may proceed to create or editing your content in order to meet the needs of all intended users. Keep in mind that you should not restrict your choice to only one of the options above. New knowledge base software solutions support user and permission options so that you can have content which can be accessed only by a specific user group.
Look at this like a unique opportunity to encourage employees to share their knowledge on a single platform. Many people restrain themselves from implementing the knowledge base because they think that all the content has to be rewritten. At the start, it will be sufficient to take all of your existing electronic documentation and user manuals and just import them in the knowledge base. You can assign members to a team that will take care of the content.
One should promptly agree to leverage the opportunities the digital environment has to offer. Unlike paper documentation and user manuals, online copies of those can be tweaked to provide a delightful experience for all users. Also, make sure that, in the end, all of the online content is simple to navigate, clear and with insightful explanations.
4. Implement, Update, and Reap the Benefits
At this point, you know the purpose of your knowledge base, you have the content and you got knowledge base software implemented on the website. The only thing you should take care of now is the content of your knowledge base. Ensure to always update and provide intuitive and simple solutions to the common problems. Appoint people from the customer support department to make entries in regard to new problems and new solutions.
Make sure to check the metrics that indicate the effectiveness of this implementation: webpage traffic, productivity, ticket deflection, etc.
As you can see, knowledge base implementation on a website is not that big of a hustle as creating and maintaining one. The success of the implementation is dependent on the quality of the knowledge base software used to create one. This is why it is important to get one from a company that regularly updates the tool and has many positive reviews posted by genuine users.
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