Ever thought about how powerful external API’s can be in super-powering your knowledge base?
Sounds crazy, but it’s actually a huge advantage in today’s business world where knowledge bases are hard to keep up to date and get sufficient feedback on when users rather call customer support than reading written content online.
I started googling around and thinking about how API’s from other companies can be used in creative ways as an advantage for knowledge bases.
The results were rather baffling – and I’ll gladly share them with you below!
Let the User SPEAK to the KB!
We all loved it when ‘Google Now’ implemented the voice search option into their engine – it frankly made a lot of lives easier. Now, what if we could do the same for a knowledge base?
This Web Speech API will do the job for you in a super short amount of time.
Providing the option to speak your question will reduce ‘typing’ to being merely an option and not a necessity. This is especially effective if customers are accessing your knowledge base through tablets or smartphones because typing takes significantly longer on those devices.
Imagine how much this would help those extra annoyed customers who are looking to get an answer ‘NOW’: The voice option has completely ridden them of the duty to punch those tiny keyboard letters with their index fingers, making sure they spelled everything correctly and finally hitting the search button.
All that has to be done is to implement the voice function of the Web Speech API into your knowledge base search bar and you’re good to go!
Using voice instead of typing has MANY advantages – and this is especially true for the next point.
Make an Apple-Like Call Center by using Twilio With Your KB!
Calling customer service pretty much sucks in general and the number one enemy is time. It just takes too long.
You ask the employee to help you with something, he searches for it for god knows how long and then comes back with a maybe-good answer.
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What Twilio does, is that it goes around the middle man, speaks to the KB and gives you the answer directly. So instead of going through a call rep, why not get the answer right away?
It basically allows you to have an automated call center once it’s integrated into your knowledge base. Think of it like “Siri” but for finding and delivering answers to a knowledge base within a split second!
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No more calling an employee who will sit there punching his keyboard like there’s no tomorrow, find an answer (or not), fetch it and finally get back to you – when you can communicate with an automated voice service that will do it for you more direct and significantly faster.
Rid your customers of the time hassle and consider going full-Apple on them by implementing Twilio!
Use ‘Delighted’ To Find Your Most Critical Users In Need Of Help!
Speaking of annoyed and angry customers: How exactly do we know what bothers them? How do we fix it? How do we improve it?
Usually, if we wanted to get feedback of such sorts – we would have to wait weeks and weeks for the customer to read the e-mail we send them, MAYBE they read it, even less MAYBE do they reply to it – we review it and find what we can do to make the service better; it’s a nightmare!
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Of course, there are other ways of doing it. At HelpJuice, for example, we can gather feedback at the end of every article in the KB by asking the standard question “Was This Article Helpful?”.
But what if, instead, we could send the customers one survey question that’s simple and straight forward – get an answer within a few seconds and have it all automatically organized on a dashboard? Delighted makes it all happen and you need to have 0 knowledge of tech to make it happen.
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The keyword here is once again: Time.
But this time, it barely exists. You send a question, you receive an answer: It’s that simple. It’s in the favor of the customer, as they understand they can help out a lot by simply answering to a one-question survey.
It’s in the favor of the company because whatever quick feedback they need for something that can potentially make a big difference for their customers – it can be handed to them swiftly and smoothly in an organized manner.
Another reason this option is better than the standard “Was This Article Helpful” is because, for the prior, the feedback is a one-time thing basically. But with Delighted, you have all your users saved and organized in a way that you can easily get back to them over e-mail thanking them for their time and asking them for further feedback!
So have consideration for the customers in critical need of help and listen to them faster than ever before with this service!
Quick Summary
In today’s competitive world, it’s all about hacking downtime as much as possible for the customers. In this case, searching with your voice, using an automated voice service or identifying your most critical users in order to help them as fast as possible are just some of the many tools out there to super-boost your knowledge base in creative ways.
So consider implementing some of these wonderful external API’s if you want to launch your KB to the moon and beyond!
PS: Any external API’s on your mind at the moment that could add to the magic of a knowledge base? Share below!
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