One means of improving customer retention and overall customer satisfaction is to produce content that helps customers help themselves. Not only are there improvements to customer satisfaction, there’s a direct cost-savings associated with customers not tying up your customer services lines. Publishing your knowledge base, frequently-asked questions, snippets and examples where search engines can find them makes this possible – not putting them behind a login for fear of competitors finding them.
Recent studies tell us that more and more customers prefer self-service over contacting a support agent; and as the below infographic illustrates, a whopping 91% say they would use a knowledge base if it met their needs. This is great news for businesses; self-service is the fastest and most cost-effective way to customer support. Zendesk’s Infographic Improvements in Search for More Intelligent Self-Service
This is fun stuff! Some quick reactions from a guy who does knowledge management and self-service for a living:
1. It’s a bit ironic that Oracle is quoted in the section about SEO and sharing your content through web search engines, as they’re a notable example of a B2B company that does NOT share knowledge base content through Google et al. For better or worse, they lock their KB content behind their login
2. My data is very, very different — much lower — than the “40% will call a contact center after self-service.” If you think about your own B2C experience on Amazon, Microsoft, etc., you can see that this is orders of magnitude too high. But even in B2B environments, volume on the website is 10x – 30x the volume in the support center, or more.
3. I think Gartner is wrong about virtual agents. (70% probability) 🙂
After Penguin&Panda updates content is king. Publishing your knowledge base will certainlu boost your SEO