For happy customers and higher revenue, invest in your knowledge base

As they say in infomercials: there’s got to be a better way.

This is why the most successful companies are investing in solutions that enable service teams to provide better support to more people with fewer resources. Self-service support options are appealing to customers and businesses. While most businesses have the necessary knowledge base content, it’s fragmented across product documents, email support, call scripts, etc. The challenge lies in unifying that content so that it can be managed efficiently and delivered consistently across support channels.

The case for investment

There’s a strong case to be made for investing in customer engagement and service — the second half of the buyer cycle. Investments in customer and partner self-service create immediate ROI by reducing support costs. This is especially true of investments in self-service support that reduce call center interactions.

In addition to immediate savings, better support drives customer satisfaction and loyalty, increasing customer lifetime value and lead generation. Investing in service drives more revenue, more customer referrals and stronger customer advocacy.

Invest in your knowledge base first

Despite a strong case for investment, service teams are competing against other organizational priorities for resources. So, how do you provide service across a growing number of channels without a comparable investment in resources? Invest in technology that helps you efficiently manage and deploy the knowledge base content you already have.

Unifying siloed content into one knowledge base provides services teams with a single source of content that can fuel numerous support channels and tools. With the right technology, a central knowledge base can power support portals, chat bots, mobile apps, interactive troubleshooting, in-product support, learning hubs and more.

There are no all-in-one solutions that do this well. It takes a combination of tools including a content solution, customer data and analytics, segmentation, personalization and front-end delivery options. Service teams need to build their own stack of tools that work well together. Investing in tools that are flexible and integrate well is the key to building a solution that can support future use cases without extensive retooling.

A unified knowledge base solves service challenges

Unifying support content into a single flexible knowledge base makes it easier to manage, more consistent and available to power more support options for customers and partners. Instead of updating content in multiple places, service teams make updates in one place, saving time and improving consistency. Updates and new content are entered once and available to all support channels.

What’s more, a unified knowledge base is the first step to providing omnichannel support. It frees up resources to focus on new support channels, makes it easier to integrate content into different channels and provides consistency as you scale.

For Lyft, one knowledge base means endless possibilities

Lyft supports riders and drivers through multiple channels: their call center, website and mobile app. Managing these channels individually for both audiences would mean maintaining six different content repositories and a lot of redundant content. Instead, Lyft uses Contentful’s content infrastructure to organize their content in one place.

Contentful’s content infrastructure is built for flexibility, integration and scale. It supports a broad range of use cases, including integration with Zendesk and other popular support tools, localization features for global content and the ability to deliver content to any digital endpoint. By choosing a flexible solution for their knowledge base, Lyft ensured that they can quickly and easily expand their support options to meet future customer demands and preferences.

To see more examples and learn how better knowledge base management empowers service teams to delight customers and drive revenue, download our white paper.