How to create the best customer experience with your knowledge base

With so many competitors providing relatively similar products, your customer experience is a chance for your company to stand out. 

Many companies fall down by neglecting their digital presence, not to mention their existing customers in favour of attracting new ones. Your knowledge base is your chance to shine by creating an outstanding long-term experience for your customers. 

When your customers have questions or problems, they can easily access your knowledge base without having to reach out to your support team. 

Their experience will be a combination of their contact with your customer service team and your digital platform. Design this process to be as intuitive and effortless as possible. 

What is customer experience? 

First, let’s take a look at what exactly we mean by customer experience. According to Hubspot: 

“Customer experience is the impression your customers have of your brand as a whole throughout all aspects of the buyer's journey. It results in their view of your brand and impacts factors related to your bottom line including revenue.”

Customer experience starts from when customers are just gaining awareness of your brain, right through the purchase phase and into the post-purchase phase. Make sure to pay attention to your customers at all stages of the buyer’s journey. 

The two primary touch points where customers interact with your business are through people and product. Are customers amazed by the performance of your product? Are they thrilled with the customer support rep who took the time to help them solve their problem? 

Customers have a wide away of options to choose from when it comes to your competitors, and a churning customer is just a mouse click away. Providing a remarkable customer experience is so crucial in retaining potentially disloyal customers. 

Next, we’ll look at why customer experience is so important in more depth. 

Why is customer experience important?

Customer experience is important because beyond the initial stage of first becoming your customer, you’ll need to develop your relationship with your customers over time. 

A positive customer experience plays a significant role in the overall success of your business. Your customers want to know you care about them, you value their business, and you’ll provide ongoing support for their needs. A happy customer is more likely to become a loyal customer and boost your revenue in the long-term. 

A knowledge base is an excellent way to support your customer experience strategy because research shows that 67% of people prefer to solve their own queries. By not provisioning a self-service knowledge base, you’re letting customers down and providing a bad experience. 

On the other hand, if your knowledge base is not only useful but a real pleasure to use, your customers will form a better opinion of your brand. Enable your customers to self-serve their own queries by providing useful and informative content. 

Make it easy to find what they need

A big part of creating your ideal customer experience with your knowledge base is making it really easy for your customers to find what they need. The second your customer encounters an issue, your knowledge base should be the first thing they think of. 

Train your agents to politely direct customers to knowledge base pages when they receive support requests, so that over time your customers will learn to automatically self-serve their queries. 

Then, once your customers are actually using your knowledge base, make it easy for them to find content.

Knowledge bases have a tendency to grow organically over time, and if your content isn’t structured effectively then customers won’t take the time to look for the answers they need. Then the next step is likely an email to your support team, or even a lost customer. 

Provide a prominent search bar, tag articles with relevant keywords and categorize your content effectively. Include a “popular searches” section to surface some of the most commonly used content. Make sure you have a navigation menu for customers who prefer to browse through your knowledge base instead of using the search bar. 

Optimize your content for search engines

Part of making your content easy for customers to find is making sure it shows up in search engines when customers are searching for answers. This is because when customers have a problem, their first step isn’t necessarily to call your support team, send an email, or start a live chat on your website. They just head straight to Google. 

In order to provide a remarkable customer experience, your help content should be showing up in Google search results. Optimize your knowledge base for search engines by making sure that your content contains the keywords that customers are using to search. 

One way to find out what customers are searching for is by typing your brand into Google’s search bar, and the auto suggest tool will find some popular, related searches. 

Using keywords to help you write your content will make sure your knowledge base articles are showing up when customers Google questions about your product. 

Make sure your search bar works well

Your search bar is one of the most important parts of your knowledge base. To ensure your customers have a great experience, your knowledge base must come with a powerful search engine to help customers find content. 

Even with the most organized knowledge base, and even if your content is sorted into logical categories, there are many customers who won’t take the time to look through your content. They’ll just head straight to your search bar. 

Your knowledge base search bar must return results quickly, no matter how many articles match the search term. It should also offer predictive results based on what customers are typing. 

Your search bar should be able to handle misspellings, and still deliver the results customers are searching for. Make sure you are using your customers’ own words to label your content, rather than internal terms and jargon. Your knowledge base reporting tools should be able to tell you the terms your customers are searching, and can give you ideas for new content that doesn’t exist yet. 

Anticipate their next steps

Customers will really appreciate it if you anticipate their next steps. This could be anything from suggesting further articles that they might find useful after they visit a particular content page, to having the most popular articles surfaced on your knowledge base homepage for easy access. 

Even with the most effective knowledge base in the world, sometimes customers will still need to contact support. Make it easy for them to submit a ticket in your knowledge base, rather than feeling like your company is putting up roadblocks between them and your support team. 

Show that your company cares enough about its customers to anticipate their needs to streamline your customer experience. 

Allow customers to provide feedback

You can’t create a better customer experience without communicating with your customers. Customer feedback allows you to iterate on your knowledge base and improve the service you are providing. 

Invite your customers to submit feedback on your knowledge base articles. Providing them with a rating system or the ability to leave a comment is a great way to solicit feedback from your customers. 

You can also include a pop-up customer survey asking customers to rate the helpfulness of your knowledge base. 

To successfully collect feedback from your customers, your knowledge base software must come with in-built features that let customers provide feedback. 

Conclusion

Your knowledge base is a valuable opportunity to demonstrate to your customers that they’re important to you and add to their overall customer experience. 

As soon as a customer comes into contact with your company, you should be making it as easy as possible for them to use your products and services. Having appropriate documentation available on your knowledge base improves their experience, and builds your company’s brand. 

Maintain customer satisfaction by providing a knowledge base to help them self-serve their queries, and you’ll be staying one step ahead of your competitors in encouraging your customers to remain loyal to your brand.