Many companies have user software, whether it is a game or useful application, as their end product. Ticket submission is an effective solution to keep in touch with your users and work on your software improvements. But what happens when your support team gets overflooded with tickets from your customers? Hiring more employees for your support team will raise support costs and overall company’s costs.

If you pay close attention to questions customers ask your support team you will notice that they always revolve around the same issues. The bottom line is that your staff members are spending a great amount of time answering the same questions over and over again. The perfect solution is to reduce your support team’s workload by building an online knowledge base. The end goal would be to encourage your customers to consult it before submitting a ticket. This way you will cut your support center cost and help your customers become product experts.

Ticket Deflection Through FAQ Knowledge Base

Studies of the Association of Support Professionals show that small companies spend nearly 20% of the revenue on customer service and technical support. This is where a knowledge base FAQ on your company’s website plays a crucial role in saving you money. This type of self-service customer support allows your customer to browse your knowledge base to find an answer to a specific question.

As your knowledge base will almost never be complete, make sure to leave a “Submit a Ticket” option for users when they don’t find an answer on your website. The answer to this new question should be uploaded as a new set of problem/fix topics on your FAQ webpage. Keeping your knowledge base updated will make it more relevant for users and will help ticket deflection in the long run.

Sharing Knowledge Prevents Training Expenses

All that time and money spent before you can bring your new staff to a level where they are 100% productive can be saved by creating a call center knowledge base and managing it effectively. Think about it, when a new staff member arrives, existing ones spend time training him/her, and are thus less productive themselves. With this internal staff knowledge base you can avoid situations where it is very difficult to find office documents, policies and procedures because they were stored in multiple locations.

With all the training relevant information available, your new support team members can learn by their own pace, leaving the other employees to work on updating the FAQ database and user manuals. The more detailed information on FAQ and user manual web pages leads to ticket deflection and lessens the pressure on your support team.

Having a call center knowledge base will also keep your customer communication consistent by allowing your support operatives to use the recorded pre-written responses and resolutions. This has an overall impact on response time, which leads to better relations with your end users.

Prevent Losing Information

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Building a call center knowledge base is very important if you want to avoid losing information to certain unforeseen circumstances. Retaining the knowledge of your employees can prove very helpful. Especially in the situation when an employee leaves the company.

If you encourage your employees to share the knowledge by implementing and using knowledge base software, you will prevent losing it when some of your support team members decide to move on. This solution will also have a great impact on staff efficiency, customer satisfaction and overall business quality.

Having a single knowledge repository will make your data loss-proof. Familiarize your employees with repeatable procedures and ready to use templates. This will reduce risk of errors and will provide your staff with an insight into what the best practices in your company are.

User Guides as Primary Defense Lines

Having a rich knowledge base of user manuals available online is a very good practice that helps in avoiding support tickets related to how to use, install or connect your company’s products. Great documentation regarding guides and manuals and common issues is very useful for end users and will help your customers avoid frustration.

When users get in touch with your product for the first time you want to make sure their experience remains great. Providing them with meaningful solutions for problems that may rise in this stage of their involvement with your product can result in returning customers and more referrals.

Having well-written and interactive user guides and solutions to common problems in a searchable knowledge base will reduce ticket flow to your support team. This is beneficial in two ways: your company will make more money when keeping customers satisfied and you will save on support team expenses every time you launch a new product.

Another neat way a great online manual can save you money is when it informs customers of the proper ways of using the product and warns them with disclaimers to limit legal liabilities. This way you can avoid inconvenient lawsuits when misuse of products result in serious or sometimes even fatal injuries, or, in the case your product is software, your client suffers data loss and theft.

As you can see, having a knowledge base has a significant influence not only on ticket deflection, but on your business overall. It can improve efficiency and productivity and lower your costs. It is very simple to use and it can be applied in many fields. Keep in mind that the end user should be able to understand the message you are sending with no effort at all. Staying pragmatic and using exact phrasing and brevity will help you write valuable content for your knowledge base.