What Is a Knowledge Base & How To Build One

What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is a repository of helpful information that customers and employees can use to find answers to commonly asked questions relating to a product or service, by themselves.

A good knowledge base will support multiple formats of learning, including solution articles or FAQs, product manuals, tutorials, videos, and troubleshooting guides, all categorized into distinct themes or folders.

Why do you need a knowledgebase?

Research conducted by Microsoft has revealed that 66% of customers prefer to start their support journeys with self-service. Customers today value easy access to useful resources more than ever since they want to find quick answers without having to reach out for help.

With effective knowledge management, businesses can launch a self-service portal that grants customers instant access to information and empowers them to solve issues independently. Let’s take a closer look at the advantages of publishing a knowledge base portal.

The benefits of a knowledge base

Offer 24/7 assistance

A good self-service portal points customers to the right solutions and ensures that they do not have to face long wait times. Customers are empowered to solve the issue by themselves as and when they encounter one.

Ease agent bandwidth

A helpdesk knowledge base can free up agent bandwidth by deflecting repetitive questions, enabling agents to use the time saved to take on more questions, especially the complex ones. By offering customer self-service, agents can tackle a large volume of customer requests without feeling overloaded with work.

Lower costs

With the right knowledge base software, you can publish knowledge base portals for different products, in multiple languages. This reduces the costs spent on scaling customer service teams for multi-product support, and the cost of hiring local teams or paying for linguists.

Offer internal assistance

A knowledgebase is not only helpful for customers. You can also build a private or internal knowledge base that agents can use to quickly pull up relevant answers, view customer support and company policies, and learn about new features or upgrades. An internal knowledge base is also a great resource for training and onboarding newly recruited customer support agents.

How to create a knowledge base

Building a knowledge base requires dedicated effort to identify gaps, create and review content, organize articles in the right folders or categories, and keep the content up-to-date.

The key to creating an effective knowledge base lies in using a good knowledge base tool. A subpar tool could cost you a lot in terms of time, effort, and customer experience. However, with a solution like Freshdesk, the process of creating a knowledge base becomes a breeze for your team of support agents and technical writers. Here’s how:

Create, collaborate, and promote your content with ease

Source content from your team

Convert agent responses to solution articles with only a few clicks.

Publish easily consumable content

Provide solutions in the form of videos, images or attached files to help your customer in the best way possible.

Create for maximum visibility

With our SEO friendly capabilities, your answers will show up at the top of the search results quickly.

Create for a global audience

Create articles in multiple languages and keep your translations up to date for your global customer base

Examples of knowledge bases built using Freshdesk

Hatchbuck

Flexi-grant

Liden Lab

How to manage a knowledge base

A self-service portal can perform optimally only when there is effective knowledge base management being done in the backend. So, once you’ve published your knowledge base, you need to update the content and screenshots as and when necessary, and keep a close eye on the performance of each article. Again, Freshdesk goes a long way in helping you manage knowledge base documentation, monitor performance, and make changes accordingly.