Few things are more irritating than not getting the right answer right when you need it. Today’s world of instant gratification has raised a population of impatient customers not willing to go an extra mile looking to fill their knowledge gap – rather, they expect you to provide an answer within seconds. Whatever your industry might be, you, as a business, want to keep your customers happy and satisfied. For this, you need to provide excellent customer care, a part of which is your help desk or call center. The impression your customer gets from a contact with your call center is so important that Richard Branson, the chair of Virgin Group, sometimes pretends to be a customer and masks his voice to reach Virgin’s call center and check how effectively it works. So a logical question is, how do you improve your call center service and create a positive image that sticks? The answer may be in establishing a knowledge base for your support team.

First, what is a knowledge base as such? It is a platform hosting a library of information about your business, its processes, flows, documentation and products or services. This internal resource is a valuable tool for knowledge sharing among existing employees and for onboarding newcomers. For a call center, a knowledge base adds more value: a base of customer inquiries and exhaustive answers, tutorials, guides and manuals, all aimed at helping the support desk staff to resolve customer queries fast and efficiently. Designed as a software tool with easy search and navigation, a call center knowledge base provides your support staff with accurate and up-to-date information and your customers – with the care and superb service they are looking for.

How to Build a Call Center Knowledge Base

Prepare the product or service documentation base you already have

Even when it looks like you need to start creating your knowledge base from scratch, it is rarely so. Big or small, your product / service range is already described, so collect that documentation and organize it logically into a comprehensive base which your call center staff can easily use.

Analyze the most common customer queries

Identify your customers’ most frequent questions and create a base of the most repeated ones. Make notes of which products or services attract more questions and try to understand why. Is there enough knowledge to address them? Try to single out the most popular cases and scenarios. Then you can add less common and more unique ones.

Categorize the questions

Once you have a base of popular questions, look for a logical way to organize them. What big categories of knowledge do they fall into? Think of easy tags, key words and headers to facilitate search.

Have the answers compiled and curated by experts

Make sure that the questions which worry your customers and should make it to your future knowledge base are answered by knowledgeable experts. Do not rely on your call center staff to find words and offer explanations – turn to those who really have the knowledge about how things work.

Make the content plain and simple

What is easy for an expert may not necessarily be readily understood by a customer and even a call center operator. Just as a content writer may not be a technical expert, a vetted professional may not have the skill to articulate simple answers. Abundance of complicated terminology, passive and impersonal constructions, complex sentences do not empower your base to share knowledge easily. Team up your experts with content creators to prepare such knowledge base content that provides clear, unambiguous, well-illustrated answers and is accompanied with images and/or videos. Once the base content is ready, check it with your call center staff because they are the ones who will have to use it. Does it cover all their needs? Are the compiled answers enough to resolve customer issues?

Provide easy search and navigation

Take advantage of cutting-edge technologies to implement autocomplete recommendations, pop-up tips and suggestions. What is the use of a knowledge base if it takes hours to find an answer? Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can make the needed knowledge available in the base fast and to the point.

Optimize the rights and security and consider self-service

If you intend your knowledge base to be used not only by your call center staff but also by customers directly, you need to think about different rights of access. Think about how information may be accidentally or deliberately altered and protect your knowledge base.

Allow for updates

A knowledge base cannot be drawn up once and for all. It needs to be updated and curated, when elements that become obsolete are replaced with up-to-date bits of knowledge. The content must be continuously managed along with the changes your business is living through.

Source: https://nimbusweb.me/blog/creating-a-knowledge-base-for-call-centers/