Reduced customer service workload
The most basic (and most obvious) advantage of having an FAQ system is so your customer service agents don’t need to spend their time answering the same questions over and over again. It’s boring, but worse than that it wastes time and energy that could be spent attending to more complex issues.
Providing a self-service option for customers immediately reduces the number of customer service tickets that come in over the phone lines, through email, or on Twitter. You might even be able to shrink your customer service department and instead hire someone to fix those problems that come up time after time.
Increased customer empowerment and satisfaction
One of the top implications of advances in technology, especially communications technology, is that people today don’t want to wait for anything, ever. This is especially true in customer service, where you might be surprised at how quickly even a short delay can turn one of your current or potential customers into the competition’s customer instead. An accessible knowledgebase that allows customers to solve their own problems quickly and easily can increase their feelings of empowerment and engender more positive feelings toward your company.
Increased productivity across all departments
By some estimates, the average employee spends close to 40% of his or her time looking for information. 40%! That’s almost two days out of every week spent just searching for things. FAQ software can speed up the search process so employees can stop wasting so much time and instead devote their energy to revenue-generating activities. Incidentally, creating an environment where employees spend less time on busywork and more time on meaningful work is a surefire way to increase their job satisfaction as well.
Centralized knowledge repository
Speaking of wasting time, how many times have you written out the same standard operating procedures for different departments or had to email the same training documents to different members of your organization? These individual actions may seem small, but over time, the minutes spent rewriting procedures and sending repetitive emails can really add up. Keeping all of your documents in a centralized repository enables easier access, sharing, and reuse of knowledge resources across an entire company.
Enhanced access control
There may be times when you need to restrict who has access to various knowledge resources. For example, you may have a public knowledgebase for your customers and a private one for your employees, or you may have some documents that are for upper management’s eyes only. FAQ software includes password protections and other privacy features that enable you to control who has access to your documents, as well as to track who is using them.
What all of these advantages add up to is a more streamlined and more secure process for managing the collective knowledge in your organization. In today’s knowledge economy, nothing could be more essential to the continued growth of your business, and your bottom line.
Author: Sameer Bhatia is founder & CEO of ProProfs.com, a leading provider of Elearning tools for building, testing, and applying knowledge. Through its knowledge base software, ProProfs empowers HRs, sales representatives, trainers and company’s top management to easily manage employee and organizational knowledge. Sameer Bhatia has a background in technology with a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and is an ed-tech industry veteran. You can find Sameer Bhatia on Google+ and Twitter.
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