How Knowledge Base Helps Your Customer Service Run Smoothly

Contact centers are constantly evolving. This fact has never been more evident than during the COVID-19 pandemic. Growing customer expectations, the age of information on demand, combined with the chaos brought by the pandemic resulted in a new level of global digitalization.

As can be seen from this graph, the number of digital customer interactions has more than doubled in the past three years. This has greatly improved the customer experience, but has also raised some challenges when it comes to running a smooth contact center and keeping customers happy.

The Knowledge Base is a centralized place within the contact center where knowledge is stored in the form of guides and documents. This knowledge can be accessed by agents, quickly and efficiently, while they communicate with customers, or at any other time. Customer support agents can leverage this information to make sure they provide relevant responses to customers and serve them better and faster.

A lot of companies have some system for storing knowledge. But, a Knowledge base can centralize this information and ensure that best practices are followed.

It’s often thought that only very large contact centers need something like a knowledge base. But there are a lot of ways having a knowledge base can enhance contact centers regardless of their size.  This can level up an organization, streamline processes, increase savings, and improve efficiencies for any contact center.

Contact centers have always experienced a high rate of agent attrition. It’s expected that a contact center will lose 17% – 44% of its agents within a year, depending on size.

It’s clear that where there is attrition, there is hiring and onboarding. A knowledge base can significantly reduce agent onboarding time.  With easy access to all information needed, they can start communicating with customers sooner, saving a lot of employee onboarding costs. Another strong point is that new staff can see the most popular articles, and familiarize themselves with the most common questions.

Time to resolution is one of the most important contact center metrics. The shorter the time is, the lower the costs are. This means more customers are helped, and the customers are happier.  

A knowledge base’s search function will help an agent instantly find the solution for the client’s problem. This feature becomes even more impressive when combined with responding to clients over digital channels. This is because a knowledge base enables the information to be stored in many different formats, including text, video, pdf, and images. This helps agents to both tell customers how to solve problems, as well as show them by sharing videos or guides. This will not only reduce time to resolution, but also first touch resolution.

The longer the contact center is operational, the more knowledge it gathers each day. Unfortunately, because of high attrition rates and employee turnover, that knowledge is often lost for good. And even if it isn’t, it’s rarely distributed efficiently. Knowledge Base enhances knowledge sharing culture within the company by allowing everybody to contribute. Of course, you can implement an “approval phase” in which senior members or management will have to approve a content piece before it’s available for everyone.

The great thing about this is, not only will news quickly be distributed, but also tips and tricks, and best practices. With a knowledge base, you can leverage your top performers’ experience and scale it across the whole organization.

Errors always reflect poorly on the company and user perception. So, the goal of every contact center is to try and minimize them. This is also one of the areas Knowledge base, as well as a good contact center solution, can help.

Let’s take Infobip Conversations, for example. It’s a digital cloud contact center solution, and it will save all interactions with a specific customer, no matter the channel they are communicating from. So, whenever customers reach out, agents will have all their communication history at their fingertips.  They will also be able to access all the information about possible questions, by simply searching for a keyword in knowledge base. This becomes increasingly convenient since  Knowledge Base is an add-on, and is available in the same interface the agent is already using for communication.

Standardization is very important, especially if the “standard” is taken from the most successful agents. When agents are onboarded they usually learn how to answer basic questions. With time,  each agent will slightly change their approach.

Contact center solutions, like Conversations, have sentiment analysis and CSAT measuring. This means that you can test or analyze to find out which responses have the highest scores and make them the standard in the Knowledge Base. This gives all the agents access to the best practices.

We should also mention knowledge centralization. As organizations grow, especially if a lot of departments or regions contribute to content creation, content can often be found in different sources. Knowledge Base is a centralized place that draws data from all available sources. This means that no matter which tool, site, or repository is used by which team, all the knowledge and information is available in an instant.

Today it’s evident that chatbots are an integral part of contact centers. They reduce agent workload, and take over high-volume – low-value queries, freeing up agents to focus on more meaningful work. This is beneficial for everyone as it increases agent satisfaction and shortens resolution time for customers.

Companies usually use rule-based chatbots, which guide users through a series of menus. Alternatively, they’ll use an AI chatbot, which recognizes user intent and provides an appropriate response. If chatbots can’t provide the assistance a customer needs, then the fallback option is usually a transfer to an agent. This kind of approach has shown great results all over the world, as businesses are adopting chatbots at a growing rate. Connecting your chatbot to a knowledge base can supercharge it, increasing the use cases it can cover, and even further reduce agent involvement.

Creating a chatbot that can cover hundreds of questions and solve hundreds of issues can be slow and expensive – and it requires regular maintenance.

Connecting your chatbot to a knowledge base can solve all of those problems.

Chatbots will instantly be enriched with all the data already in your knowledge base, and depending on the channel you use, will be able to send video tutorials, pdf files, images, or audio files.

This can greatly reduce your customer service workload, and wait time for customers, especially on peak days. It’s all about increasing customer experience and satisfaction. Today, customers want information quickly but also with the rise of digitalization, they want that information on a variety of channels. Chatbots are a great tool for that, and are rapidly becoming a new standard for customer service.