Why Confluence?

In our everyday interactions with existing and prospective customers, we have often encountered a general misunderstanding or downright lack of knowledge in what Confluence is.

This collaborative wiki tool by Atlassian ensures a better workflow by enabling everyone to create, organize and edit documents and various data all in one place. Exchanging and editing via Google Docs, e-mail or different file-sharing programs leaves probability of errors, whereas Confluence allows for commenting, editing and tracking progress by various people all at once.

But even more important, Confluence helps share knowledge – even outside of the work team. That’s how this collaborative tool could turn Service Desk into a Self-Service Desk.

To do so, you should first buy a license for Confluence and start working with it to get the basics of creating content. Then simply set up Confluence as a knowledge base so Service Desk customers can serve themselves – by following the steps here.

Why is this pairing bound to help?

First of all, because no matter how different Service Desk customers are, a fair portion of their questions are the same. Troubles with logging in or a forgotten password are more common than you might expect.

And while these issues are simple enough to deal with quickly, they take up valuable time that could be used by Service Desk agents to tackle more serious requests. But now you can allow the agents to write down a specific answer to a common question only once – in Confluence.

When Confluence and Service Desk are linked, customers will see a large search box, inviting them to Find a Solution. By typing in a sentence or just a few keywords, instead of raising a request, customers will get access to one or more Confluence articles detailing on the possible solutions.

Even if customers disregard the search box and go straight for the Request form, Confluence articles are automatically suggested when they begin typing their requests.

How can you improve the self-service?

Simple – by writing numerous helpful articles that cover a large spectrum of already known issues. It’s even better if you manage to prepare most of these articles beforehand, so that customers may not raise requests for the simplest obstacles they run into.

You should also take time to monitor and understand how your audience is responding to your knowledge base articles. Do so by regularly checking out the knowledge base insights which graphically depict how articles were used during a specific period of time.