If you’ve ever had a tough time finding specific company or product information as a customer or an employee, then you see the value of a knowledge base. Customer-facing knowledge hubs are particularly popular right now with rising customer expectations and the exploding demand for self-service. Globally 61% of customers prefer self-service options for simple issues. In the US alone, that number rises to 88% of customers expecting digital self-service portals.
In this article we’ll break down the different types of knowledge bases and their features, so you can determine which one best suits your needs. Still not sure if a knowledge base is a necessity for your company? We’ll also outline the benefits and explain why this tool is essential for modern businesses.
Definition of a Knowledge Base
First let’s clarify any confusion by answering the question “What is a knowledge base?”. A knowledge base is a self-service digital library that hosts information about a company, its products or services, and industry-related subjects. This includes all types of information such as FAQs, articles, how-to guides, glossaries, video demonstrations, and more. Knowledge bases are akin to help centers or resource hubs. They aim to gather, organize, and deliver content for the purpose of helping customers and employees easily find answers to any question.
Importance of a Knowledge Base in Modern Businesses
Companies need to provide helpful information to diverse users. Industry leaders know that gathering and storing the content in one dedicated space makes content discovery easy. This is why a knowledge base is key. In a world where 81% of IT leaders say data silos are holding back their companies, knowledge bases allow companies to provide a better customer and employee experience. From a rising demand for self-service to high employee training costs and unavoidable content silos, knowledge base software is essential for providing a competitive user experience.
Types of Knowledge Bases
When deciding how to build your knowledge base, it’s important to consider what it will be used for. Who are your users? What level of content do they need?
Internal Knowledge Bases
An internal knowledge base is a centralized platform of company content. This database is available to employees, and it serves as a valuable resource to search for product or corporate information. It includes anything relevant to the daily lives of employees or that can help them perform their jobs better. This includes content such as onboarding documents, customer insights, training materials, technical documentation, and information on business units.
Creating an internal knowledge base reduces personnel costs and enhances the employee experience. With 47% of companies reporting infrastructure access challenges as a core difficulty for onboarding employees, organizations must invest in solutions that improve access to scattered resources. Moreover, businesses report that new hires spend more than 12 hours each week asking other employees for help. With a knowledge base, they can find answers easily, allowing all employees to focus on their priorities.
External Knowledge Bases
External knowledge bases are similar to internal knowledge bases, but the audience is different. These external hubs are for customers, partners and the public. They combine content into a single source of truth where users can access documentation how and when they want. The goal is to help clients make the most of your products, to share tutorials and learning resources with customers, and to enable users to easily find information, whether they require an installation guide or a product comparison brochure. By providing valuable information and responding to user questions, you offer a better customer experience and reduce the number of new support tickets.
Key Features of an Effective Knowledge Base
To maximize the benefits of a successful knowledge base, there are certain functionalities to keep in mind when selecting a tool. What makes certain features critical for business? Look for components that enhance the information delivery experience and that facilitate seamless knowledge sharing.
User-Friendly Interface
A user-friendly interface is an essential element of any knowledge base. Different tools have different levels of design autonomy and branding. For example, Fluid Topics’ page designer allows companies to customize and style their knowledge base with a WYSIWYG editor and various “drag and drop” components. This allows them to create different home pages and landing pages, personalize layouts, branding and other design elements in full autonomy.
As a result, prospects and customers have access to a familiar knowledge base that becomes an extension of your brand.
Advanced Search Functionality
Ineffective site search puts you at a competitive disadvantage. In an AI-powered world, people expect a Google-like experience when it comes to searching your knowledge base. Different types of knowledge base software have varying search abilities. The two main types are keyword search and semantic search.
- Keyword Search: This type of search is based on the specific words that users type in their query. The search engine retrieves all documents from the knowledge base that contain one or several of the keywords in the query.
- Semantic Search: This search technique goes beyond keyword search. It uses the power of natural language understanding and machine learning to determine the intent and contextual meaning of the words a person is using in their query. This process provides highly relevant and contextual information in the search results.
Globally leading knowledge solutions will include both search options to optimize results for users based on their contextual needs.
SEO Capabilities
Digital knowledge bases can help generate organic traffic and boost the results rankings of your documents. To do this, the content hub must be optimized for search engines like Google and Bing. With features like custom metadata options, your knowledge base will help search engine bots crawl and index your content.
AI Support Assistant
Enhance knowledge base search tools with Generative AI (GenAI) to turn a normal quest for information into a conversational experience. Users enter their questions in natural language into a self-service chatbot or search bar interface and automatically receive accurate responses.
Similarly, support agents can use this technology integrated into their help desk platform to generate clear, relevant answers to customer questions. This augmented support agent cuts ticket handling time and allows support agents to focus on more complex issues.
AI-Powered Reader Experience
Knowledge base content needs to be detailed and comprehensive to promote strong product adoption. Your knowledge base should complement and highlight the quality of your content. Integrating GenAI capabilities into your knowledge base creates a unique reading experience and is a great way to launch new AI projects.
Solutions like Fluid Topics allow companies to configure and customize AI prompts to create a set of unique features for users. Design queries for the model that generate content summaries, step-by-step instructions, code translations into other languages, lists of tools for on-site interventions, product quizzes for knowledge teams, and more. Then integrate these features into your knowledge base in the form of buttons so users can extract distinct types of information when reading a specific piece of content.
Out-of-the-box Integration
There are must-have features for the back end too! Easy integration is key for product adoption. For writing teams, find solutions with ready-to-use connectors for content sources and tools such as Paligo, Ixiasoft, RWS, Heretto, other CCMS, and GitHub repositories. Platforms like Fluid Topics allow you to easily integrate all types of files into the knowledge base including Word and PDF documents.
Additionally, knowledge bases can be free-standing portals or integrated into existing applications for seamless information enrichment. For example, integrate your knowledge base directly into your CRM to ensure support agents have access to the content. That way, they can quickly solve user problems without having to switch back and forth between tools. To facilitate this ease of access, your solution should adhere to an API-first architecture.
Access Control Management
Companies often deal with privacy and content governance issues. User authorization controls are crucial for ensuring that users have access to the content they need, yet not to any confidential information they aren’t privy to. Choose a knowledge solution that allows you to define the scope of access and usage at a granular level to make sure people have access to the right product information and protect confidential content.
Analytics and Reporting
Access content and user analytics to determine if your knowledge base features are helping your users interact with your content more efficiently.
- Documentation trends: Identify the most popular content and search terms to prioritize content work. Look at the least-read content to discover which topics aren’t as critical for users. Are they less popular due to a lack of questions on the topic or because users search for different keywords?
- Content findability: With keyword analytics, see what customers search for. If they use different terms than those in the content, enhance your knowledge base with new metadata, taxonomies, and synonyms. This will improve your content findability and usefulness.
- No-results searches: Identify content gaps with “Searches with no results”. When results are lacking, documentation teams need to produce or update content.
- Ticket deflections: When content is easy to find, engaging to read, and complete with details, customers resolve problems on their own. With ticket deflection metrics, calculate customer support savings generated by your content.
Content Audits and Refreshes
Your analytics dashboards and content metrics are helpful tools that form the basis of knowledge management audits. Occasionally, it is beneficial to review your knowledge base content accuracy and relevance, particularly for the most popular search queries. Monitoring your content quality ensures that users continuously benefit from your product information.
Maintenance and Updates
There are several tools and resources available for your content teams to determine priorities when updating content.
- User feedback: Include features that allow users to interact with content in your knowledge base to embrace continuous content improvement. Whether it’s a 5-star rating or a tip to improve content, direct user feedback is invaluable. This communication allows you to collaboratively build a successful content experience.
- Product updates: When an updated version of your product is released it’s a good moment to review past content (“no search results” metrics, most common queries, most popular content…). Reviewing this feedback as your teams prepare documentation ensures they optimize the latest content according to user needs and patterns.
- Support tickets: Product documentation and support teams must collaborate to optimize the customer experience. By reviewing the main concerns addressed in help tickets, documentation teams can optimize their content to provide solutions for users more clearly.
Benefits of Implementing a Knowledge Base for Your Company
A well-organized knowledge base with comprehensive content and reader engagement features has invaluable benefits for businesses. Access to information helps your company provide better services to customers and onboarding to employees. Here are just four of the core ways knowledge management systems positively impact organizations.
Centralized Information Repository
Building a knowledge base is a valuable opportunity to create a unified repository of product information. Tools like Fluid Topics transform your content from any source and any format into a smart knowledge center. The key is to find a solution that continuously ingests documentation from across authoring and content management tools, files systems, PLM, PIM, and more, to make your content available from a central location. The result is a modern and seamless content experience.
Improved Customer Self-Service
With information readily available and easy to find thanks to advanced search features, customers can use knowledge bases as self-service platforms. Knowledge base features make it easy for users to sift through comprehensive information to extract key information quickly and efficiently. Plus, unlike traditional customer support channels, self-service platforms are available 24/7 to help users find answers whenever they need them.
Simultaneously, higher rates of self-service mean support agents have more time to focus on helping users with more complex problems. As a result, level 2 and 3 problems also experience improved customer service indirectly from knowledge bases.
Enhanced Employee Productivity
The working time of technical writers is highly valuable. Between new versions rapidly deploying and businesses expanding globally, there is never a shortage of new content needed. When a knowledge base functions as a single source of truth, technical writers don’t need to spend time alleviating the issues caused by content silos. Instead, they can focus their productivity on writing and updating content to continuously feed the knowledge platform.
Reduced Training Time and Costs
Knowledge bases with advanced search engines make it easier than ever to find specific information. This is important since onboarding processes are often overwhelming for new hires. With the amount of information employees need to learn to do their jobs well, an organized knowledge hub is a profitable investment. On average, companies spent $954 on training new hires across industries in 2023. Knowledge systems allow employees in training to work at a higher capacity by accessing the shared knowledge of their colleagues.
How to Implement and Manage a Knowledge Base
You already have plenty of content available to construct your knowledge base. Therefore, you don’t need an outline of how to develop a knowledge content strategy. Rather, let’s look at what tool will centralize that valuable, existing content into a single source of truth.
For companies with content ready to go that just want to transform it into a knowledge base, a Content Delivery Platform (CDP) is the best way to go. CDPs are software solutions that gather product knowledge from any source and in any format. Then, they unify the content into a central knowledge hub and make the information available to various endpoints via Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs.
CDPs are ready-to-use and efficient at providing accurate, helpful content for end users on the devices and at the touch points of their choosing.
Future Trends in Knowledge Management
Looking ahead, the largest trend that will continue to impact knowledge management is the rise of Generative AI. GenAI is poised to automate and enhance information discovery. AI knowledge bases will provide users with more personalized, contextualized experiences. It will also improve problem resolution rates for customers using self-service portals and for support teams using augmented support agents.
Similarly, innovators will continue to develop new ways for knowledge hubs to become collaborative spaces. Moving beyond content silos, companies will foster better environments for knowledge sharing, continuous learning, and joint content creation. On the user side, new opportunities to engage with product content will continue to emerge, creating a more modern reader experience.
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