It is likely that the first company to use a knowledge base for its customers popularly was Apple Inc.
It was around the late 90s when they launched support.apple.com to help customers solve problems on their own. We believe that this was a significant step in the field of customer empowerment and it was obvious for other consumer brands to follow suit.
Two decades later, customer behavior has changed quite a lot. People are spending more time on the internet than television.
A lot of this time is spent researching the perfect products to purchase. For low ticket purchases, Amazon is the preferred medium. But for high value, less frequent purchases (like financial services or university admissions), company websites are the hangout zones.
Brands are outcompeting each other in designing websites that make people take purchase decisions immediately. The next new trend is personalization, allowing every visitor to see a different version of the website according to their location, behavior and source of arrival.
So what does the future look like?
The future of personalization is in your company’s knowledge base. Merely writing support content and tucking it away in a separate page is not gonna help any customer take a purchase decision. Support content should be available on every page, contextually and intelligently. So that every user can find the information they want, as quickly as possible.
A personalized knowledge base can make users take purchase decisions quicker – using a simple hack.
A call-to-action button .
A CTA button after every article will guide users about what to do next. Something like “Buy Now”, “Start Free Trial”, “Check your score” or “Apply Now”.
I’m excited to announce that we have added “Call To Action” as a prominent feature in Airim. When you are editing an article for your customers, you can add a webpage link or a contact form as a button. This button will be shown just below the answer in a widget.
Have you tried it yet? If not, test it for free on your Airim Content Manager.