March 27, 2017 Hybrid Master Articles 0 Research and Knowledge With more and more research supporting the notion that people prefer to help themselves rather than reach out to support, delivering exceptional self-service has become mission-critical. That means gathering up the answers to your customers’ questions and putting them in easy reach. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Step one is marshaling your organizational knowledge into a cohesive resource, whether that’s a collection of FAQs, a knowledge base, a troubleshooter, or a full-blown support center brimming with every multimedia and interactive resource you can think of. Steps two through a million are making that resource as user-friendly as possible. Whatever shape your self-service is currently in, you’ll always be improving and refining— and that task is much easier to tackle if you have a clear plan in mind. Let’s explore a couple of strategies that will help you ensure customers are getting the most out of your organization’s information. Be mindful when scaling your self-service Self-service comes in lots of shapes and sizes. A lot of teams start out with just a collection of frequently asked questions, while others are responsible for managing a full-blown knowledge base. Although there are lots of different paths to take when growing your self-service, moving from a set of FAQs to a more comprehensive, structured knowledge base is a common one. You’ll need to spend some time thinking about the information architecture for your knowledge base. This will help you not only organize the content you have but also make it easy to expand on your content in the future. Be on a customer’s position To give yourself a place to start, put yourself in your customers’ shoes to determine the best way to organize your knowledge base. Ask yourself: What do they struggle with the most? How do they think about your services? What are some of their most common questions or search queries? Use this information to help you structure and prioritize your content. Information architecture is a way of sorting the content you have into buckets so you can create consistency across your different content types. It enables your customers to orient themselves when navigating your knowledge base, and find the content they need because they know where it is in relation to where they are. As you’re scaling up to a knowledge base, order your articles logically and consistently. For example, let’s say you’re building a knowledge base for your email marketing software. Your top-level categories might include Deliverability, Editor, Reports, Your Account, and so on. Be careful not to succumb to the temptation to include too many categories — this can quickly get overwhelming. Apply web best practices to your knowledge base As your knowledge base structure starts to come together, you should treat it like any other website. Make sure it resizes well on different devices, check that it looks good on as many browsers as possible, and work to bring it in line with other web design best practices. Ideally, you want to have your knowledge base match your company branding and hosted on a subdomain of your website to make it dead simple for your customers to find. You want your knowledge base to be easily searchable so your customers can find answers quickly. Include a large, prominent search bar on the homepage of your knowledge base (that reappears on every page) to prompt customers to type in their query. The help desk system at Hybrid Solutions is rich yet easy to reach any piece of information at the minimal of time. Supported by videos and explaining snapshots, Hybrid solutions have made it easier for you not for only get your business issues resolved but initiating new business ideas. In additional, the 24/6 live support is still available to back you up. additionally, the 24/6 live support is still available to back you up,
