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Increasing Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Through a Knowledge Base
By James Stephenson

Every organization that has been in business for any length of time, acquires massive amounts of information about their products and services. Making that information available to not only customers and clients, but also your own staff could save you countless hours in time and also provide a service that will build good will and customer satisfaction levels you never thought possible.

Access to key information has always been problematic. Imagine if instead of making customers call in to answer these questions, which requires you to have someone available to not only answer the call, but respond to the request, you added a knowledge base software database that is easy for your customers to access, and which also answers all of the most common questions that your customers have.

Knowledge base software is great for quickly answering your customers frequently asked questions, or providing a common resource for your own staff. Knowledge base software can be used to provide 24/7 online support to customers. All companies and organizations that support a product or service will benefit from establishing an easily available, online, knowledge base. Customers are able to help themselves to technical information and answers via the Internet and employees can immediately add new information and make it public for supporting new issues or instances.

Solving customer's problems should never be considered a waste of time. The relationships you build with your customers will ultimately determine your success or failure. But, there are more efficient ways to provide answers to common questions. You may think to yourself that your customers might prefer speaking to a person instead of having to search your website for the answer, but consider this: To satisfy your customers you can either hire enough support staff to answer all of these questions in a timely fashion (something that could end up costing you enough money to sink your company) or you could utilize a knowledge base software application. By allowing customers to help themselves 24 hours a day, organizations find that they need fewer technical support employees and less time is needed training new employees on supporting issues.

While it is vital to offer professional, efficient, and high quality customer service support for any questions or help that your customers may need, it doesn't take long before your customer service support staff gets bogged down answering simple, basic questions time and time again. Knowledge base software can even help to satisfy customers who are first time buyers by getting quick answers to their questions about your products and services. Knowledge base software is one example of a single solution that can be deployed and customized for any group of customer, long term or new, helping companies meeting multiple business objectives.

Your company has spent years accumulating information, producing subject matter experts, writing product documentation, and developing customer service policies. Why not take advantage of the capabilities that technology has to offer and build a self-service website, customer service call center and help-desk team immediately using one solution. For instance, a knowledge base:

o can assist customer service representatives while solving incoming customer questions
o can support sales and marketing teams
o can aid help desk representatives
o can directly address customers questions through customer self-service

Your objective is to provide the best service to your clients and customers, making their investment in you worth their time and money.

In most cases it doesn't take long for your customer service support staff to answer the majority of customer inquiries that they are faced with. And if your customer support staff is spending time dealing with these kinds of questions, that's billable hours, spent answering those simple questions that could be better off used for serious problems. Imagine having one solution with the flexibility to support your customer inquiries, help-desk calls, and technical support issues. Searching through knowledge base software can be easy. Knowledge base software can be used to provide 24/7 online support to customers. Consider looking into this opportunity to provide one more, very important service, to meet the needs of your customers and clients.

James Stephenson is an IT and Business Consultant with over 25 year of experience.

His firm specializes in helping small to medium sized businesses use their information technology and business resources effectively.

To find out how you can build a successful knowledge base for your customers and clients see: [http://www.scc-i.com/Knowledge.html]

http://www.scc-i.com

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