Building A Dynamic Knowledge Center For Your Software Website
By creating a knowledge center for your customers, you build a warehouse of stellar solutions to their problems. Here's how you can make a knowledge center.
1. Knowing Your Audience
The first step towards putting in place a stellar knowledge center is knowing your target audience. Your efforts can never be fruitful if you don't know the needs of your customers. While determining your target audience, it’s advantageous if you think not only of your customers but your software company’s staff as well.
Once you've researched your target audience, it's time to look at their requirements and determine your customers' and employees' expectations from your software company. Your customer representatives who are in frequent contact with your customers can tell you about the most common queries of your customers.
Look at the frequently asked questions, the software department that is mainly referred to by customers, and other valuable resources for content to add to your knowledge center.
An overwhelming 91% of customers said they would use an online knowledge center if available and tailored to their needs. Use this knowledge to plan content that is bespoke and is tailored to your customer's needs.
2. Determining The Type Of Knowledge Centers For Software Website
Once you've done your research on your target audience and their needs, it's time you start considering different types of knowledge centers around. Go for the kind that provides the most value to your customers and employees. 51% of customers prefer technical support through a knowledge center. Don’t disappoint these customers by choosing the wrong type of knowledge center.
While determining the type of knowledge center that best suits your software company and customers, you need to consider several factors. These factors include the target audience, the accessibility to the general public, and your knowledge center hosting source.
Types of knowledge centers include:
- Internal knowledge center – A knowledge center designed exclusively for your employees.
- Hosted knowledge center – A knowledge center that stores and collects easy-to-access information that is of use to your internal and external stakeholders.
- Self-hosted knowledge center – A knowledge center hosted on your software website's server.
- Customer knowledge center – A knowledge center designed especially for your customers and is very accessible and easy to use.
- Open-source knowledge center - Open-source knowledge center software can be helpful if your organization wants to allow developers or programmers to customize the source code according to business needs.
- External knowledge center – A knowledge center with resources and information that is public, and anyone can view it.
3. Developing The Infrastructure For Your Knowledge Center
While designing your knowledge center, you should be careful about its architecture and design. It should have a neat and organized flow of information.
It would be best if you enriched your software knowledge center with quality content that is easily accessible by your target audience. Your knowledge center must interact with your customers in an intuitive fashion that is unmatched by other software companies.
A well-organized self-service knowledge center may assist you in increasing client fulfillment and retention, which will improve your profitability. 54% of companies offering web or mobile self-service have seen an increase in their website traffic. A good structure of your knowledge center helps you achieve that.
You can organize your knowledge structure around your customer types, the activities of your software company, and the type of your software. 36% of customers say companies should improve their search functionality and website usability. Knowledge centers with search boxes to entertain queries can help you achieve that.
4. Enriching Your Knowledge Center With Strong Content
When you've organized and done your homework on developing a knowledge center, you're all set to gear your knowledge center with valuable content for your software customers.
The content that you've added to your knowledge center should be easy to access and tailored around your user's needs. 55% of consumers fall in love with a brand when that brand offers easy access to information and support. Use your content to provide value to the customers and make it known to the customers that your software company cares about its customers.
Your content should be easy to understand, to the point, and free of any technical jargon and complex words. The resources should have content that is not monotonous and is easy to read. Keep your paragraphs short and use heading and subheadings where necessary to enhance the readability of your content.
You might also consider using graphics and other visual aids to make your knowledge centers engaging for the user. Ensure you include links to other valuable content that the readers may find helpful in your knowledge centers. This has the added benefit of generating organic traffic to your website and boosts your website's SEO.
5. Keeping Your Content Up-To-Date
You're done with creating an exemplary knowledge center; GREAT! But this isn't the end. You need always to keep the content and software information resources up-to-date in your knowledge center. 70% of customers prefer to use a company's website to get answers to their questions rather than use phone or email. Make sure your knowledge center provides value to your customers by keeping your content updated at all times.
You should update your knowledge center based on the changing needs of your software customers. Look at how they view your information and what else they expect from your software company. Use these findings to make your knowledge center even more helpful for your target audience. Updating your content frequently also makes Google rank your website; this helps drive traffic to it.
Final Thoughts
Planning, designing, and putting an incredible knowledge center in place can be an arduous task, but it's not impossible. Once you've done all the hard work, your efforts will most definitely pay off. Knowledge centers have the benefit of retaining customers by providing solutions to their problems relating to your software in an easily accessible fashion. The cherry on top – they also help in boosting the SEO of your software website.