Building knowledge base for company in e-commerce industry

From the beginning of the cooperation, that is, from 2015, we have carried out a number of projects for the company including customer service processes, sale of advertising spaces, and partner programs. The described project focused on building an internal knowledge base. In practice, it was supposed to be divided into two separate bases – the first one was for the Customer Experience (CX) team, and the second one for all employees.

The company had used a knowledge base before; however, our task was not to refresh it, but build a new tool from scratch. One of the biggest challenges was the project scale: it required migrating old content, that is, several thousand articles to a newly built knowledge base without losing the articles’ unique elements, such as collapsible sections, linked videos, and pictures.

The most important objective for the CX team was to enable consultants to work with one tool. It was supposed to make the articles available in one place where the consultants handle orders. To make sure that the knowledge base addresses the CX team’s needs, we implemented the following functionalities:

• displaying articles related to the topic of a currently handled order,
• monitoring and reporting user’s activity, that is, their interests in specific articles,
• default filtering – presenting content to an employee of a specific team.

Another area that required particular attention was to make the comment system commonly used in the whole organization more efficient. The customer wanted to have a possibility of responding to comments directly under the articles. We also wanted to collect service data (that is, information on issues, incidents, and introduced changes) in one place. Thanks to an ongoing update of this data, agents would have knowledge of the service state (for example, the reason why the number of orders increased for a given partner). Ultimately, it was important that the tool could be developed easily, and above all, it could be upgraded with new features.

The implementation supported, above all, the service of issue resolution – it is faster and easier to handle. The knowledge base also enabled faster onboarding of new employees, distribution of information on new technological changes among all employees, and service of inquiries regarding those changes.

The most important benefits of the implementation are as follows:

• faster resolution of issues,
• reporting employees’ activities (it gives a possibility of reviewing whether an employee became familiar with a mandatory and required article),
• faster implementation of changes and response to current needs,
• an organized process of entering articles – permissions and implementation stages,
• responding to employees’ inquiries is more efficient – conducted on Community,
• access to knowledge is based on preferences.

Among the most important improvements available for the knowledge base users, we can mention the following:

Four ways of article searching by:

• entering an article title or a phrase from the article title in the search bar
• clicking a category on the home page
• clicking the “all news” button in the “the latest articles” section
• clicking the “all news” option in the “the latest changes” section

Two ways of content filtering:

• On the articles list page, there is a division into sections; by default, an employee can see content from the area in which they work,
• A user can independently change the area by clicking the area name. Additionally, there is an option of sorting articles, for example, by selecting the “to read” filter option, an employee can see bolded articles they have not read yet. Sorting can also be narrowed down to a specific area, for example, delivery and return. Articles are displayed in a chronological order starting with the most recent one. There are options of marking a given article as “favorites“ or “to read”, reviewing them, and addressing specific users in the comments section. It is also possible to report an error in the text by writing directly to the article author.

Employee Community has proved itself as an internal knowledge base for the company’s employees. The implementation of the Salesforce knowledge base improved the efficiency of solving issues.

Launching a new knowledge base was accompanied by video tutorials. They were made available for employees along with the new tool. The tutorials present the capabilities of the knowledge base and provide a user-friendly guide on how to use the tool.