Customer Service Knowledge Base: Guides & Examples

At SupportYourApp, we can’t start supporting a product or service if we don’t have enough information about it, since that will inherently lead to a poor customer service. Therefore, we often help our clients build an extensive knowledge base to start the project in time and not sacrifice its quality. 

What Is a Customer Service Knowledge Base?

Customer support knowledge base is a database which has all information about a specific company, its products or services and is used by customer service agents. Such database is sometimes developed by the client. Though, when information provided is not exhaustive, a Team Lead takes over this task during a client integration process. 

Knowledge materials can not only be used by support agents, it can also be utilized to polish company’s website by developing better troubleshooting, FAQ, terms and conditions pages or even to brush up products themselves. An important point when organizing a knowledge base is that it must be easy to find and read.

Additionally, as the product improves, the database should expand and improve too, therefore owners or managers should review and update the data in it regularly. Since such information is developed largely for the customer service representatives, they surely should have a say at its development. It’s always a good idea to find out about material coherency or ask for an overall feedback from people who will actually use it daily.

Structure for a Successful Customer Support Knowledge Base

• General information about a company and its projects
  • About the company
  • Headquarters
  • Main people
  • Projects
  • Goal with the company
• Detailed product descriptions and characteristics
  • Product purpose
  • Product features
  • Licenses
  • Policy
  • Prices
  • Discounts
• Common bugs, errors and their troubleshooting
  • FAQ
• Tools and programs AKA “Support Kit”
  • Apps used for product support
  • Hosting account credentials
  • Admin credentials
  • Widgets
• Flow charts
  • Steps for troubleshooting the product
  • Escalation process

It’s always best to use engaging and intuitive presentation when creating large databases like this. Interactive systems, presentations, videos, queries and test environments from clients are a sure way to increase knowledge base readability and comprehension.

Measuring the Quality of a Knowledge Base

We all make mistakes when dealing with vast scopes of information. Naturally, a review process is needed in order to access and ensure the quality of a customer support database. At SupportYourApp, we have a QA and Documentation department who deal with the question of knowledge material quality. They review the structure, share it with a client for accuracy review and gather feedback from consultants right after training, summing up not only its factual precision but also users’ experience with the materials, which allows for its further refining.

Why a Good Knowledge Base Is Important

The purpose of a knowledge base is simple. High quality information that is easy to access quickly leads to high quality support, which is easily measurable by customer support KPIs, but not only. It also enhances the work of customer support services teams and improves business-customer relationships. Just a few ways in which a unified knowledge base could significantly improve your business are:

• Improve customer service efficiency

When your database is user-friendly and consists of clear troubleshooting and well-put pipelines, it helps agents find information promptly, which leads to faster response and escalation processes.

• Reduced workload

Open and easy FAQ or troubleshooting page allows customers to do more by themselves, as a result reducing the volume of incoming support tickets.

• Increased trust of your customers

Another benefit of an open self-service knowledge base is that by allowing people to resolve issues themselves, you fulfill their expectations of finding simple solutions online, besides, you create a business-customer trust and encourage better knowledge of product features.

• Easier marketing

Indeed, a knowledge database may also be used for marketing. Specifically, it is useful for education of employees on the specifics of your products, services and processes and even for content creation.

SupportYourApp Successful Cases of Knowledge Base Development

We at SupportYourApp understand the importance of a good information database and have helped numerous companies to better utilize it. 

An apartment renting company 🏠 used our services. Originally, they came to us with a single page of information and a few templates to answer. Through a lot of communication, we have succeeded in developing materials that covered the majority of their support tickets.  

A start-up food delivery company 🍔 uses the knowledge base we developed for them in creating website content and articles about the company. 

A website builder company ℹ️ asked us to support a very complicated product which required vast technological knowledge. Originally, we hired only agents with solid experience in tech, computers and engineering to support it. But after developing a knowledge base for the product, anyone with a basic knowledge of a computer could do it.

Delivering an effective customer experience can add much more to your customer service strategy. By developing a knowledge base for our clients and employees, by making it accessible enough to incorporate into their daily workflows, we have significantly improved our output and the output of our clients and became a step closer to strategy goals.

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