What to do if your knowledge base goes wrong

There are a lot of articles out there about how to make the most of your knowledge base, but none about what to do if it goes wrong.

We hope you can avoid a worst case scenario, but if you’re experiencing a knowledge base crisis, then this article is for you.

Customers won’t use it because it’s too complicated

You may get to the point where no one is using your knowledge base because the categories have become too broad, or you’ve added so many categories that they’re not useful anymore. Customers don’t know how to navigate your knowledge base.

The way to overcome this problem is by ensuring you have a prominent search bar that customers can type their queries into. Tag the your articles with relevant keywords so they are pulled up in searches.

You can also reorganise your articles into useful categories. The way to choose the right categories is by identifying the main areas of your product or service that your customers interact with. The key to effective categorisation is consistency and keeping it limited enough to be useful.

What if no one’s using it at all?

You may be thoroughly convinced that your knowledge base is useful but are experiencing low traffic volume. And yet, your support team is still inundated with queries that customers could self-service, so what should you do?

You must promote your knowledge base to your customers when they contact your support team.

Your team members can politely send a link to your customers to gradually introduce them to the idea of self-service. You can also include links to any interesting new KB articles in your email newsletter, so that your customers are continually kept aware of its existence.

One way to improve retention rate in your knowledge base is to choose a software solution that allows you to use your own website branding. This will legitimize it for your customers by portraying it as part of your company.

How to do damage control if something goes wrong

If your knowledge base goes down completely because of server issues or something similar, don’t panic. Your hosting company’s support team is on hand to help you when this type of scenario happens, so get on the phone to them to raise the issue as a priority.

If your knowledge base goes down, you can also send an update to your customers through email and put a notice out on social media. These things happen, but assure everyone that you are working to get the problem fixed as fast as possible.

If you need to do maintenance work on your knowledge base or to develop it, then you can let your customers know that it will be going offline for a while so you can improve your service for them.

Ideally you should be able to work on another version of your knowledge base in the background while it’s still running. Talk to your software company about this.

Prevention is better than cure

Now that having a knowledge base is so commonplace, there are many strategies you can use to avoid having anything go wrong.

It’s best practice to appoint a knowledge leader who actually publishes all your knowledge base content pages. This will ensure that your knowledge base follows your content strategy and it remains useful and effective for your customer support goals.

Make sure you regularly backup your knowledge base, so that if anything really does go wrong it can be restored quite easily. If you don’t know how to do this, your web support team can help.

We pride ourselves on providing the best customer support to help if anything goes wrong. Learn more about KnowledgeOwl knowledge base software today!