Are you making one of these four knowledge base mistakes?
4-Roads Four - Are you making one of these four knowledge base mistakes?
You have created your knowledge base, and your customers love you for it – it is faster for them. The answers your customers and potential customers are looking for are now given to them after a simple search. Your support team should no longer be bombarded with easy-to-answer questions and can now offer better support to customers with more challenging issues to solve and require more time.
Creating your knowledge base is just the start of ensuring your customers can enjoy self-service interactions with your business. At 4-Roads, we create and update knowledge bases for countless clients. Here are four mistakes we see that you should avoid to keep your knowledge base a valuable tool for your business and your customers.
Mistake One: Not Updating your content often enough
Take a look at these stats from the Deloitte European Workforce Survey:
25% of employees rate the value of information from their colleagues or a knowledge base below average.
Let that sink in.
A quarter of your information is inaccurate. What you tell your customers and what you provide your staff is potentially unhelpful or harming your success.
If you want a knowledge base to continue working, you must keep it updated. Content on the knowledge base should also be regularly reviewed and checked for up-to-dateness. If it isn’t, your internal knowledge base will start to become redundant, with teams looking elsewhere for information or making decisions based on wrong information. For your customers, this might mean they lose trust in your brand or begin to look at competitors for more up-to-date and relevant answers to their questions.
Mistake Two: Messy Structure
It can become messy as you continue to add newer and different information to your knowledge base. Searching for the right information can become difficult. If you aren’t deleting content and updating it, searches may return conflicting answers.
Your knowledge base might contain every piece of information valuable to your teams and customers, but if they cannot find it, it might as well not be there. 4 Roads often see knowledge bases that have lost a systematic taxonomy to data categorisation.
When you built your knowledge base, it should have been divided into categories, further subdivided into subcategories, and so on. As your knowledge base ages and continues to grow, it is vital that you ensure these categories remain relevant and that all new content follows the same structure.
If you allow content to deviate from the planned system, your users may begin to have trouble navigating and finding what they need from your knowledge base. If a user can’t find what they are looking for or it is hard work to get there, they will look somewhere else.
Mistake Three: Turning Knowledge into Sales
An excellent knowledge base leads to sales, but a knowledge base should never sell.
Businesses look at increasing engagement on their websites through a knowledge base and start to attempt to sell to customers in a more direct way through these interactions. This will alienate your customers.
When a person uses a knowledge base, they are looking for self-service. They want answers to questions they have about your products and services or are looking to help themselves with a problem they may already have with a product.
If you begin to try to create more content that sells rather than helps, you have forgotten the purpose of your knowledge base, which is a place for your customers to turn to when they need help.
Mistake Four: Design
The way we consume content is very visual. While your knowledge base is a vast fountain of information, if that information isn’t attractive or easy to read, your users will be less likely to browse through your knowledge base. If the design is outdated, the user may find the same information elsewhere.
Once you have established your knowledge base, start translating the content into videos and graphic content. Illustrating answers for your customers will help them understand the answers to the questions they are looking for.
If your product or service is particularly complicated or technical, a video is exactly what your customer will be looking for. Rather than them going to YouTube for a video on how to replace a part or fix an issue, provide your customer the same solution and house the content in your knowledge base. This video content will save your users time and improve their perception and trust in your brand.
4-Roads Final Thoughts
Making these common mistakes with your knowledge base might seem insignificant, but they add up to much more than you think.
According to an IDC survey to an IDC survey, the 500 businesses that make up the USA’s Fortune 500 lose around $31.5 billion a year from knowledge base mistakes alone. That is lost revenue and lost productivity from your own internal use of a knowledge base.
These four mistakes are common across many businesses. Maintaining your knowledge base is just as important as building it, and far too often, these mistakes happen without companies even being aware of them.
If you’d like to learn more about mistakes and how 4-Roads can help ensure your knowledge base is created and structured correctly, get in touch. We’d love to help you help your customers!
Ready to Improve Your Knowledge Base?
Avoid common mistakes and enhance your customer experience with a well-structured, up-to-date knowledge base. Contact 4 Roads today to learn how we can help you build or optimise a knowledge base that drives success and customer satisfaction!