8 Ways to Boost Ecommerce Sales And Growth Using a Knowledge Base
See how using a knowledge base can drive Ecommerce sales. If you’re not familiar with what a knowledge base can do for your customers, read this post.
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Just in case you haven’t already noticed, the world is moving online, and it’s highly likely your business has too. This has some unique benefits, such as customers being able to make purchases in bed or businesses keeping a perpetual inventory record with ease.
These are exciting times for your ecommerce venture, and there are specific things you can do to boost your company’s sales and growth. One worthy of note is the benefits of an online knowledge base.
A knowledge base can be a huge help to your customers, giving them all the information they need in one key location. Gone are the days of answering the same customer queries over and over – instead, you can redistribute your customer service expertise into solving unique issues and providing quality support when needed. Meanwhile, customers can easily solve their own issues.
What Is a Knowledge Base?
Picture a library of really detailed and clear information surrounding your company. This is essentially what your knowledge base is. It includes a variety of pages on all sorts of customer questions, which can be grouped according to a topic or discovered using a search bar. Using your call center tracking software makes a one-stop source of information for any customer before they ask more specific questions
Typically, a knowledge base includes information about products, delivery, returns policies, payments, and even contact options or terms and conditions can be included. If customers are likely to ask about it, it’s worth adding it to your knowledge base, including links to other relevant pages and providing easy solutions for those searching. However, there’s a whole range of knowledge base features available – it’s ultimately down to what suits your company best.
Throughout this article, we’re going to look at eight of the top ways to boost the sales and growth of your ecommerce website. But, plot twist, there’s only one thing you need to do to improve your ecommerce – that is, set up a knowledge base. With benefits ranging from increased customer loyalty to speeding things up throughout the business, it’s high time you used a knowledge base.
1. Provide Instant Customer Service
No one likes waiting around, and when it comes to customers, the longer they wait, the higher the chance of churn and abandoned online carts. A knowledge base can help provide super speedy customer service and resolve issues instantly without waiting to schedule the best VoIP services call with an agent. Rather, the solutions and answers are in the customer’s hands, available at a moment’s notice.
Although you often read about how the personal touch can make a customer service experience, this is not necessary for the basic questions most customers will have. Instead, having an online answer allows customers to make informed purchases even when your support team isn’t around. This variation of self-service means you don’t always have to be on the lookout to deliver quick response times.
2. Make Information Widely Available
Many ecommerce sites are at risk of bottlenecking their sales, making the benefits of their POS system software redundant, all because the key information that customers want to know before they purchase relies on one person or a small team. By providing this information in an easily accessible location on your website and directing customers to it, you can massively help activate customer purchases.
It also has the potential to open your ecommerce business up to customers who may have accessibility requirements. Whether that be in easily translating your webpage into other languages or providing a visual aid for those hard of hearing, this can be a growing resource for your company as you add products or uncover additional customer queries.
3. Eliminate Confusion
A knowledge base can act as an authoritative source of information for both you and your customers. This means there is no variation or room for wrong interpretation of policies and answers to questions will be the same for every customer. Again, this can open your ecommerce company up to international business without getting lost in translation.
As a staple of your ecommerce website alongside high converting product pages, a knowledge base is a reliable source to return to again and again should customers or employees need clarity on anything at any point in the purchasing journey. Everyone is acting on the same information, which can help keep conversations and other forms of contact with customers on the same page.
4. Speed Up Onboarding for Employees
Over time, employees can build up an encyclopedic knowledge of their role within the team. However, when onboarding a new employee, it can take quite a while for them to build up this expertise. Even when all training has been completed, there can be niche bits of information they don’t realize they need until a lot further down the line and may not know where to look.
Having one knowledge base to direct them towards can help speed up the onboarding process. From filling them in with all the information they need to know, getting used to online electronic signature software, to answering their questions without having to schedule meetings with longer-serving team members, it allows new employees to act autonomously before they ask someone else.
5. Free Up Customer Support
The best use of your ecommerce customer support team will never be constantly answering the same repetitive questions. Like a customer support agent using IVR systems, directing customers to a knowledge base for those frequently asked questions frees up your team to take on the more intricate or nuanced customer cases with care and attention and with a quicker response time.
By reducing the number of tickets or cases your customer support department is dealing with, you can also boost their morale and allow space for more meaningful customer interactions. All of this helps improve the quality of the customer’s experience, increasing customer retention. While this doesn’t seem like a lot, it all helps to prove to your customers that your business is one to keep coming back to.
6. Minimize Costs
By providing all the answers in one place for customers through your knowledge base and other retail CRM software, you don’t need to designate so many resources and budgets to additional customer service employees responding to queries. Instead, you can use these resources elsewhere, helping to promote growth in your company.
By allowing the customers to become your product experts, you also gain more customers through word-of-mouth recommendations. Customers are more likely to recommend something they feel comfortable explaining and sharing with others, so providing the information they need can encourage this. This can help reduce the need for some forms of marketing and boost the number of sales.
7. Reduce Negative Reviews
Chances are, you’ll never completely eradicate negative reviews and comments. However, that doesn’t mean you should give up on keeping them to a bare minimum. A lot of complaints come from poor customer service or waiting too long for a response. The longer a customer waits, the worse their mood is going to be when they finally get to speak to someone, and the lower the chance there is of a positive outcome.
A knowledge base completely cuts out the waiting time and clarifies from the start all returns or delivery policies, product information, or anything else a negative customer may want to dispute. This can also help to back up your responses to complaints, giving you credibility and providing a calm and measured response.
8. Optimize Pages for SEO
By having a comprehensive knowledge base, each page is a small boost for your ecommerce website when it comes to easily find it on a search engine. Keywords and commonly asked questions allow your pages to be found more easily by internet wanderers with similar questions, and by using SEO link building, you can attract more people to your website. The more inter-navigation of your pages, the higher up the search engine suggestions it will be.
Once on your website, having embedded links can help keep visitors there, either suggesting similar topics or directing them to the products and services mentioned. If you’re lucky, this might even lead to a sale. As well as being super handy for those searching for answers, this acts as a new source to attract customers, again helping to grow your customer base and boost ecommerce sales.
Get Your Knowledge Base Up and Running!
Having a knowledge base is not just about getting customers to answer their own questions – it’s about growing your company, using the assets you have available to you wisely, and giving your sales a boost all in one. From answering frequently asked questions to providing specifications, policies, and instructions, your knowledge base can be whatever your company needs it to be. The possibilities really are endless.
Like a workflow builder, the great thing about a knowledge base is that you can keep adding to it and updating it as you find different customer inquiries and as your business develops. It’s a constant work in progress, evolving as your company changes and becoming more useful the more that’s put into it. But, it can’t help you while it’s still an idea in your head – it’s time to get started and set up your ecommerce knowledge base today.
