Knowledge Bases and Forums: Why Your Website Will Benefit from them?

Posted on 30 Jan 2017

If you are planning to use in-house resources to build a knowledge base for your website, then you should try the Zendesk solution, which provides you with all the necessary features!


Why knowledge base and community are necessary for you?

Your site needs a carefully designed knowledge base, in addition to an active community because they help you provide your customers with a wealth of information while putting in the least amount of effort.

Both Zendesk knowledge base and Community are necessary for you to provide your customers with the questions they might ask most frequently as well as the answers to them. Customers also look for articles on troubleshooting and how to use your products or services.

If your website offers all this information in an organized way, then your customers won’t have to contact your customer service to solve most problems they encounter using your product. They will be able to easily locate the answers on their own. And that will save you money.

They’ll also get plenty of useful information on product updates, new releases, and the like. You’ll find it’s a good way to market your services without doing so overtly.

Overall, this is a very simple way to increase customer satisfaction without increasing your employees’ work or your costs.

It’s no small task to put together a really good Zendesk knowledge base for your company or host an online forum because there are so many different aspects to be covered. In fact, this is very important to give you an edge over your competitors.


Important things to consider

However, you’ll need to consider quite a few things when putting together your Zendesk knowledge base and community.

The first thing that you need to do is structure the content very carefully or your customers will get confused. You can do that in the following ways:

  • Divide the content into categories. Find out the most common topics of interest to your customers and divide your information among them. Your site’s web traffic analytics will tell you what the most popular topics are, and so will your data on the tickets raised by customers.
  • You can also provide links between the categories if certain articles have overlapping information.
  • Give the categories appropriate names based on the norms of your industry.

The next thing that you'll want to do is update your content frequently. If necessary, make changes to your categories as well. In other words, be responsive to the changing needs of your customers. You can do this in the following ways:

  • Keep track of the tickets your customers raise. This will help you find out if your information on any topic is insufficient or unhelpful, or if you have left out a category altogether.
  • You could also rearrange the order in which you list out the articles and other content so that the most popular ones (your analytics will tell you which those are) can be placed right at the beginning.
  • If you want to go one step further, you can have a section asking customers to suggest topics they want more information on.
  • You can also ask readers to vote on the articles and videos based on their usefulness.

More tips to make your information more efficient

Always keep your information clear and concise because the purpose of all this is to make your customer’s life easier. Don’t use a lot of industry jargon either. Avoid using marketing language as well.

 

Make it easy for your customers to get to the content they need. Provide links directly to the main categories from the web pages relating to those categories. People don’t really like being taken to the home page since they’re generally in a hurry to get work done.

Finally, it is also a good idea to check out the knowledge bases and forums of your competitors. Who knows, you might pick up a lot of useful tips this way!

Go ahead and use any of these tips that are relevant to your business. Also, you can find a lot of useful information on our blog, or you can try one of our premium help center themes. You are sure to see a significant increase in business once you implement them.

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