Building a best-in-class
customer self-service
experience
Building a best-in-class customer self-service experience
2
Although that title doesn't come with a fancy trophy or ring
though that would be niceyou take pride in driving your
company's efforts to give customers what they increasingly
prefer: self-service.
Why do you do that? Because the benefits are clear: customers
don't want to wait, and providing them with great self-service
content shows them that you value their time as much as they
do. And since self-service lowers support costs, drives better
customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, and improves agent
efficiency, it's just good business sense.
Yet while your knowledge management efforts have begun to
bear fruit, there's a nagging sense that your organization could
do better. Just how exactly will you take your knowledge-
management program to the next level?
If there's a universal truth in knowledge management, it's that
building a successful program requires a long-term, cross-
organizational effort. In this guide, we'll show you the path
forward, from building a solid foundation to becoming a truly
knowledge-centered company.
You're a knowledge
management
champion.
Building a best-in-class customer self-service experience
3
Building a solid foundation
Your first step to laying the groundwork for a constantly
improving self-service experience will be to commit the
necessary resources: people and technology.
The backbone of your program will be team members with
extensive expertise, technical skills, and a commitment to
quality, so be prepared to do everything you can to set up your
agents for success. That need for expertise stems from the
changing role of the support agentwith artificial intelligence
tools becoming increasingly powerful, the traditional tier 1
position (which handles basic tickets) has begun to disappear.
For example, Zendesk's Answer Bot can answer the simple
questions traditionally handled by entry-level employees thus
freeing up agents to work on tougher problems and build better
relationships with customers.
While Answer Bot's powerful machine learning abilities mean it
continuously improves as it works, you'll need skilled agents and
knowledge base curators to help it perform even better.
Because Answer Bot surfaces content from your knowledge
base, your agents can help improve the logic further by training
it with better concept matching to ensure the correct information
gets to customers, as well as continue to populate the
knowledge base with high-quality content that Answer Bot
can use.
Hundreds of companies already use Answer Bot, and the data is
clear: support organizations report increased agent productivity,
thousands of hours of customer wait time eliminated, and some
are seeing it resolve up to 22 percent of issues without a live
agent ever getting involved. And as bots continue to evolve over
the upcoming years, they'll be able to handle even more
complex issues, further reducing overhead and enabling live
agents to focus on more complex problems, customer loyalty,
retention, and keeping your knowledge base accurate and the
best it can be.
Get agents involved in
content creation
Some agents might be resistant to contributing content for the
knowledge base, so in the beginning be sure to help them
recognize the value of having good knowledge by surfacing it to
them when answering support tickets. This will enable agents to
understand the value and improved productivity that comes from
having good knowledge base content that covers common
customer questions, and documents more advanced knowledge
or newer information that only some agents know.
Organizations that focus on building and maintaining a solid
knowledge base and continuously improving it over time see 23
percent lower resolution times, 20 percent fewer tickets
reopened, and 2 percent better CSAT scores on average. These
organizations of "agile improvers" distribute the creation of
knowledge base articles amongst their teams as they know agents,
and other knowledge workers, are most responsible for the success
from good content. So make sure to leverage your team to ensure
your knowledge base is getting better and better.
Given these statistics, it is crucial that your agents understand the
importance of capturing institutional knowledge, as doing so makes
it possible for your self-service options to answer increasing
numbers of issues. One important way to do this is to make it easy
for agents to take the content they write for individual tickets and
convert it into knowledge base articles. But another key component
of a top performing help center is the constant updating and
improvement of current article. So in addition to adding new content,
you should make flagging and improving suboptimal content an
essential part of their job. Also, as agents get the hang of content
creationand start to add information more frequentlyshift your
focus to quality. Agents with editing skills and areas of expertise will
begin to stand out, which will help you fine-tune your knowledge
management process.
The Knowledge Capture App
An excellent tool for encouraging agents to get involved in adding
and improving content is the Knowledge Capture App, which allows
agents to access knowledge from within the Zendesk environment,
link to it, and create both internal and customer-facing content. The
Knowledge Capture App recommends relevant articles to agents,
helping them quickly and accurately answer tickets, so they'll
already recognize the value of having good content available. If they
see something out of date or incorrect, they can flag that content for
review, which will kick off a workflow for a content manager. Those
content managers will be able to use the knowledge management
dashboard to see which agents are flagging and adding the most
content, as well as how effective that content is.
Building a best-in-class customer self-service experience
4
Now that your agents are invested in content creation and are
taking advantage of Answer Bot, the Knowledge Capture app,
and Team Publishing, it's time to think about how to finish the
transformation into a knowledge-centered company, one that
constantly iterates and improves content. You'll want to:
Continue to create and maintain relevant knowledge
Design a framework for knowledge management
Drive organizational change and sustain engagement
articulate the benefits, promote teamwork, and
recognize and reward those who contribute
Once content has been flagged for improvement, Team
Publishing comes into play by enabling your content managers
to set up clear workflows for authors, approvers, and publishers
who will finalize the articles. These stageswork in progress,
ready to review, ready for publishing, and publishedhelp keep
your content creation process on track and ensure quality
control. Content managers can also assign article updates
directly to team members, ensuring that agents with relevant
expertise will be prompted to help improve content and capture
their institutional knowledge.
You can also take your knowledge management practices a step
further through analytics and AI-powered tools like Content
Cues, which will help ensure you have the right knowledge base
content. Content Cues identifies common questions customers
are asking and searches for relevant content, and if none exists
or current content needs updating, it will surface those insights.
By identifying these knowledge gaps, Content Cues helps
content managers understand opportunities to improve help
center content so they can then leverage tools like Team
Publishing to assign out content improvements or new articles
that are needed.
Become a knowledge-
centered organization
As previously mentioned, Team Publishing provides clear
workflows for content creation, editing, and publishingbut as a
knowledge-centered organization, you'll also want to consider
creating certain roles to ensure knowledge is maintained and
vetted properly:
Establishing these roles can help your
team collaborate more effectively and
get your customers and agents the
content they need.
Authors:
Sometimes referred to as knowledge workers or
these can just be your agents, authors write
knowledge base articles and choose which
section of the knowledge base to house the
article, before sending the article for review.
Oftentimes category owners are designated for
authors with particular areas of expertise.
Publishers:
Once approved, the publisher publishes the
article. In addition to deployment, this role is
often responsible for maintenance of the
knowledge base. A subset of publishers
are knowledge base owners, who handle
the tactical execution of the knowledge
management program.
Approvers:
Once written, articles are sent to approvers who
review, revise, and ensure quality before
approving articles for publication. It's also the
approvers responsibility to add the correct labels
to each article.
Building a best-in-class customer self-service experience
5
The benefits of self-service, for your customers, your team, and your
company, are significant. But fully realizing those benefits will take
some work and preparation. While it can feel overwhelming at times,
focusing on the fundamentals will help simplify everything:
Never stop improving
Start off with a solid foundation
Success begins with the right talent
knowledgeable, committed agents who
provide quality supportand tools
technology that enables great self-service
support for your customers. And with
Answer Bot, it's possible to enable more
customers to self-serve, freeing agents
to focus on more complex issues and
building better customer relationships.
Create high-quality content
Self-service support requires great content
that enables customers to solve their own
issues. Use the Knowledge Capture App
to empower your agents to consistently
write and update knowledge base articles
that do just that.
Become a knowledge-centered
organization
Build a framework for the constant
creation and improvement of your
knowledge base. Use Team Publishing
to collaborate on content and establish
specific rolesauthors, approvers, and
publishersto have responsibility for
content, as well as use Content Cues to
understand where you have knowledge
gaps that can be improved.
Creating or editing an article
with Team Publishing
Work in Progress
Ready for Review
Ready for Publishing
Published
If more updates are needed,
agent receives email notification
ROLE
ARTICLE STATE
Adds
labels
Approves
article
Waiting for
Publishing
Publishes
article
Reviews
article
Creates or
edits article
Chooses a
section to
house article
Submits
for review
Author
(Agent)
Approver
(Content Manager)
Publisher
(Content Manager)
Building a best-in-class customer self-service experience
6
Conclusion
We hope this guide will help you take your knowledge
management practices to the next level, but it's not
meant to be the final word on the subject. Please visit
Zendesk to learn how you can continue to adapt self-
service to meet the needs of your customers.