Support teams often get overwhelmed by incoming questions. However, many of those tickets can be solved without an agent.
In fact, a survey found that 69% of people try to resolve issues on their own, and 67% prefer a self-service option rather than calling support. A well-organized customer support knowledge base lets customers find answers quickly and on their own terms, lightening the load on your team.
In this article, we’ll explore what a knowledge base is, in-depth. We will also discuss how it cuts ticket volume through self-service and automation, how to choose the right topics to cover, and get tips on how to create interactive decision trees to deflect more tickets.
What Is a Customer Support Knowledge Base?
A customer support knowledge base is essentially a centralized library of information about your products or services. It contains how-to articles, FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and other documentation that customers (and even your own agents) can use.
By putting this information online and making it searchable, a knowledge base empowers users to answer questions at any time. In practice, a good KB is organized into clear categories and topics so users can quickly find what they need without contacting support.
How a Knowledge Base Helps Reduce Tickets
Let’s address the most common question: how exactly does a knowledge base help reduce tickets?
1. Enables Self-Service Support
A knowledge base empowers customers to help themselves. Instead of waiting on hold or submitting a ticket, users can look up solutions on their own schedule.
When you encourage self-service, it eliminates the need for customers to contact an agent. In doing so, it lowers your support ticket volume. Research backs this up. According to a survey by Zendesk, nearly 69% of buyers are keen on resolving issues on their own.
This shows that customers favor quick and on-demand answers. A knowledge base is a convenient way to offer them what they want. It helps boost customer satisfaction and nips their concerns in the bud. So, many tickets that are easily solvable don’t get created in the first place.
2. Deflects Common and Repetitive Queries
According to studies, many support staff members find over 40% of inquiries "mind-numbing and repetitive."
Most often, these are simple issues that can be managed easily by customers themselves if they have access to the right resources. A customer support knowledge base enables this, so the need for live agents goes down. Your staff can then dedicate their time to complex issues that genuinely warrant human attention.
3. Improves First Contact Resolution (FCR)
A high-quality knowledge base has several benefits for your customer support team as well. With most answers and information at their fingertips, agents can achieve first contact resolution (FCR) more easily.
This means they can quickly respond to customers with the right solution, without the need for follow-ups or ticket transfers. Overall, equipping agents with a comprehensive archive of knowledge helps reduce callbacks and resolve issues faster.
4. Extends Support Availability
Here’s the cherry on top…knowledge bases are accessible to customers 24/7, unlike live agents. So, your valued buyers don’t need to wait until your support hours.
This has a positive ripple effect beyond a reduction in tickets. When customers have access to the right knowledge and resources at all times, their customer experience with your business is likely to be better, too.
How to Create an Effective Knowledge Base
Let’s look at a three-pronged approach to creating an effective knowledge base.
1. Analyze Existing Support Tickets.
The first step is to review your past support tickets. You need to look for the most common issues and identify questions that pop up frequently. These are the concerns you definitely need to have knowledge base articles for.
If you need help, you can explore CRM tools and automations for this purpose. Manual scanning of support tickets is also a decent way to create a list of top priority questions, even if it does not offer in-depth insights.
2. Collaborate With Support Agents.
Next, you need to make sure you involve your support agents in the process of charting out an effective knowledge base. These are the people on the front lines! They have firsthand information on what the most common struggles of your customers are.
You can engage with your agents by holding workshops or focused meetings. Here, encourage support agents to list the most common customer pain points.
You can also gather information on what type of responses help resolve these issues in the most efficient manner (in terms of response detail, tone, language, etc.).
This is also where you consider building an internal customer support knowledge base. What are some challenges your support team faces? What topics do they need the most guidance on? What information would help them resolve customer tickets faster? - Figure out the answers and document those.
3. Create the Knowledge Base and Monitor Search Queries in Your Help Center.
By this stage, you should have a basic knowledge base blueprint in place. Start by drafting the articles and content for it in simple, easy-to-understand language. While doing so, you can:
- Compile existing FAQs
- Interview customer support agents for content
- Create interactive decision trees
- Draft dedicated support documentation
- Enlist the aid of designers to keep the appearance consistent across pages
Make sure your knowledge base is convenient for users. Use a proper system of labelling and categorization to make articles easy to discover.
Once it’s live, your top priority should be to keep track of what topics users visit the most and what topics they search for.
Keeping a close eye on search queries and clicks will help you get this information. In doing so, you’ll be able to figure out whether to include new topics in the knowledge base or update the content within existing topics.
Using search data correctly is a powerful way to strengthen your knowledge base’s ability to reduce support tickets.
Tips to Maximize Ticket Deflection
Your customer support knowledge base is certainly a strong step towards boosting self-service and reducing tickets. Even so, you can take some additional measures to increase the rate of ticket deflection.
Let’s explore these measures below.
Link to Articles in Auto-Replies and Chat
Customer support works best when it has various levels of escalation. So, try to set up an AI chatbot or an autoresponder to deal with customer concerns. Its role would be to proactively direct customers to relevant knowledge base topics for their issues.
In fact, even if customers email your support staff with common questions, an autoresponder or script can reply with knowledge base links. To take it a step further, some experts recommend using strategies like welcoming users to your page with a link to the FAQ section.
Implementing the above, you give your customers a shot at self-service even after reaching out for dedicated support. Often, they’ll solve their own problem and not feel the need to submit a ticket after all.
Use Decision Trees for Troubleshooting
Facing a difficult issue? No worries! There’s a way to navigate complex concerns, too. Decision trees for customer support and flowcharts, can help customers as well as agents approach issues in a step-by-step manner.
A decision tree is essentially like a troubleshooting map. The user starts at a question, typically with simple "yes/no" answers or a few short options. For each answer, there is a different step that the user must take next.
For example, if the user’s answer is "yes" for a question, they follow one branch to the next relevant step. If their answer is "no", they follow a different branch with alternative instructions. This turns into a logical path, and users can easily reach a final solution without engaging in any guesswork.
Through decision trees, customer support processes become interactive and empower users to solve their own issues. They’re useful for agents as well, if they’re guiding customers via a phone call or email.
Here’s a quick example of a decision tree:
Can’t log in? Follow these quick steps
1 - Did you forget your password?
- Yes → Click "Forgot Password" and reset it.
- No → Go to Step 2.
2 - Do you see an error message?
- Yes → Copy the error code and check our [Error Help Page].
- No → Go to Step 3.
4 - Is your account locked?
- Yes → Check your email for unlock instructions (or wait a few minutes).
- No → Go to Step 4.
5 - Still can’t log in?
- Try clearing your browser cache/cookies and log in again.
- If that doesn’t work → Contact Support for help.
Many contemporary knowledge base platforms have the capability to integrate interactive decision trees and customer support charts. For instance, in Document360’s system, you can create interactive decision trees and host them in your knowledge base.
The platform works well for both internal and customer-facing documentation. It supports content in multiple languages, organizes articles into effective categories, and offers real-time updates.
Promote Top Articles on High-Traffic Pages
Publish your best customer support knowledge base content on popular pages so that people can easily find it.
For instance, a lot of businesses have a "Top Articles" or "Popular FAQs" section on their support or product pages.
