7 Best Ways to Improve Your eCommerce Knowledge Base

Did you know that 70% of customers prefer using a company’s website to get answers to their questions rather than using the phone or email?

That means they are more likely to land on your eCommerce website’s knowledge base before sending an email for support. Customers act in this manner because they need an answer faster to resolve a pressing issue.

It’s pretty cool, right? You can offer a quick solution without getting your support team involved. But what happens if customers fail to find the right eCommerce process documentation or user manuals while browsing your knowledge repository? 

You may fail to gather support queries for the team and even burden them with some of the frequently asked questions. That is not what’s on your agenda when choosing user manual software for your eCommerce business. 

To avoid such drastic results, here’s what you can do - work on improving your knowledge base. Just in case you’re having trouble with where to start, here’s a list of measures you can take to successfully improve your eCommerce knowledge base.

7 Easy Ways to Improve Your eCommerce Knowledge Base Regularly

1. Make Regular Updating a Consistent Practice

One of the first things you need to be worried about is your knowledge base not being up-to-date with the current eCommerce process documentation. As an example, you might have changed your return policies and how customers can request them. You may face more customer calls if you fail to update your repository with the current return policy and its practice.

That’s why updating your knowledge management system consistently is so crucial to help customer support teams focus on pressing matters. Besides updating your existing articles in the repository, it is advised to look out for more queries that are turning out to be common during support calls, chats or emails. Thus, you can add more articles to which customers need a quick response.

2. Add Videos for Better Explanation

Readers may find text-only documentation boring. You can make your knowledge base articles more engaging by adding videos. You can create videos for returning, exchanging, or refunding products to help customers understand them better. Besides these common queries, you can also create how-to videos for complex yet common queries your eCommerce business may be facing regularly. This way, you can cater to customers who like reading or watching an explanatory video to tackle the problem.

Pro Tip: You can also create interactive video for all your products and show customers how they can be used. You can add these videos even on the product page to increase the probability of the customer checking out the product.

3. Never Forget to Answer What, Why & How

Create a flow for all your knowledge base articles to ensure they answer the customer’s question hassle-free. One popular way to stream your articles in the knowledge repository is to follow the ‘What, Why and How’ pattern.

You explain to your customers what that particular product is, why it is relevant for them, and how it can be used. By answering these questions, you give customers more insights into the product, its use, and how they will use it once purchased. Keep this as a simple template for writing user manuals.

Using this pattern, you avoid creating separate articles to answer these questions and help customers find answers to all of them in one place.

4. Include a Search Bar

Your knowledge base is incomplete without a search bar.

With a rich knowledge base repository, it can be challenging for customers to find an answer to some of the commonly asked questions faster. It may even be a roadblock for those who want a quick solution. 

Imagine you come across a customer who wants an answer right away, finds your knowledge repository but fails to locate the relevant article that answers their question. Understand that you irritated this customer, and now it has no option but to approach your support team using other platforms. When it takes a while for them to find a support executive, they will likely rant at them for experiencing so many issues for so much longer than expected.

What’s the result? You’ve got an angry customer at hand, and your support executive is busy dealing with a common issue while losing out on customers with a severe technical issue.

This can be avoided if you have a search bar in your knowledge repository. It can help your customers find the right article that answers their questions. It will save them and your executives more time and energy, making your support process more streamlined.

5. Show More Customer Service Options

Let’s not assume that your knowledge base article will solve an issue immediately. While most customers may find the answers they came looking for, some may be left dazed and hanging for more answers. You need to cater to the needs of such customers as well. 

In such a scenario, you can do two things. One, add a recommended read section below the article to give them answers to questions that will likely pop up in their minds later. As you finish writing a newly-written piece or updating an existing one, make sure you add related or recommended reads that answer questions that your customers may have after reading it.

Two, you can also show support options below the article to help customers reach out to the right department and find the answers they want. Support options include live chat, email, phone calls, and even bot integration. But with more support options, it will be easier for your customers to find a solution using their preferred platform.

Pro Tip: You can use both options to improve the customer support experience and ensure no customer leaves without a solution.

6. Capture Feedback for Each Article

Are customers happy with the solution they find in your knowledge base articles? Did they find them helpful?

If that’s a question you haven’t found an answer to, it is time you start capturing feedback for all the articles you have published so far in the repository. This is a wise practice to understand whether or not the information your customers find is relevant to them. Utilizing customer testimonials for marketing purposes is a widely used practice. 

If you see more users for these articles but still witness a rise in your calls and emails, the feedback will allow you to understand where the article lacks. This will help your team improve it for a better support experience.

7. Create the Right Categories for Better Search

If you have the right categories in place, it will be easier to route customers to the right answer faster. Building categories will help you answer more questions, making customer satisfaction hassle-free.

Brands like Spotify not only use the search bar to their benefit but also create relevant categories to answer most of their customers' queries faster. This helps their subscribers and the support team save time and energy, building a tangible support solution that customers can always look up to when in need.

Start Upgrading Your eCommerce Knowledge Base Today!

Understandably, you would want your support team to answer questions that aren’t typical and take more time for resolution. Many of you adopt a knowledge base system that helps answer common questions and reduces burnout for support executives. However, having one in place won’t help your eCommerce business answer these common questions every time. 

It would be most helpful if you improved it consistently so it answers their questions hassle-free. We've listed straightforward and easy-to-implement strategies in this article that can help you accomplish your goal. We hope you find them helpful, and that they help your eCommerce business improve its existing knowledge base to improve its performance.