In the business world, it’s become a given for companies to provide a knowledge base, among other self-service tools, for customers and employees alike to use. The danger of treating a customer service tool as a given lies in underutilizing it, underfunding it, or generally misunderstanding its power to increase your sales and improve customer satisfaction rates. These pitfalls are easily avoided by keeping your team and yourself in the know about knowledge.
A 2015 study revealed that 76% of customers use an FAQ page for customer service if it’s available. This means that the simple act of compiling what your team will view to be common knowledge will save your company from countless customer service calls, increase the quality of the service offered, increase the speed of reaching customers, and take vital step in providing the kind of customer service environment that people are demanding.
With a proper set-up, FAQ’s will be a part of a wider web of customer self-service tools available on your company’s site. This sort of investment will take a bit more work than just putting out an FAQ, but the numbers show again just how imperative it is to provide. 70% of people reported that it was expected for a brand to include some sort of self-service application for the customer to resolve their concerns independently.
Along with these points, it’s important to take the customers’ desires into context. In this age of mobility, people don’t just want service, they want it on the go. 75% of people think FAQ’s should be available via smartphones for quick customer service whenever and wherever the customer happens to think of it. Customers have also confirmed that at least 84% of people will use a search engine to look for an answer to a customer service question. This can mean Googling the question from their desktop, but more than likely, it means asking Siri to search the web while you’re driving to work in the morning. This means that the potential for resolving customer concerns before they ever reach your customer service agents is astronomically higher than it has ever been in the past – creating opportunities for current companies that our predecessors never had.
Suffice to say, the customer’s desire for knowledge has been steadily growing through the years and it is on the shoulders of service providers to meet the rising demand. How knowledgeable is your company? Monitoring and prioritizing excellence in this category could be make the difference that puts your company ahead of the game on today’s market.