How to bullet-proof your knowledge base for customer-facing teams

Importance of maintaining a knowledge base

Your knowledge base should be the first stop for customers seeking quick solutions, acting as a comprehensive resource on your products or services. Keeping this information updated and clear is crucial to maintain trust and prevent customer frustration. Customers value the independence of resolving issues at their convenience, which not only enhances their satisfaction but also builds loyalty to your brand.

A well-maintained knowledge base reduces routine inquiries, allowing your support team to focus on complex issues and improve the overall quality of support. This efficiency can lead to lower operational costs by decreasing dependence on human assistance. For the support team, the knowledge base is an essential tool, offering quick access to information that aids in effective customer assistance and serves as a thorough training resource for new employees, leading to a skilled team and higher customer satisfaction.

Some of the challenges in updating your knowledge base

Time constraints due to backlogs: Teams often struggle to find time to update the knowledge base because they are overwhelmed with clearing backlogs of customer support tickets. This constant pressure to address immediate customer issues leaves little room for teams to focus on long-term resources like the knowledge base.

Difficulty identifying gaps: Without the right tool and sufficient time to analyze customer interactions and feedback comprehensively, teams may find it challenging to identify gaps in the knowledge base. Understanding what needs to be updated or added requires analyzing trends and recurring queries, which is difficult when the team is consumed with resolving immediate tickets.

Repetitive inquiries drain resources: When customer support teams are too involved in handling repeat tickets, it hinders their ability to allocate time and effort to enhance the knowledge base. This repetitive cycle of addressing the same types of queries can prevent teams from focusing on creating and updating content that could potentially reduce the frequency of these common inquiries.

Crafting Your Knowledge Base: A step-by-step guide

Conduct a needs assessment: Start by analyzing customer support tickets and feedback. Identifying common issues helps prioritize the content that addresses the most pressing customer needs.

Define the structure and scope: Based on your needs assessment, categorize the information into logical sections or topics. This could include setup guides, troubleshooting tips, billing information, and frequently asked questions.

Determine format: Decide on the types of content you'll offer, such as articles, video tutorials, step-by-step guides, and infographics. Consider diverse learning styles and preferences to make your knowledge base more accessible.

Content creation and curation: Ensure that each piece of content is easy to understand, avoiding jargon and technical terms that might confuse users. Use bullet points, headings, and numbered lists to break down information.

Intuitive Navigation: A robust search feature is essential, allowing users to quickly find specific information. Include filters and tags to refine search results. Implement a robust search feature and a user-friendly interface. Mobile responsiveness is key to accommodating users across devices.

Testing and Feedback: Before the full launch, allow a select group of users to access the knowledge base. Their feedback can highlight usability issues, unclear content, or gaps in the information provided. Collect data on how users interact with the knowledge base because this information is valuable for refining and improving content.

Launch your knowledge base: Announce the launch of your knowledge base through email newsletters, social media, and in-product notifications. Highlight its benefits to encourage users to try it out. Ensure your customer support team is familiar with the knowledge base content so they can direct users to it when appropriate.

Maintain and update regularly: Set a regular schedule for reviewing and updating the content to ensure it remains accurate and relevant. Product updates, new features, and policy changes should be reflected promptly. Make it easy for users to provide feedback on articles, whether it's reporting outdated information, unclear instructions, or suggesting new content.

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Utilize analytics for improvement: Use analytics tools to monitor how your knowledge base is being used. Look at page views, search terms, and feedback scores to understand what's working and what's not and leverage those insights to add and revise content.

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Leveraging Threado AI to upgrade and improve the knowledge base

Threado AI features a Chrome app and Slack app which is exclusively built for internal teams or customers to be able to resolve queries faster. This frees up time for your team from having to search for answers from scratch every time they address a ticket. Additionally, the agent assist extension also summarizes tickets, auto-suggests responses, and personalizes the answers for the agents. This improves efficiency and gives your team the time to reflect on support, understand what’s working and what’s not, and clear of any backlogs.

An extensive knowledge base is the stepping stone to being able to make the most of emerging AI technologies. And this is not just true for Threado AI but any AI model that runs on data. Before anything else, the data needs to be sufficient enough for the tool to become reliant. In a way, both the tool and the knowledge base are dependent on each other for improvement i.e. Threado AI performs better if the knowledge base is extensive and the knowledge base can be made extensive using Threado AI. Let’s see how that’s possible.

After you’ve built a knowledge base to begin with and you can now start training Threado AI on that knowledge base so your customer-facing teams and even customers can start using it to get instant and accurate answers.

Training Threado AI on your knowledge base

Once you’ve signed up for Threado AI, you can train the bot on multiple data sources including URLs, PDFs, tabular data through CSVs, customer conversations, support tickets, and more.

After you’ve trained the bot across your available data sources, it’ll look something like this -

Identifying gaps with Threado AI

After you’ve installed and started using Threado AI (Agent Assist and Customer bot), this is when you will understand how accurate the bot is in terms of responding to queries.

Analyze Reports and Bot performance and see how the bot is answering queries. Unanswered queries mean those questions were not resolved and that can be identified as a gap in the knowledge base. The same can be said for answers that were downvoted which means that the answer was either incorrect or incomplete.

Threado AI also gives you the questions that the bot wasn’t able to answer and are flagged as ‘Open’ conversations. You can directly navigate to these conversations and keep a close eye on these questions. From here, you can also see the answers that have been downvoted and understand what might be wrong with the answer.

Use these methods to identify gaps in your knowledge base and upgrade it accordingly. One of the best ways is to create FAQ sections or title the content based on how it’s being asked by the customers of even your own team members. Although you can train your team to ask questions in a certain way to get answers you can’t always do the same for your customer. So, it's always better to customize the knowledge base based on how the questions or queries are being asked.

Verify answers yourself

After you identified and rectified these gaps in your knowledge, it’s important to constantly monitor and make sure that the Threado AI bot is now answering these concerns that it wasn’t answering before. Keep a close eye on the answers being provided, is it correct? Is it complete? Is it being downvoted by customers or teammates? All these observations will help you understand your knowledge base better, and most importantly, improve it.