Knowledge bases and FAQ pages play a role of the first aid for the customers and users of your website as soon as they have a doubt, question or an issue. Now, let’s compare them on the example of Freshdesk and Freshservice knowledge base.
The FAQ section usually aims at new visitors of your website, who are just getting around with your product and services. Therefore, it consists of the very first and most basic questions that run in the minds of potential customers when they are facing something new. The actual customers and users already know the answers to these questions and usually have different issues and an entirely new scope of more comprehensive questions.
As a result, FAQ pages provide a brief overview of your business by clarifying the basics, whereas the knowledge bases play a more important role to your existing customers and even to your support team. Professional support centers offload your agents by taking care of the most common requests, decrease the number of tickets and allow users to find answers to the complex questions themselves. Hence, having a fine-tuned knowledge base like Freshdesk or Freshservice offer will enable your staff to focus on individual cases requiring human participation.
Info Categorization
Good knowledge bases are rich for helpful articles and guidelines on different topics and categories. Therefore, smart categorization like Freshdesk and Freshservice support centers offer are crucial for the user to find the answers and learn more features about your business quickly and easily. While the knowledge bases have numerous levels of info architecture, the FAQ sections list all information on a single page. It is one of the most significant differences between these “tools”.
Search Box
A search box is an absolute must for knowledge bases, whereas the FAQ pages usually don’t have it, considering the limited scope of information listed in this section. Searchability of the articles is one of the critical criteria of a quality support center and one of the most significant distinctions of the FAQ page at the same time.
Reporting tools
No business will progress far without analytics and metrics that allow you to see a complete picture. Unfortunately, the FAQ pages don’t have anything of their own, as they are rather a part of the main website. On the other side, the analytics offered by Freshdesk and Freshservice knowledge bases provide you with more profound insights in the form of reports about your weak and strong points, users’ activities and give you a choice of such metrics as ticket lifecycles analysis, team workload, customer satisfaction ratings, etc.
User Experience
The experience of your customers with a knowledge base and an FAQ page is entirely different. If we can look at the FAQ section as a single page of a website, the knowledge base is a website on its own. For example, Freshdesk and Freshservice support centers offer customers relevant solutions based on the request while the customer is creating a ticket.
Conclusion
When it comes to comparison of opportunities that an FAQ page and a knowledge base can offer, then the second one can be treated as a multi-purpose tool, which helps customers improve themselves and lowers the number of tickets for your support team. Furthermore, it can improve many indicators including customer experience and target actions. However, simple integration of the knowledge base without optimization doesn’t make any sense. You should treat it seriously.
If you want to have a quality support center that goes in alignment with your website regarding its look and feel for your audience, user-friendliness, corporate style, and other elements, you need to customize your Freshdesk or Freshservice knowledge base. The fastest way to do it is to get in touch with an official Freshworks partner, who knows all aspects related to design, technical tricks and possible hidden barriers.