Knowledge Base: Definition, Type, and Best Software in 2023

Have you ever shied away from asking a question due to the vanity of it? Or ever dreaded coming across as less knowledgeable as compared to your peers?

Consumers of any product or business fear the same consequences.  This is why businesses focus on providing assistance at every step of the product life cycle, aka, the knowledge base.

Setting up a general knowledge base that answers the basic concerns your customers have is crucial to your success. Whether it’s about the configuration of the product, troubleshooting, plugin implementation, pricing, or general frequently asked questions (FAQs), a brand should have ancillary helpdesk support. 

Right off the bat, gaining company knowledge and company policies to sketch out a knowledge base article is a bit of a challenge. Organizing your writing efforts with knowledge base software can optimize the content inventory, design turnarounds, and proofreading process.

So before you send your customer services to your client, stack up on your knowledge base and raise your customer experience benchmark.

Have you ever wondered why Google or Zendesk support guides surface when you’re searching for a niche keyword? Both companies have an open-source knowledge base that everyone on the web can access.

Not only does this refine user efforts, but it relieves some of the pressure customer service specialists feel when dealing with sales objections. Further, it increases customer satisfaction and paints the picture of a “customer-first” brand.

Why do businesses need a knowledge base? 

Approaching the most occupied team, i.e., the customer service team, can get frustrating. Customers are on hold for long hours on toll-free lines while the system routes their calls to an available rep. Not only is this physically taxing, but it poses a poor brand impression.

Programming a knowledge repository for different customer grievances saves on service tickets. It helps customers feel a sense of achievement and builds further confidence to use the product. Keep reading to learn more reasons for creating a knowledge base.

• Information retrieval: By connecting knowledge hubs with online chatbots, customers get easy access to solutions. It saves them the heft of finding and checking user manuals and gives them the right resolution before it’s too late.
• Easy management: These personalized guidebooks are easier to maintain than bulk user manuals. A knowledge base is categorized according to the client, escalations, and general issues. Based on these categories, customers can easily forward the right document to the end user and close the ticket.
• Interdepartmental edification: A knowledge base not only resolves external queries but educates new team members. For example, it helps newbies navigate IT queries like app configurations, permissions, and user credentials. It can also lay the groundwork for the HR department with pay information, company policies, and leave approvals.
• Helpful content: Before your prospect or customer falls for your competitor’s bait, a knowledge base keeps them loyal to you. Presenting industry-specific and expert-based content with a knowledge base expands your credibility among first-timers.
• Easy updates: If you have a new release announcement or feature launch on the cards, add it to existing content. The process of updating doesn’t require a lot of bandwidth. Any professional with a basic understanding of content management tools can keep your knowledge database current.
• Faster turnarounds: If a user gets stuck at any phase of product consumption, they know where to go for a quick resolution. This eliminates back and forth between the brand and the user, building empathy, increasing customer retention, and stabilizing business. 

Features of knowledge base systems

Whether you’re setting up a web library or a printing media to build a knowledge base, acquaint your customers with how to use it. Customers can’t solve product glitches on their own. Designing knowledge bases makes it possible for them to glean information and satisfy their queries. 

It’s a good idea to have support videos, product manuals, or documentation about your product to alleviate confusion for anyone trying to use your knowledge base for critical tasks. 

Some other features you could consider having in your knowledge base system include:

• A centralized repository. Knowledge-based content is an in-depth container for storing, organizing, and retrieving a wide range of information in a collaborative and easy-to-access manner.
• Structured organization. A knowledge base is set chronologically, using a priority or a scheduling workflow. It’s structured using categories, topics, headers, sub-headers, or sections, allowing easy navigation.
• Search functionality. Knowledge bases have embedded search options or optical character recognition (OCR) for users to enter specific keywords and access image data.
• A user-friendly interface. A helpful user interface ensures that the customers don’t drown in a sea of information and instead receive step-by-step guidance for their queries.
• Multiple content formats. The knowledge base resources should be available in different file formats, like FAQ guides, videos, guidebooks, images, and e-books for different cognitive abilities.
• Self-service support. Brands want to make their customers feel empowered and organized without coming across as neglectful or unreliable.
• Scalability. Knowledge bases handle a growing archive of written assets that can be scaled per organizational needs, operations, and size.
• Continuous updates. Technical writers, programmers, and content marketers work on the knowledge base of particular brands and keep them up-to-date.
• Internal and external knowledge base. A brand can provide this support to both its clients and prospects looking for a certain product-related concern. Examples include support pages, configurational guides, newsletter releases, product updates, and onboarding videos.
• Search engine optimization (SEO): If a brand knows its product the best, chances are that search engines like Google also lean in its favor. Brands that maintain a knowledge base can improve their domain rating, search engine result page (SERP) visibility, and authority on the web. 

How to build a knowledge base

Most organizational communication depends on the liaison between sales and marketing teams. While the digital marketing team can launch go-to-market (GTM)  strategies, webpages, and teasers, sales executives understand ideal consumer personas.

To build a knowledge base, you need the best of each world to come together, ideate, and build from the ground up.

• Define the purpose and the audience. Before investing time to make a knowledge base, brands need to figure out user needs and intent. The semantics of a knowledge base should be specific to the end user, whether it’s for customer support, employee training, or sales enablement.
• Use a relevant platform. Select a knowledge base platform that best suits your needs. Do not go for generic solutions. Choose more customized solutions or specialized knowledge base tools.
• Create a wireframe. Use more familiar tools like Google Docs or a spreadsheet to build a proper framework for your knowledge base. List your buyer preferences, requirements, personas, and common questions to categorize your website content and newly generated work.
• Create content: Get a team of technical writers with experience working with a wide range of tools like Grammarly, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), or other web content management systems like Drupal or WordPress.
• Optimize for SEO. Ensure you have your on-page SEO and technical SEO in place. Put images, interactive videos, video tutorials, dynamic illustrations, graphics, and product guides within your web page or dedicated pages.
• Structure metadata. Check out SERP behavior for your target search queries and tailor your content accordingly. Find the best trends around organic keywords and use that information in your meta titles and descriptions to rank higher.
• Build word of mouth with promotion. Reach out to your customers via thank-you surveys, leadership meets, knowledge-enhancing seminars, and other channels to invoke their interest and build word of mouth.
• Conduct A/B testing. If you’re working to create a pillar page or a content hub on the web, use A/B testing to test your web page compatibility so you can easily monitor conversion rate optimization.
• Enrich the user experience. Create sleek pages that convey information clearly. Adjust your font size, font color, background color, headers, and other design elements so that it doesn’t appear daunting to the reader.
• Test out your quality. Once the trial version of your knowledge base is ready, send it over to the quality assurance team to check for bugs and code compatibility issues. Ensure pages don’t take too long to load or display any broken links.
• Add regular updates. Once you’ve got your knowledge hub up and live, don’t neglect it. Keep adding new content, updating existing widget mailers, and adapting to users.

Keeping up with the market pulse will always be challenging. Most companies are fixated on their gross rating point (GRP) and return on investment (ROI), whereas others are fixated on cutting corners on products. 

Shifting your center of focus from “market-driven” to “consumer behavior" solves the majority of your challenges regarding high turnover and lower retention. And knowledge base is just the right way to do it. Let’s look at some leaders who have reduced the constant tussle of calling helpline numbers.

Knowledge base examples

Below is a list of companies that worked by the book of consumers and launched self-support libraries to become leaders in the consumer space.

• Shopify: A popular online reselling platform, Shopify provides its merchants and retailers with a knowledge base to help them set up their own e-commerce businesses. It helps them figure out their inventory needs, billing and invoice, merchandise, supply orders, dispatching, and stock refilling processes.
  

• HubSpot Sales Hub: When anyone thinks of CRM platforms, HubSpot Sales Hub comes to mind like muscle memory. HubSpot's knowledge base has outclassed any existing B2B CRM software. HubSpot’s online academies, podcasts, and guides answer every recurring CRM query.
  
• Zendesk Support: Zendesk is a customer support and engagement platform that works as an open-source knowledge base. It aims to provide customer support to users, reduce service tickets, and increase user satisfaction. It’s an open-source knowledge base that businesses can use to make their own documents.
  
• Slack: To get in touch with their audience, Slack uses empathetic and emotional content strategies to get in touch with their audience. By offering comprehensive information, step-by-step guides, and other collaterals, it has outpaced every other business communication and messaging software tool.
• Atlassian: Atlassian provides a highly secure cloud-integrated platform for uploading and sharing documents across different functional departments. Confluence, one of  Atlassian’s products, helps teams collaborate and share knowledge while maintaining privacy and protection.
• Microsoft: Microsoft has launched Microsoft Learn, a Q&A maker that helps organizations quickly start their content production. It provides a common platform where you can find product-specific questions, visual flowcharts, and Microsoft developer tool guides.

Best practices for building a knowledge base

All the logs of an organization, like technical specifications, business logic, manuals, and other records, need a careful eye for curation. While you're at it, as a brand, it’s your duty to develop a good user experience. Getting lost while searching for a particular product-based detail might throw your users off a cliff with nothing to fall back on.

Be wary of how you structure your knowledge base by following these best practices.

• Update your knowledge base. Certain product nuances change from time to time. Make sure you reflect those changes in your existing knowledge base to alert users of upcoming modifications so they’re prepared to adjust.
  

• Structure your website blogs with the right formatting. Use proper headers, bullet points, tables, callouts, and descriptions to present a clean experience. Format your blogs using the correct website development guidelines. Organize information in a cut-and-dry way.
  

• Follow best on-page SEO practices. Google craves resourceful content and surfaces it pretty often. If you optimize your web pages or hub pages for correct search queries, you might be able to rake in a good amount of organic traffic and attract new visitors.
  

• Analyze performance with a reporting analytics dashboard. Benchmark the performance of your articles through an analytics dashboard. Revisit the dashboard to see the content users click on the most, which articles have been untouched, and the number of repeated queries.
  

• Make web pages consistent. Standardize font size, color, page border, page layout, table width, and other design elements across all web pages to provide a cohesive view of content.
  

• Always include a forum section. Discussion forums help crowdsource answers and allow transparency among your consumers. Users can collaborate, exchange answers, dissect problems, and build rapport among themselves, which can position you as an empathetic brand.
  

• Add product videos wherever required. To illustrate the entire product journey, add product videos along with text-based descriptions. Voicing the narrative sometimes resolves queries faster than creating FAQ guides.
• Make it easy to confirm appointments. Always include a calendar booking widget that customers may use if their questions are still unanswered. 
  

5 best knowledge base platforms in 2023

A knowledge-based software platform pulls information from different sales and marketing channels into one location, allowing contributors to outline their requirements, exchange logic, and correct errors.

To be included in this software category, a software must: 

• Help stakeholders collaborate over documents.
• Create easily editable and formatted content assets.
• Allow users to search for specific keywords and content.
• Build an automation of a taxonomy system to organize content.
• Allow bulk or multiple file uploads in different formats. 

*Below are the five leading knowledge base platforms from G2's Summer 2023 Grid® Report. Some reviews may have been edited for clarity.

1. Notion

Notion is a communication system where teams can ideate, build rooms, and communicate over critical agendas. It provides an intelligent, AI-based platform that can anticipate your needs and construct an effective framework that reduces your team’s workload. 

What users like best:

"It's an amazing app that has made organizing knowledge and data much more efficient. I love Notion's clean interface. It has tons of options to choose from. I love the various view options and customizations. I can make it look the way I want it."

- Notion Review, Naveenkumar P.

What users don’t like:

"I think the mobile app is not as user-friendly as the web app. It’s better if you use it on your PC."

- Notion Review, Yash A.

2. ClickUp

ClickUp is an effective knowledge management platform that team members can access in real time to edit, modify, and plan strategies. It comes with a document management system, chat functionality, video conferencing, whiteboards, and other productivity tools that strengthen the rapport between virtual teams.

What users like best:

"I love the flexibility of the platform. For example, I love how each List, Folder, and Spaces can be set up differently and that you're able to turn different ClickApps on and off to avoid cluttering your space with things that you don't need."

- ClickUp Review, Autumne F.

What users don’t like:

"The product is so incredibly robust that it can be easy to become overwhelmed. When starting out, it's hard to know where to begin. Their recurrence features of Tasks are still confusing and a bit clunky. The Whiteboard feature is pretty buggy."

- ClickUp Review, Genevieve H.

3. Confluence

Confluence can be accessed through a secure network protocol. Users need two-factor authentication or multi-factor authentication to log into the Confluence dashboard and view team-specific articles and enlistments.

What users like best:

"It's cloud-based and really easy to use once you know its little quirks; much easier than managing an intranet. Great for collaboration within teams and departments, easily links to other systems."

- Confluence Review, Paul B.

What users don’t like:

"I don't like that you cannot search for the same knowledge base you need using just one keyword. If you enter one or two words, multiple results are shown. Even the article you won’t use comes up if it detects the keyword you added. It can be a bit slow and unresponsive at times."

- Confluence Review, Diana S.

4. Stack Overflow for Teams

Stack Overflow for Teams is a technical documentation platform that solves recurring programming queries through self-paced videos, code samples, definitions, and interface screenshots. It’s mostly used by software engineering teams and analysts. 

What users like best:

"Stack Overflow for Teams is a game-changer for companies. It offers the same exceptional features as Stack Overflow but in a private version exclusively for internal use. It enables efficient collaboration, secure knowledge sharing, and swift problem-solving within a single company. It has allowed us to build a searchable and easy-to-browse knowledge base."

- Stack Overflow for Teams Review, João C.

What users don’t like:

"I find the emails from Stack Overflow to be a bit much. Every day,  I would receive at least 2-3 as a reminder to log on and help answer questions. In my role, they tagged me as a ‘Super User.’ One email a day would be enough."

- Stack Overflow for Teams Review, Jen F.

5. Guru

Guru is the wiki, intranet, and knowledge base that publicizes information for clients, vendors, and employees. With an easy-to-understand interface, users glide through important information without being overwhelmed. 

What users like best:

"The best feature of Guru that amazes me is that it can be accessed through an extension that takes less time to open. Another best shot of Guru is it delivers and displays the information according to the personalization of our administrator and us, users of Guru."

- Guru Review, Ashley M.

What users don’t like:

"I feel Guru is still lacking in being able to show related information about when our new hire is searching for information/training cards. Having this issue solved will make it more user-friendly."

- Guru Review, Darren N.

Now serving: self-sufficient customers

Maintaining a personalized touch with your customers through your knowledge base can increase brand reliability, visibility, and reputation. Customers long for brands that care after that sale is made. Post-sale support, like knowledge bases, can make or break your brand in the consumer market. It can also set you apart from agile competitors, who are under par with humanity and compassion.

Don’t fret at the thought of writing for hours for your brand. Learn how you can bring effective content to your consumer’s doorstep with help authoring tools (HAT).