Customer expectations for ecommerce businesses have never been higher. Today, if you can’t offer instant, white glove service to your customers, they’ll simply leave your site to shop at any of the thousands of other online shops that fulfill their needs.
One of the most effective ways to achieve this high level of service is by maintaining a well-organized customer knowledge base. A robust knowledge base empowers customers to find their own answers, unburdening support teams from repetitive inquiries and allowing them to focus on more complex, high-value issues.
In this blog, we’ll explain why a knowledge base is essential for ecommerce businesses, how it differs from a broader customer help center, and how AI-driven tools can supercharge your support efforts. By the end, you’ll understand the key benefits of deploying a comprehensive knowledge base and gain some helpful tips to help you set one up for your own ecommerce store.
What is a Customer Service Help Center or Knowledge Base?
Before we discuss its importance, let’s define a customer knowledge base and explain how it fits into the broader category of customer service help centers.
First, there’s often a subtle but important distinction between a customer service knowledge base and a help center, though the terms can overlap in casual usage. Generally, a knowledge base is a structured repository of information, often presented as a collection of articles, FAQs, guides, and troubleshooting steps.
A help center, on the other hand, is a broader support hub that often includes a knowledge base, as well as additional resources and ways to get help. Your help center, for example, can list options for contacting your support team, such as email, a contact form, chat, or a phone number, as well as discussion forums or any other tools you might want to provide your customers with access to.
The purpose of a help center is to provide customers with multiple paths to support and assistance. At the same time, your knowledge base offers self-service support by educating customers about products, services, or policies.
Why a Customer Knowledge Base Matters
These days, shoppers expect excellent customer service at every level of interaction. This evolution of customer expectations has led to a need for people to be able to access immediate, accurate assistance at any hour of the day. Due to this, self-service is a key differentiator in the highly competitive ecommerce industry.
While your customer service team can handle complex customer needs throughout business hours, shoppers shouldn’t have to speak to someone to get the help they need–especially if their problem is simple, common, and/or can be answered in an FAQ or help article.
Customer knowledge bases help reduce friction in the customer journey by providing readily available information to shoppers/customers, preventing frustration. This decreases the number of repetitive inquiries made to other customer service paths, such as email or chat.
Common Pain Points for Ecommerce Businesses Without a Good Knowledge Base
While it’s entirely possible to operate an ecommerce store without a knowledge base or even a help center as a whole, those who choose not to do so will often run into some pain points that can easily be rectified with knowledge base software:
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Inconsistent or Outdated Information: When you have one single source of truth for your brand, it’s much easier to keep everything accurate and consistent. Old information, ingredients, size information, instructions, and more floating around can impact your brand’s credibility and trust, confusing your customer support team and customers.
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Unnecessarily High Support Ticket Volume: Answering repetitive questions, even with saved email templates and scripts, increases operational costs and results in longer wait times, which can negatively affect your company’s customer service experience.
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Difficulty in Scaling Customer Support: As businesses grow, manual solutions become less efficient, and the need for an automated, scalable approach to your customer service strategy grows.
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Increased Risk of Disorganization: When you’re managing customer service requests directly on whichever platform your customers use (Facebook, email, Instagram, etc.), you not only lose a lot of time switching between all these tools, but messages can also get missed or forgotten about if they come through on a lesser-used or unmonitored platform.
When you consolidate all your company’s communication channels and information to your ecommerce help center and knowledge base, your customer relationships will improve, and you will find scaling your business much more manageable.
Benefits of a Comprehensive Knowledge Base
Online businesses that utilize customer service software with knowledge base capabilities benefit in several ways. Here are the most common:
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Enhanced Self-Service for Customers: The ability for customers to get quick answers to their questions leads to happier, more independent customers and improved first-contact resolution rates.
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Streamlined Internal Processes: Support teams now have a consistent reference point/source of truth for their day-to-day operations. Having all your information in one place also makes onboarding or offboarding new team members much easier.
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Improved Operational Efficiency & Reduced Costs: Customer self-service equates to a lower volume of simple inquiries for your customer service team, especially regarding requests that would have otherwise come in outside of business hours. This allows your support agents to focus on more complex, high-value issues.
When it comes to customer service, reducing overall emails, calls, and chats, and improving response rates can significantly enhance your entire operation while saving time and increasing customer loyalty.
Introducing AI-Powered CX Tools
As AI technology has improved, we have continued to find new use cases for it in our day-to-day operations as ecommerce professionals. One area in particular where we see a lot of promise is in AI-powered CX, where AI chatbots are trained on your company’s knowledge base articles so that they can provide answers to customer requests using your brand’s own voice and internal information.
Not only do these bots never sleep–so they can work 24/7/365–but they are capable of improving over time based on interactions with customers, in addition to improvements and changes made to your company’s documentation. Now, your team wakes up to a reduced backlog from the previous evening, allowing them to focus their efforts on the more complex issues that require a human touch.
As long as your knowledge base and help center are regularly updated and properly maintained, you can rely on these tools to answer any common questions customers may have about your products or services independently, without requiring unnecessary human intervention.
Our Top Ecommerce Help Center Pick
As an ecommerce agency with a lot of experience helping businesses of all sizes set up their operations to be more efficient and scalable, we always recommend Gorgias to our clients looking to start building a help center and training an AI agent to handle their easy CX inquiries.
Gorgias is great because it consolidates all your customer service efforts into one single dashboard where you can handle all CX-related aspects of your day-to-day operations without needing to switch between multiple tools and platforms.
Link Gorgias to your ecommerce platform, EMS, social media pages, shipping partners, loyalty program, SMS tools, and more to manage every aspect of your company’s CX right on the platform. This provides your team with a unified view of customer data and order history, making it easier to resolve issues that arise throughout the day.
Gorgias really shines with its customer knowledge base feature, which allows you to build a robust microsite containing anything you want or need – from a simple FAQ to in-depth product instructions, troubleshooting steps, and more. This is also where our next favourite feature, AI-powered chatbots, comes in.
Gorgias offers AI bots that can “work” for your company and handle common requests and straightforward inquiries so that your team can focus on your VIP customers and more complicated issues. They are trained on your existing customer knowledge base, ensuring their responses consistently align with your instructions, policies, and brand voice. They also continuously learn from your tweaking based on their customer interactions.
In addition to being an AI-powered help center, Gorgias also offers automated workflow and ticket routing features that automatically prioritize and categorize tickets. This further reduces manual overhead for your support team members. It can also perform actions on your other platforms, such as cancelling an order on Shopify or sending the status of an order to a customer upon request.
Best Practices for Setting Up and Maintaining Your Knowledge Base
To get the most out of all these features, you’ll want to ensure that your knowledge base is primed to be the source of truth for all your CX efforts. When setting up your knowledge base for the first time, you’ll want to tackle the project similarly to how you would build a content marketing strategy. Start with your FAQs and tutorials, then add and iterate through your material based on customer feedback and search queries.
Review your AI responses and content periodically to ensure that everything you say to your customers remains relevant and accurate. Utilize your performance metrics to pinpoint areas for improvement and enhance your content quality overall.
If all goes well, you should see a considerable improvement in response times, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction.
Conclusion
A well-maintained customer knowledge base isn’t just a collection of FAQs; it’s the backbone of an efficient, scalable, and customer-centric ecommerce operation. From reducing repetitive inquiries to enhancing brand consistency and fueling AI-driven chatbots, the benefits of this resource resonate across your entire CX ecosystem. When updated regularly and running on a powerful platform like Gorgias, your knowledge base becomes a highly useful tool that grows and adapts alongside your business.
At Blue Badger, we have the experience and skills you need to get started with using a tool like Gorgias to build a help center that works for you, even when you’re off the clock. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you get started with AI-powered CX.
