Why knowledge management systems are essential for ecommerce businesses

In the era of digitization, customer experience is synonymous with the revenue you company makes. Especially when you run a business such as e-commerce, where customer satisfaction is the primary factor that ensures reliability and growth of your brand, in addition to expanding your revenue. 

Your customers expect to get the right information at the right time without having to pick up the phone to speak to someone. Customers today want to be able to find immediate and relevant information themselves. Moreover, you cannot expect your employees to waste 40% of their time speaking to customers back-and-forth.

According to a report by Forrester Research, 55% of US online adults are likely to forego or abandon their purchase if they cannot find a quick answer to their question. Implementing a knowledge base system to your online shopping website is the best move to ensure a better user experience, customer satisfaction, product or service details, better decision making and a faster buying process. 

Are you contemplating implementing the number 1 knowledge management platform to boost your online store operations? 

Check out these five ways that can do wonders for your business:

1.  Fastest response for customer queries

Your customers do not have the patience and time to browse numerous pages of your website content to find the answers they need in order to complete a purchase. Research from Fast Company bolsters the argument that 70% of shoppers expect online businesses to provide quick, easy, self-service options for handling inquiries, problems, and complaints. In most cases, they expect to access those answers without a back and forth with your support team. If a prospective customer has a specific question about your business, they will take it for granted that they can find an answer by simply searching your website using specific keywords. If you do not have an ecommerce knowledge base in place, customers will not be able to find the expected answers to their solutions or problems and will opt out of your site looking for other businesses. This results in potential loss of revenue. On the other hand, if you have a well-resourced online repository, a search will return instantaneous and desired answers your customer needs to make an informed purchase decision.

2. It cuts down your support queries and makes it easier for your team

Customer agents handle tons of support tickets every day. A fully functional knowledge base in place significantly reduces the workload for support teams, since finding information becomes a cakewalk and customer queries are resolved in a jiffy. This means the team can concentrate on other important customer queries that cannot be addressed through the customer support knowledge base. It is said that a knowledge base reduces customer queries by 70%. Dealing with fewer clients to help also means that your customer support staff will work in an environment that is less stressful, and therefore, will be able to provide more focused quality services to your clients.

In addition, you can continuously expand your information repository by ensuring that customer queries that are not addressed therein but have been resolved by your support are integrated regularly. This is important because a regularly updated knowledge base system will be rich in content and will be the leading ticket deflection factor for e-commerce businesses.

3. Helps reduce workload and employee costs.

E-Commerce businesses need to be open round the clock the entire week. As such, an information repository is useful in reducing the workload that customer support teams have to undertake. Instead of hiring a new employee for accommodating a 24-hour shift on a whole week, an e-commerce business that has a comprehensive knowledge base platform in place can work with just the day shift staff and not worry much about supporting customers during the night with an intelligent knowledge base system such as Document360.

Also, make sure to include all issues directly resolved by agent intervention in your knowledge base to stay up to date. There will always be a ready reference in case you would like to view your knowledge base in future.

4. Drives traffic to your e-commerce site

More people will expect an information center that features valuable, best written content. This easily boosts traffic for your site making your articles appear on top of search results online. This ensures that your content ranks highly on search engines while increasing your chances of having new prospects visit your helpdesk. Once they get the answers they are looking for, your prospects are likely to spend more time on your e-commerce site and as they browse through your online store, will more likely end up making a purchase. To achieve a high visibility for your website, the articles written on your knowledge base should be generated when the customers search for procuring information using those specific keywords. 

Search engines such as Google or Bing look for the time spent by visitors on web pages a key factor in ranking and they rank your website higher when people get the desired content using their algorithm.

5. Streamlines collaboration across departments

As your e-commerce business grows, the number of teams will increase, and your teams will become more interdependent. And as a collaboration among teams increases, communication can be difficult to maintain in some instances. At this point, having a centralized repository for your internal information will be necessary. An in-house information repository allows you to place everything your team needs to know in a single place in an organized manner. It provides a platform for your employees to simplify the storage and synergy of knowledge sharing. This not only makes your company look smart, professional and up to date, but it also reduces confusion among employees. It also encourages collaboration and reduces financial overheads as it allows them to work independently without micromanagement or supervision.

6. Helps with hassle-free onboarding.

The frequency with which people leave their jobs is on the rise and professional networking has everything to do with it. A survey conducted by LinkedIn shows that, 89% of people who are building their careers got their current jobs due to networking. In the event of job transition, employees leave the companies they work at and carry on with the knowledge and experience they have accumulated over the years. Thus, it becomes a challenge for the team that is left behind to pick up the pieces and ramp up the new hires. Creating a company knowledge documentation for your internal departments helps them learn the product in a few days thereby reducing the cost of training new staff. Furthermore, documenting your e-commerce company’s data increases the value of your business. The knowledge base can be shifted from an intangible asset into a valuable, shareable asset in case you decide to acquire or sell your business.

Final thoughts 

A knowledge base is the most needed tool for e-commerce businesses who are looking to scale their customer service program and enhance customer satisfaction. Knowledge base is sensitive to content and context. Adding smart bars, pop ups, making an article bold and adding highlights and other formatting options give a whole new dimension making it easier for the customers to read your knowledge base.

Moreover, the knowledge base editors should seamlessly enrich content by helping add laborious lines of code with your text. An enhanced search with enriched content that includes FAQs, troubleshooting guides, documentation helps your customers receive help without the need to contact your support anytime, anywhere. A knowledge management software provides a platform for the customers to not only create useful content that customers need but also does the task of engaging customers. It is up to the document writers to create content that is useful and captures the attention for the target audience to grow their business in addition to providing stellar customer support.