Tech.ENA | Digital Transformation

Enabling SMEs to digitally transform the business

WHY A KNOWLEDGE BASE?

Your customers are getting more and more impatient - they want solutions to their problems like immediately!

If they can Google it, they will Google it, nobody wants to sit in a call waiting for the support agents anymore!

Customers are also getting smarter - if you let them, they can do a better job troubleshooting their own deployment of your system!

So stop wasting your support agents' and your customers' time. Push your knowledge online in the form of a Knowledge Base repository and watch your customers help themselves with their technical issues!

To you as the business owner, the knowledge base forms part of a Level 0 support to the customers, filtering out those pesky, repetitive; but easy to solve issues out of your support agents' workloads. Only when the problem grows in technicality would your support agents kick in to offer a high level of customer experience. And it keeps work stresses out of your support agents, so they can give their best faces to the customers. Win, win, and win!

CONVENTIONAL KNOWLEDGE BASE

KNOWLEDGE BASE: THE OG!

Conventional knowledge base platforms like Atlassian's Confluence, or MS SharePoint Online sites are the OG (read original). You can think of them as the base layers in your knowledge base deployments, kinda like a fall back when all else fails.

Chances are, your customers are already familiar with the knowledge base layout, so onboarding can be done easily.
People can follow a step-by-step guide at their own pace, no more frustrations on your support agents' part due to repeated sentences/questions!
Your support agents can work in tandem with the knowledge base: face a similar issue already documented in the KB, just send them a link to the guide!
Getting repeated calls about the same issue? Document it and tag it as popular so customers can get to it easily!

Explore a custom built KB site using Confluence (free plan)

Username: rwtan.mecha@gmail.com, p/w: QweRTY@1234

See how the Discourse team use Discourse to build Discourse!

COMMUNITY FORUMS: THE NEW BOYS IN TOWN

Community forums make a lot of sense especially if you have long running customers in a highly technical sphere. It would make even more sense if a lot of your customers are already involved in open-sourced projects trying to make everyone's lives easier.

Basically, the primary advantage of maintaining a community forum is achieving the truest sense of self-service support: made by the community, for the community. If one member of the community faces problems, other members within the same community who may have experienced the problem before and have found a solution can come in to offer guidance on how to troubleshoot, and maybe even getting them out of the problems.

Sure, this method of disseminating knowledge may not be suitable for all industries, but you'd be surprised at how effective it can be; especially if your community of customers have one or two really technical gurus that are more than ready to offer help. Kindness is kinda contagious if you think about it.

POWER APPS: THE NEW BOYS IN TOWN PT.2

This particular form of deploying a knowledge base is for a rather focused application, wherein:
Your knowledge are primarily contained within the MS SharePoint implementation, such as in Excel documents, Lists, and Pages,
Your knoweldge are spread out in a number of different SharePoint sites,
Your target audiences are complaining that the deployment is messy, or
Your target audience are complaining that they do not know where to find a specific information.

Basically, Microsoft's Power Apps belong to a suite of Power Platform software, with connectivity into SharePoint Online. You can think of it as a simple UI designer, and the technical knowledge to build it is far less demanding than building your own mobile application from scratch.

Features of the Power Apps:
Your data can continue living in their individual SharePoint Sites and format, no migration needed!
You can design your own UI to display the data your way!
Power Apps can integrate with Power Automate (basically Microsoft's Robotic Process Automation) to automate your data flow!
You can embed Power Apps into your websites via the use of iframe tags!

This app leverages a clean user interface complete with a functioning search bar to display error message information stored in a SharePoint List.