Knowledge Base Software

Buyers guide

Are you a customer support manager struggling with resource-crunch?

Are your agents tired of answering the same questions over and over again?

Do your customers need to wait a long time for customer support, resulting in poor customer experience?

If you answered 'yes' to any of these questions, you'll need to find ways to free up agents' time to manage increasing workloads efficiently. Otherwise, you'll need to hire more agents, adding to the costs of your customer support operations.

One way of doing that is to provide your customers with a self-service support website, where they can search for answers to their questions.

A knowledge base solution helps you do that—without requiring you to have technical expertise. It lets you create a support website where you can list frequently asked questions (FAQs), helping customers find answers to their questions all on their own.

A knowledge base solution gives you a double advantage: While your agents save time per issue fielded, your customers will not need to contact support agents for more straightforward technical issues.

To help you select the right knowledge base solution for your business, we've created this guide that covers the basic information related to knowledge base solutions.

In this guide, we'll cover:

• What is knowledge base software?
• Common features of knowledge base software
• What type of buyer are you?
• Benefits of knowledge base software
• Market trends to understand

What is knowledge base software?

Knowledge base software is a tool that helps users create and manage a support website where customers can search through issues and find answers on their own. The software also allows managers to understand the search trends, and thereby come up with more topic ideas for the support website.

Managing content on knowledge base website in KnowledgeOwl (Source)

Common features of knowledge base software

The first step for selecting the right knowledge base software for your business is to understand the essential features of the software. This knowledge will help you select the products that can help you automate knowledge base functions based on your business needs.

According to our research, below are the common features of knowledge base software:

What type of buyer are you?

After you've read about the features, the next step is to understand the types of knowledge base software buyers. This will help you understand the software type you need to invest in.

According to our research, the following are the types of knowledge base software buyers:

• Standalone knowledge base software buyers: These buyers already have a help desk or ticketing system for managing customer support requests, and want to add a self-service knowledge base section on their support website. These buyers should look for the products listed on our knowledge base directory page.

• Full customer support system buyers: If you are currently using manual methods for managing customer support requests, and need to digitize your help desk ticketing and knowledge base function, a knowledge base solution will not suffice your needs. You need to check out help desk solutions with knowledge base functionality. The caveat here is pricing—if these solutions fall outside your budget, you can look for a free help desk solution, and invest in a knowledge base solution that integrates with it.

Benefits of knowledge base software

After you've gone through the list of features, the next step is to understand the benefits of knowledge base solutions. This will help you understand how the software will be useful in different areas of your customer support operations.

Following are the key advantages of using a knowledge base solution:

• Reduced agent workload. Since knowledge base software lets customers handle a lot of queries by themselves, they will not need to interact with an agent directly, thereby freeing up agents' workloads. They can focus on difficult issues while allowing customers to find answers to the easy ones on their own.

• Lesser response time of the customer support team. Since knowledge base software frees up your agent's time, they will be able to pick up incoming support requests faster. This will result in a shorter wait time for customers and improved customer experience.

• Lower cost of customer support operations. By freeing up agents' workloads, the software increases your support team's capacity for handling more inquiries. This reduces the need for hiring more customer agents for managing increasing workload, thereby reducing the costs involved in adding new employees.

Market trends to understand

The last step is to understand the relevant market trends. This knowledge will help you select vendors that are currently working on incorporating these technologies into their offerings, thereby providing you with an early adoption advantage.

According to our research, following are the biggest trends in knowledge base software space:

• Video content is the future of knowledge base support. While customers can read text and understand instructions, they can still have trouble following through the technical steps it takes to resolve issues. With the help of video content, you can make the steps engaging, thereby simplifying even the more complex issues. For instance, the agent can create a walk-through video of the process, which customers can follow along to fix the issues. Since this will significantly improve the effectiveness of self-service support, we expect video-based knowledge base management solutions to become mainstream by 2022.

• Chatbots to improve efficiency of knowledge base software. Chatbots can help you add a human touch to self-service support. For instance, an AI-based chatbot can interpret a customer's query, sift through the knowledge base resources, find the solution, and present it to the customer in a conversational way. This allows your customers to find resolutions to their issues faster and quicker, thereby improving customer experience. With vendors such as Acquire.io and Zendesk making efforts in this direction, we can expect chatbots to become core functionality by 2021.

Note: The applications selected in this article are examples to show a feature in context and are not intended as endorsements or recommendations. They have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.