Oana Elena Florea, Customer Support ManagerAs the health crisis has impacted businesses all around the globe, service companies face the challenge of keeping customer satisfaction as high as possible and reducing the risk of churn. Improving the tools that help deliver the best possible services should be mandatory for each remote team's internal roadmap. Here are some best practices we use at XWiki that produce immediate results.
Create a public knowledge base for the customers with the most common questions
When we launched our XWiki Cloud offer in 2016, we quickly came to realize there is a need for our customers to have access to a knowledge base with common questions and answers. We have created the XWiki Help Center as the go-to place for basic cloud questions, service FAQs and tips and tricks for XWiki and its apps.
Build an internal knowledge base for speedy answers
Most companies put a lot of effort into building a section on their website to host a knowledge base for customers that usually lists the most common questions and answers. Creating an internal knowledge base for the support agents can be sometimes overlooked even if it has multiple benefits:
- Increased productivity not only for the support agents but for anyone working on the customer success team
- Avoiding corporate amnesia
- Enabling better, faster decision making and optimization of resources
Internal knowledge bases are key to reducing the response time from support. Some of the information we keep in our support wiki which helps us deliver speedy answers:
- Draft product questions before they can be published on the external knowledge base
- Private client information and procedures (e.g. warnings when service interruptions are allowed)
- Very specific infrastructure details, everything that is outside of the standard processes
- Summary of the previous interventions or interactions with the customer
- Links to dedicated procedures
Here is a glimpse at our support knowledge base which has been build using XWiki and AppWithinMinutes:
We have used scripting and skin extensions to adapt the application to our needs:
- We added a list of fields that reflects our domain: client name, status, type of contract, start date, end date, XWiki platform version, etc. The livetable helps us easily search and categorize our client list: how many active clients we have, how many per level, which contract expired, etc
- We added custom CSS on top of the skin to personalize the look and feel of the application
- We have a yearly update on the field values to reflect our current offers (e.g. the different levels of Support, the types of contracts we provide, etc)
Constantly improve your communication templates
We have also created a simple XWiki application with AppWithinMinutes to store the most common communication templates. We use mostly English and French to communicate with our customers and creating templates save us time by not having to compose every new message from scratch.
Creating a public knowledge base with the most common questions from customers, building an internal knowledge base for speedy answers and constantly improving your communication templates are three best practices that help provide better customer support for remote teams.
