How to start building your Knowledge Base in Dynamics 365 Customer Service?

Your team needs to move their focus from simply working through the case load in front of them in Dynamics 365 Customer Service to creating the Knowledge Base to help create a shift in culture.

This notable culture and working change need to come from the top and feed down, but if the down embrace and drive benefit up the chain too, how good is that? Importantly, though, to all of this, employees need to feel like they are being given the time required and that it is not just an extra pressure or extra workload – that difficult fine balance eh?

This means you as an employer/manager/team leader need to give them the scope to be able to do this without expecting them to do extra work in the same amount of time.

You may experience short term productivity decreases as cases take slightly longer to resolve whilst there is no answer in the Knowledge Base to resolve them, but as it grows that time will shift the other way, and you will start to see greater efficiency once there is an answer readily available.

Understand that this will not be an overnight shift, but a gradual one over the space of several months. It’s a long-term vision, that in reality you will think, why didn’t we do this before?

Coming up with a solid plan

Get your team to come up with a plan (get the buy in). Create a list of things in order of priority that need to be added in and written up.

It is not going to help getting the most obscure issues written up first, as your team will not start to see any benefit from using the Knowledge Base and will feel it is a waste of time building it.

Give the most skilled people in that area the responsibility and time to write the article.

The best place to start is to find out what the most common issues are that your organisation faces.

You can do this by reviewing your case load, and while these would be a good place to start and should top the list, ask your employees.

Ask the people that answer the phone to your customers.

Chances are there will be ‘quick 5 minute’ questions that they can just answer over the phone that don’t even get logged. Think of it this way though, if you get 20 of these ‘quick 5 minute’ calls a day and you can halve this, that is almost an hour saved. That is 5 hours a week, 20 hours a month.

It might not seem like much, but then you start to add in the ones that aren’t quick 5-minute calls. The ones where your team have to type out an email with detailed instructions or an explanation that can take 10 minutes. Would it not be better for one person to write these out once, and then everyone else be able to copy them?

Better yet, would it not be better to be able to refer your client to a webpage with these instructions on, and maybe even related answers to questions they haven’t even thought of yet?

Empower your employees

So, when you start, get your employees to think of the knowledge base. Give them ownership of it and empower them to build it. This is to help them and make their lives easier just as much as it for the business.

Tell them instead of writing the instructions in an email, check the knowledge base and if they don’t exist, write them in there.

Give them the time to take extra care to write, read and re-read what they have written to ensure that it is precise and concise.

If there is an article already in there, but they think something is missing or something can be expanded on, encourage them to work collaboratively with the original author to expand out the article and decide if the additional information should be added to the existing article, or if it should be an article in its own right.

Before long, you will find that you have the start of a healthy-looking knowledge base and the next time someone is on holiday and a query comes in, another employee has instructions on how to deal with it.

Give them time. Time to think of the best way to explain them, and time to write it. And make sure that you are supporting them in the time they are investing in your organisation by providing them with the infrastructure for it to be worthwhile.

Lastly and most importantly, accept that is will never be ‘finished’. There are always new issues, always new questions that no one has thought of before, always new ways of solving a problem that are better.

Treat it like an ever-evolving thing, upon which to build the foundation of your Customer Service. Can you afford to put this off any longer?

Want to learn more about Dynamics 365 CRM? On Tuesday 10th March, we are hosting a Customer Workshop - How to make the most of reporting within Dynamics 365 CRM? We hope to see you there!