There is a lot of noise regarding knowledge base implementation these days, and for a good reason. It is a much cheaper support tool compared to the traditional costs, yet incredibly efficient and appealing to customers. A knowledge base is a truly revolutionary customer support software feature that turns our dreams into reality in terms of cost-effective solutions. Simply put, self-service is a trendy and preferred method among digital consumers nowadays, especially youngsters who spend most of their time on their cell phones and tablets.
However, there are internal knowledge base benefits too! But how are they different? The internal knowledge base is hidden from your customers’ eyes and serves as a first port of call for your support agents to get help. Not only do your customers need to search for solutions, but your reps do it even more often. With an internal knowledge base, you can list articles explaining key support techniques, your company’s privacy policy rules, or quick reminders on your reps’ duties. This feature boosts both your employee and customer satisfaction rate while cutting your support costs significantly!
Let’s dig deeper to comprehend the tremendous internal knowledge base benefit!
1. Internal company library
Looking for tips on how to solve a customer’s problem quickly and efficiently? Aiming to learn about your company’s policy or how to do your job in the best way based on previous experiences? You can find all of that in one place by typing your problem and simply clicking the mouse! You can think of your internal knowledge base as an online company library where your reps don’t need to walk to get the material they need. They can now find answers rapidly, the same way your customers do. Otherwise, you may be faced with a situation where your customers are quicker at problem-solving than your employees, which doesn’t sound good for your review score or overall company reputation.
2. Retain work knowledge
When you create your own easily-accessible and thorough knowledge library, you're actually investing in the future of your company as well! One of the internal knowledge base benefits is that you can collect all valuable knowledge that keeps your business sustainable and boosts growth and store it in one designated place.
You can try to rely on memory for storing all of your employees’ knowledge, skills, and experience, or you can possess a central knowledge source that you and your future employees can search through at any time. Unfortunately, customer support has the highest attrition rate and losing one support rep means you have lost a significant knowledge investment as well! Whether you fire someone, they quit, or they retire, you will have an internal knowledge base that houses all of the accumulated support experience through years and keeps it forever! Imagine how much you would lose if an employee who worked for your company for 40 years were to retire without leaving enough instructions for newbies to follow.
However, employee turnover is not the only problem. We live in a rapidly evolving business world where life-long learning is required to reach success. Due to continuous tech advancements and fast-paced scientific progress, we need to embrace novelty and replace traditional solutions that are holding us back. If you don’t keep up you will not only make your company stagnant, but you will also risk losing the business race! When you don’t embrace new tools that guarantee efficiency, your competitors surely will!
But how can you keep track of all the changes and new developments? Again, the miracle lies in the internal knowledge base’s ability to store all the tools and knowledge used, and to easily replace them when you see a new opportunity to enhance your work processes!
3. Speeding up onboarding practices
Again, the reps’ turnover is very high! Even if you decide to hire an experienced support rep that has amazing qualifications, you still need to introduce them to your company-specific tools, practices, and measures. Creating a team that will train them means that they will need to send emails, repeat instructions, and other busy, repetitive work! If they didn’t have this obligation, they could help you improve your customer experience on a daily basis instead!
This way, the training time and empty support rep spot will become a huge issue for your annual budget. There is no need for that burden when you can enjoy the internal knowledge base benefit of having a place to send your new team members for anything they may need. Now, with just a link and profile creation, you can provide them with access to a video repository or document portal where they can learn how to do their job in the best way. Moreover, they can study at their own pace, which means that onboarding agents from different time-zones will not present as much of a challenge anymore.
4. Enhanced collaboration
Internal knowledge base is a self-service portal that doesn’t require much collaboration. So how can it improve collaboration among your support reps? Well, you probably know how annoying it can be when a new employee frequently asks trivial questions because they struggle with a lack of confidence or have simply forgotten a certain rule. Senior representatives waste an enormous amount of time and energy on keeping them up to date with their obligations, which ends up costing you a lot! However, with an internal knowledge base you can say goodbye to such issues, as the newbies will be able to find their answers within seconds without disrupting the workflow or preventing senior management from completing their work tasks.
5. Better employee morale
The need to ask too many questions while gaining necessary work experience is not making the senior management uncomfortable. It is far worse for junior employees who know they have the right to ask, but who need answers very often. Thus, they will try to avoid raising their hand but that carries a risk of having improperly trained staff who will make many mistakes. The internal knowledge base wipes out this problem from your task board as well. In this case, no one will know if the junior rep had a silly question. Now they can surf through your knowledge base whenever and to whatever extent they need! .
6. Improved staff engagement
The most important KPIs that every business needs to track are: cash flow, customer satisfaction rate (CSR), and employee satisfaction score. Why? You need to check on your earnings regularly to know if your business is profitable. Also, you need to know if your customers are happy in order to estimate how likely it is that they will come back. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, you need to know if your employees are satisfied with working for your company. If they are not, both your cash flow and CSR will suffer.
Employees want to feel valued, have good working conditions, and, of course, be rewarded for their work. When their company invests in the tools they use and provides the best work conditions possible, employees take note and feel a moral obligation to return the favor by providing the best work possible. Imagine how big the return will be when you introduce a modern internal knowledge base!
7. Boosts productivity
Unfortunately, many companies of all sizes are experiencing an employee engagement crisis these days! The latest research unveiled that only 13% of global employees said they felt engaged. On the other hand, 18% of US employees said they feel actively disengaged. These numbers surely don’t yield the maximum productivity.
Asking trivial questions to senior management takes time too! Not to mention the toll that a lack of confidence in dealing with customer problems can take.
Customers don’t tolerate long wait times anymore. They know that technology made everything faster and they want a response within 5 minutes!
Luckily, you can solve all these productivity issues with one internal knowledge base! The easier the access to knowledge, the quicker the solution and the more your support reps will know. Furthermore, the more they know, the better both employee and customer engagement!
8. Reduced support costs
According to a McKinskey study, one support rep spends 20% of their work time, or 1.6 hours, on asking simple questions or looking for an answer every work day! However, if you employ an internal knowledge base, you can cut this cost by a fantastic 35%!
Even though we live in a knowledge-focused economy, businesses still haven’t given enough importance to this priceless commodity. Instead, losing knowledge costs businesses up to $4.5 billion every year!
What is your take on the internal knowledge base benefits now?