Understanding the Knowledge Base

The Knowledge Base is a tool companies can use to share information with employees, customers, and partners. In its simplest form, SmarterTrack's Knowledge Base is an online repository of articles that help agents and customers solve issues quickly and efficiently.

A well-organized Knowledge Base can save organizations money by decreasing the amount of employee time spent trying to find information about company products, policies and/or procedures. As a customer service tool, the Knowledge Base is one of the most cost-effective support channels because it gives customers easy access to information that would otherwise require contact with the company's staff.

Of course, the effectiveness of the Knowledge Base is dependent on the company's ability to create, edit and review its articles on a regular basis. SmarterTools suggests running regular reports to determine how often your customers access specific articles, which topics/products/etc. your customers are seeking help on and which article searches returned no results. These reports are valuable because they can be used to identify deficiencies in Knowledge Base content.

Organizing the Knowledge Base by Brand

With SmarterTrack's branding feature, companies can assign articles to one or multiple brands. This allows companies to only display the articles that relate to a specific brand, eliminating the customer's need to weed through irrelevant information.

For example, a software company with multiple products may have separate websites for each product. By assigning Knowledge Base articles to different brands (products), the company can ensure that only the articles relating to a specific product are displayed to the customer when they visit that product's portal.

Using the Knowledge Base with Tickets and Live Chats

When customers complete the ticket submission form on the portal, relevant Knowledge Base articles and resources are automatically displayed as possible solutions to their inquiry. This is also true when customers initiate live chats with a department. As a result, your customers may receive answers to their issues before they've finished filling out the ticket or live chat -- ultimately saving your company valuable time and money.

Similarly, when an agent is participating in a live chat with a customer or responding to a ticket, SmarterTrack uses the text of these conversations to actively search the Knowledge Base for applicable articles. By automatically displaying possible solutions from the Knowledge Base to agents, SmarterTrack helps companies ensure that their customers receive timely and accurate responses to their inquiries.

Using the Knowledge Base as a Marketing Tool

SmarterTrack's Knowledge Base takes companies into the next generation of information delivery. Each article can contain images, video, code block and other special features, and each article helps improve search engine optimization strategies by auto-generating canonical and meta description tags. By incorporating multimedia and search engine optimization strategies into Knowledge Base articles, companies can transform their Knowledge Base content into a valuable marketing tool.

Marketing benefits include:

• Knowledge Base articles are search engine optimized and will display in search engine result pages, allowing potential customers to discover your company as they seek answers to their questions.
• Utilizing the Knowledge Base can improve your company's overall SEO strategy by helping you build links and improve Google PageRank.

By incorporating SEO strategies into our own Knowledge Base, SmarterTools has successfully topped search engine results for a variety of searches. For example, the SmarterTools KB article "Where are My IIS Log Files Stored?" currently ranks in the Top 10 for the search phrase "IIS log files." As a result, that article has received hundreds of thousands of views and is our most popular article to date.