How to Build a Knowledge Base That Actually Works

Help Desk Software / October 2024

A knowledge base is integral to an organisation’s often overloaded knowledge management ecosystem. Its function is to manage a company’s myriad of knowledge resources and data, enabling customers to access relevant information quickly, share product and service knowledge, avoid duplicated efforts from support teams, and create consistent customer support workflows.

Knowledge base systems have two key objectives. The first is to help weed out expired, redundant, and unused content (referred to as dark data).

The second is to act as a self-service resource for internal and external support, enabling customers to solve issues independently – After all, 70% of customers prefer to solve their own requests.

The Driving Factors For Implementing a Knowledge Base System

A knowledge base impacts the productivity and efficiency of an organisation’s internal and external support teams. It is used by:

• Employees: Answering questions like, “Do men get paternity leave?”
• Teams: Answering questions like, ‘Why is this project behind schedule?”
• Management: Answering questions like: “What was our ROI this quarter?”
• External stakeholders: Answering questions like, ”Who is responsible for unexpected outages affecting production?”
• Clients and customers: Answering questions like, “How do I upgrade to a different subscription plan?”

Depending on the parameters of multiple research surveys, the statistics vary, often significantly, but one thing is clear: the need for knowledge bases that users can access to resolve their problems and answer their queries is increasing.

• Younger consumers (89%) prefer to use a search engine to find answers to their queries before contacting customer service.
• About 70% of customers prefer to use a company’s website to find answers to their queries rather than contact an agent.
• Whether because they’re impatient, like their privacy, or don’t want to look stupid asking questions, 40% of customers prefer self-service over human contact.
• Ninety-one per cent of customers would use an online knowledge base if it fulfilled their needs.

In a Zendesk survey, 53% of respondents said it was important for them to be able to resolve their own service queries rather than rely on customer service representatives. Hubspot research found that 90% of customers want an immediate response (approximately 10 minutes or less) to their customer service questions.

11 Steps For Building a Working Knowledge Base

1. Select a task team to plan your knowledge base system.
2. Identify your audience and their requirements. Your audience may be internal or external, or both.
3. Depending on your audience requirements, your focal point may be showcasing and promoting your business offering and how users benefit from it, providing separate guides for different types of users or products, publishing explanatory articles, or providing step-by-step instructions and videos. Or, all of the above.
4. Choose your knowledge base system. This could be as simple as a link on your website to Google Docs or commercial Knowledge Base Software.
5. Get inspiration from popular knowledge base systems for your interface.
6. Plan and organise your content into sections (categories) and sub-sections (collections).
7. Include essential features like advanced search, live chat, workflows, and feedback.
8. Upload multimedia to reinforce learning and visually illustrate how things work.
9. Test your knowledge base with focus groups.
10. Document your knowledge base system and compile a training guide.
11. Update your knowledge base regularly.

4 Knowledge Base Designs For Inspiration

For inspiration, these knowledge bases tick all the boxes for being aesthetically pleasing, easily navigable, with well-structured content and advanced search capabilities.

1. LiveChat: Reinforces the value of its own business offering; AI-assisted live.

2. Apple: Categorised by product and strongly supported with video.

3. Airbnb: Showcases the use of separate portals for guests, hosts, experience hosts, and travel administrators.

4. Atlassian: Has a sidebar menu for easy navigation on one page.

Easily Find Help Desk Software That Matches Your Customer Support & Service Needs

Real-world Outcomes of Successful Knowledge Base Deployments

A Helpjuice Double Whammy

Helpjuice helped insurance clients Canopy reduce their support tickets by 75% and reduce the onboarding process for new clients from two days to minutes. They also helped Auger, an ISO-accredited engineering firm, to reduce out-of-hours support requests by 80% and onboarding time by 25%.

Xerox’s Eureka Moment

Document360 client Xerox saved millions after implementing its knowledge management system, Eureka. Eureka gave engineers shared access to a database of solutions they all contributed to.

Self-Service Success

Using ProProfs Knowledge Base, Sikt, a leading provider of library services to the education sector in Norway, reduced its customer support load by 50%. The reduction was a result of an increase in the use of self-service options.

Genesys’s Bright Ideas Portal

Genesys is an AI‑powered experience orchestration platform that creates roadmaps to design customer experience journeys. Using Aha! Ideas and Aha! Roadmaps, Genesys created an ideas portal where their clients could share feedback and make suggestions about new features. The result was a 30% reduction in the time taken to help clients create roadmaps for their customers.

What Content Goes Into Building a Self-Service Knowledge Base?

The volume of knowledge content and information assets can be enormous. Around 402.74 million terabytes of data are created daily. Knowledge base content typically includes:

• Confidential documents
• Intellectual property
• Branding guidelines
• Standard workflows and processes
• Software manuals
• Multimedia (like videos, presentations, and audio files)
• Developer specifications
• Employee and customer records
• Web pages
• Legal collateral
• Price lists
• Employee details
• Customer profiles
• Leads
• Supplier details
• Spreadsheets
• Presentations
• Meeting minutes

Specific company departments and groups of users may store information assets specific to their niche. For example, an IT department will need easy access to tools to recover data and analyse network performance.

An example of knowledge content common to all departments is branding guidelines. Created by the marketing department, Knowledge Base Software ensures the current version of a company’s branding guidelines is inviolable, stored centrally, and freely available to anyone who needs it.

Knowledge base content can also depend on what type of knowledge base is used; internal or external.

Internal Knowledge Base Content

• Onboarding and offboarding checklists
• Training material
• Employment policies
• Standard operating procedures (SOPs)
• Security policies
• Company mission, objectives, and cultural values
• Company news and calendar
• Decision-making frameworks
• Team processes and workflows
• Troubleshooting guides
• Product strategies
• Meeting and conference notes
• Market research
• Resource links

External Knowledge Base Content

• Product FAQs
• Installation guides
• Account setup instructions
• Multimedia resources
• Troubleshooting guides
• End-user manuals
• Informative articles and blogs
• Company support and contact details
• Feedback forms
• Step-by-step articles

Benefits of Having a Self-service Knowledge Base

Online knowledge bases enable customers to search for and find answers instead of contacting a company agent. This frees up customer service representatives to provide a more personalised service to customers who have unique or more difficult problems.

These issues could be problems they either can’t resolve themselves or even system bugs.

• Encourages collaboration: Promotes a knowledge-sharing company culture.
• Refines existing knowledge: Customer support agents can update the knowledge base with fresh insights about complex queries and new ways to resolve unique problems.
• 24/7 and remote support: Open for business around the clock, globally.
• Centralises information: Users don’t need to search their repositories of information on their laptops or in emails, and updates never have to be made in different places.
• Increases customer satisfaction: Improves customer retention rates and boosts an organisation’s professional reputation.
• Increases employee job satisfaction: With less pressure to answer mundane and repetitive questions and reinvent the knowledge wheel, employees have an opportunity to be more proactive and focus their talents elsewhere.
• Promotes brand consistency: Ensures a consistent and high standard of content.
• Integrates with popular tools: Organisations can continue using favourite applications. Users may uninstall software installations on their own machines and access external applications through a single knowledge base portal.
• Reduce costs: Reduces the need for dedicated customer service staff.
• Enhances brand credibility: Shows employees and customers your organisation is committed to addressing their needs.
• Supports decision-making: Up-to-date information helps leaders make informed decisions.

Features & Capabilities of Modern Knowledge Base Systems

• Interactive AI support
• Real-time collaboration workspaces
• Document templates for user guides, FAQs, processes, etc.
• Smart search
• Built-in reporting
• Performance analytics and usage reporting
• Automated maintenance and software updates
• Facility for easy content creation
• Integration with existing files
• Integration with external applications, like messaging, email, accounting, ticketing, survey, feedback, and ecommerce services
• Custom branding
• Multi-device compatibility
• Self-service support
• Document version control and tracking
• Multilingual capability
• SEO capabilities to enhance visibility in search engine rankings
• Choice of subscription plans
• Access management
• Security
• Backup and restore

Potential Pitfalls of Implementing a Knowledge Base System

• Bloated feature sets: Installing features the company doesn’t need. For instance, if branding and graphics design are outsourced, weighty design add-ins may be unnecessary.
• Security risks: Failing to implement strict access management policies and security procedures. Confidential documents, intellectual property, and financial records are at risk not only from cybercriminals. Security threats may be internal, sometimes inadvertently. For instance, an employee may download information they should not have access to and then lose their computer.
• Steep learning curves: There may be a learning curve for users to get up to speed with what features are available.
• High maintenance: With large knowledge base systems, a knowledge champion must take on the full-time responsibility of analysing usage and performance reports, confirming automated software updates have been installed successfully, reviewing user feedback, adding or updating content, etc.

The Impact of Gen-AI In Knowledge Base Management

Generative AI is driving the future of Knowledge Base Software. According to the Ipsos Consumer Tracker, people trust AI slightly more (38%) than they trust humans.

Advantages of Generative AI Like ChatGPT

• Helps organisations to transform knowledge from a single source into different formats. For instance, end-user guides can be parsed for different types of information, like lists of error codes, installation instructions for support teams, product overviews for sales and marketing, and FAQs. And vice versa. Generative AI can draft knowledge articles from existing documentation, from support tickets to message content.
• Helps users innovate faster by creating first drafts, even from a limited number of bullet-pointed prompts.
• Identifies knowledge gaps where responses to AI queries produce low or no results.
• Can translate and personalise content and has built-in grammar and spelling features.

Disadvantages of Generative AI

• Potential security risks if confidential information is not secured
• May require fact-checking, particularly if using dubious information resources
• Potential data bias inherent in its algorithms
• Absence of tacit knowledge and critical thinking

FAQs

What’s the Difference Between a Knowledge Base and Knowledge Base Software?

Knowledge management is an approach to achieving organisational objectives by making the best use of knowledge assets. Knowledge bases and Knowledge Base Software are sub-categories of knowledge management, a framework for making the best use of knowledge assets.

Sometimes used interchangeably, there is a subtle difference between the terms knowledge base and Knowledge Base Software.

Knowledge bases are repositories of information. Knowledge Base Software is any tool an organisation uses to create, store, track the use of, share, distribute, optimise, and manage knowledge resources.

For instance, a company may build a database of resources for the use of a sales team. Specialist Knowledge Base Software, like a customer relationship manager (CRM), can be used to manage this sales collateral.

What Are the Different Types of Knowledge Base Systems?

• Document management systems (DMSs)
• Content management systems (CMSs)
• Messaging and collaboration platforms
• Intranets and internal Wikis
• Web portals
• Learning management systems (LMSs)
• Access management solutions

Can Customer Support Centres Use a Knowledge Base?

Yes, Customer Support Centres Need Knowledge Base Software. Research suggests AI and automation will be the driving force behind the most successful customer service centres. It’s already happening.

Microsoft, for instance, is embedding ChatGPT in all its enterprise products. And there are few knowledge base portals and help desks that don’t already offer AI-supported assistance.
The bad news is that even the most currently successful customer support teams can’t rest on their laurels. The good news is that in time to come knowledge bases will maintain themselves.