Introduction
eCommerce is a thriving industry in current times. According to Insider Intelligence, the global eCommerce shopping market size hit nearly four trillion in 2020 and is continuing to grow.
Serving this vast industry often brings along many challenges for eCommerce business owners. Attracting customers, engaging them with the brand, and retaining them is a concern for most businesses. Poor customer experience is one of the top reasons why customers are resorting to other alternatives when shopping online.
A study by Techjury revealed that 73% of customers feel customer experience plays a major role in their buying decisions.
The knowledge base is one of the best resources to deliver an excellent experience to customers. It is a library of information about your products, services, or brand that helps customers or potential customers carry out certain tasks. It also addresses top customer concerns and offers them the necessary information for making a purchase decision.
In simple words, a knowledge base is the online documentation of commonly asked questions that contains tutorials, how-to articles, troubleshooting manuals, and other information. Your customers can find answers to their queries by referring to this documentation, without any help from the support team. It promotes greater customer satisfaction and ensures customer loyalty. That is why creating a knowledge base is essential for the success of eCommerce businesses.
Now, let us understand how a knowledge base can help you streamline your eCommerce business.
How Online Knowledge Base Helps eCommerce Businesses?
1. Streamlines Customer Onboarding
Effective onboarding is one of the best ways to satisfy a newly acquired customer. To do that efficiently, the onboarding process should be fast, easy, and simple. It should guide your customers to understand how your eCommerce service works. For example, a customer would want to know about various payment options offered on your site.
Having a dedicated knowledge base with tutorials, customer support, or product tours can help customers find value in your products at every step. Right from the first login to account setup, a well-planned knowledge base ensures that customers feel special and welcome.
According to Wyzowl, 86% of customers are more likely to shop from a business that invests in creating a seamless onboarding process.
An online knowledge base can help you streamline the customer onboarding process via informative articles about how to use your eCommerce site. These articles could include detailed screenshots or short explainer videos to help customers settle in.
Zappos, a well-known shoe and clothing retailer has dedicated sections for Account Settings, Payments, Returns, and a lot of other information in their help center. In addition to this, they provide quick tips as an overlay on the screen to help new customers understand the website.
Online knowledge base acts like a self-service platform that helps customers get started quickly rather than waiting for a customer support agent to help them out.
2. Provides Customers with Quick Answers to Their Queries
According to a HubSpot study, 90% of customers believe immediate response (10 mins or less) is essential when they have any questions for the customer service team. Shorter time for query resolution has thus become mandatory for customer support teams, especially in the eCommerce industry.
However, considering the number of queries eCommerce businesses receive in a day, it’s impossible to live up to customer expectations of speedy problem resolution.
But using a knowledge base platform can help you streamline and quicken the query resolution process without any hassles. You can configure your knowledge base software to suggest an answer to the customer’s queries without involving a support agent.
Remember to organize these articles into proper categories based on the topics they cover. Also, ensure that you link related articles together for seamless navigation.
The customers will have one-click access to the required information in the form of step-by-step help guides, tooltips, and pop-up windows. This will, in turn, enhance their shopping experience.
Check out Amazon Support Desk in the screenshot below. The customers are provided with various options concerning their orders. There is also a universal search box that can be used to find answers to any questions the customers may have.
Informative knowledge bases like the one above will help you resolve customer queries faster. Thus, you can improve the customer experience and reduce the chances of getting negative reviews from angry customers.Apart from this, you can also implement a review checker to monitor and track customer reviews and it further supports product improvement.
3. Enhances Customer Support Experience
eCommerce today is about accuracy and speed. Customers who are shopping from your business expect accurate and prompt answers to their queries. However, it is not always possible for every support team member to know everything about your business operations, especially newly hired team members.
You can avoid situations like these by investing in a knowledge base. It not only helps customers to find answers by themselves but also helps the support team to refer to the same as and when required.
For example, if a customer wishes to know how to reorder the items, the support team could guide him through the entire process by following the steps mentioned in the help article.
Similarly, suppose your customer has a query regarding an order being shipped in two separate packages then having a basic understanding of how eCommerce order fulfillment works would be beneficial for the support team in resolving the customer’s query.
Conducting an audit on the support queries and including the resolution of those queries in the knowledge base as articles will contribute greatly towards building a fool-proof help center. By following this approach, your knowledge base will always be updated with relevant articles that interest your customers.
The knowledge base will help in improving the quality of service you provide to the customers.
4. Decreases Stress on Customer Support Teams
Being the first point of contact with customers, the customer support team deals with stressful situations every day. Whether it is an angry and frustrated customer or a customer with no online shopping experience, these agents provide them with solutions to their queries.
However, more often than not, customers have similar queries. Creating a knowledge base that addresses these common concerns can reduce the stress on customer support teams and enable them to focus on other pressing customer issues.
Introducing a knowledge base will help in simplifying the lives of customer support agents by decreasing the number of tickets received every day. Moreover, self-service portals are a big eCommerce trend today. Customers prefer solving their problems with minimum intervention from customer service professionals.
The knowledge base will also serve as a resource for training new customer support representatives.
5. Minimizes Support Team Costs
Knowledge base takes away manual support ticket resolution and speeds up business operations. Customers can now get their queries resolved with the help of a knowledge base rather than relying on a customer support representative. As they are aware of more information, their calls when speaking to a support representative are more clear and concise. All this contributes to faster query resolution and ensures greater customer satisfaction.
A knowledge base also reduces the need for hiring additional staff as most of the support
queries are being taken care of by this helpful resource. Thus, wages, training, and other
operational costs will be drastically reduced. You can then utilize the saved money in providing the support team with additional facilities and other benefits.
Final Thoughts
Running a successful eCommerce business is becoming very competitive in today’s world.
To stay ahead in this competition, it is essential to keep customers satisfied. Knowledge base helps in providing a personalized approach towards resolving customer queries.
Use knowledge base platforms like Document360 to stay organized, solve real customer problems, and offer a great customer experience. This will help you retain your existing customers, attract new customers, and grow your business.
