Customers are increasingly choosing self-service options like knowledge bases, help centers, and chatbots instead of contacting support through helpdesks and call centers. This is great for customers because they can solve their own problems without waiting, and great for businesses, who can focus customer support resources on permanently resolving issues and prioritizing high-value customers. 

Self-service and automation isn't happening in spite of customer preferences: We're all using self-checkout at the grocery store and opting to check in via an app or digital kiosk for a flight. Research shows that 81% of customers will try self-service options before reaching out to a human being for help.

The technology behind this is rapidly evolving, but there is one common element to a successful customer services experience: an organized, up-to-date knowledge base. An effective knowledge base not only helps your customers help themselves, but also serves as an information resource for your own support agents and a database of information that your AI chatbots can learn from for automated support.

This post explains the customer experience and the business and technical advantages of building a knowledge base. It also provides information to help you choose tools for organizing and publishing documentation for your users, as well as step-by-step instructions and best practices for creating a knowledge base.

What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is an online resource your customers can access at any time, from anywhere, that contains information about your product or service. A knowledge base usually includes specific details about product functionality, FAQs based on common customer queries, and often tutorials and guides (like this one). While most knowledge bases are intended for a public audience, some are intended only for internal use, providing information like company policy, product technical documentation, or business processes.

An effective knowledge base is structured and searchable, empowering your customers by making it possible for them to find their own answers using information that is continuously refined, improved, and updated as your product evolves. General software platforms exist for creating, maintaining, and hosting knowledge bases that provide all of this functionality, or you can assemble your own knowledge base solution that is tailored for your industry, product, and customers.

Why you need to create a knowledge base

Creating a knowledge base has a positive impact on your customers' experience, and it makes your support teams more effective and efficient. 

1. It provides your customers with quick and easy access to information 

Easy, quick access to information is no longer a nice-to-have, but a necessity. Customers want to be experts in the products and services they purchase, and availability of information is increasingly becoming a big factor in the purchasing decision. Knowing that the product is well supported and that the vendor is confident in its functionality is essential. 

Once a customer has adopted your product into their workflows, they will continue to want deep insight into the product and access to knowledge about the production processes, troubleshooting, planned future features, and more. 

A knowledge base provides all of this information in one easily searchable repository that can be accessed by the customer whenever they need it without having to worry about business hours. It provides accurate, contextual information at pivotal times that affect product adoption and customer success. 

2. A knowledge base can significantly reduce support costs 

Web self-service long ago dethroned phone service as the most commonly used communication channel. This is not only a big win for overstretched customer service teams, but also your budget. 

Staffing and maintaining a call center or a significant customer-facing team can be extremely costly, and answering common, frequently asked questions is a poor use of time. A knowledge base, as the first point of contact for customers, provides quick answers to questions and helps users troubleshoot problems at effectively no extra cost, even as your audience grows. 

3. It's a learning tool for new and existing staff 

A knowledge base isn't just for your customers; it’s also an excellent resource for both new and old employees to use whenever they need clarification or help. For example, HR can pull information from the knowledge base for onboarding tools and training, and new employees can use it as a resource and guide for the early weeks of their job, reducing the number of questions they'll have of their own that would require help from other agents. 

Anyone who's worked in customer support will tell you it isn't an easy job, but that it can be made easier with the right tools. Support agents who can provide accurate, up-to-date information about product usage will experience less friction and be much better equipped to handle inquiries from frustrated users. This also improves job satisfaction, which is key in support operations. Happy agents are much more helpful when a difficult customer does arrive, and they are better able to make the customer feel looked after and resolve their issues.

4. A knowledge base unifies your information and improves consistency 

A customer's negative experience with customer support usually begins with inconsistent information. There's nothing more frustrating for a customer than contacting support and getting two different answers from two different people. Inconsistencies can undermine the customer experience and, ultimately, a company's credibility. 

Creating a knowledge base can form the backbone of enforcing consistency across your organization. It's a time to standardize common definitions, agree on best practices, and solidify support solutions. 

This process also helps define what your product should do: if you document a behavior and your app does something else, then you need to communicate with your developers that there's a disconnect between the design and the implementation (or, worse, a software bug). For sensitive design or internal technical information that you don't want to be publicly available, you can maintain a separate internal knowledge base.

5. It gives you useful insights into what your customers are looking for 

A knowledge base can be a gold mine of information about what your customers want and need. By analyzing search data and page hits, you have access to the information your customers are looking for, and you can use it to improve your product and shape your support materials. 

For example, if your customers are consistently referencing the knowledge base for help downloading and installing an app, it might make for a good step-by-step blog post. This would guide users without them having to wait for a support representative to help them and reduce the number of helpdesk inquiries.  

Good documentation can also be part of your ongoing growth marketing efforts, in which customer feedback and usage data is directly used to inform marketing campaigns and focus product improvement and expansion. An example of this would be identifying a new use case for your product based on your customers' interaction with your knowledge base and support, and then improving your product, training your support staff, and expanding your documentation to meet this new use case.

Want more information about why a knowledge base is critical to winning the customer? Download our free white paper, “Why knowledge base content is critical to winning the customer experience battle.”

6. A knowledge base prevents knowledge loss  

A nice benefit of keeping information in a single repository is that you're not losing information to team siloes or rapid growth. A knowledge base keeps a record of your changing product, recording a history of its growth, its expansion, and all of its iterations.  

A knowledge base also helps prevent institutional knowledge from being lost when senior support agents move to other teams. Long-surviving support staff are highly valued due to the accumulated information and context about how products are used, and having that information documented and made accessible to other agents means that it isn't lost. Knowledge loss is also a problem outside of support teams, and an internal knowledge base can be a powerful tool for establishing and recording other bespoke business processes.

7. Creating a knowledge base is the first step in creating AI-powered support agents

AI support agents are powerful tools for automating customer engagement and self-service, and they need to get their information from somewhere. A knowledge base, combined with information from your helpdesk or other support software, can provide an AI chatbot with all of the information it needs to answer customer questions and aid in troubleshooting. 

Creating a knowledge base can be the beginning of a long-term investment in an organized information resource that provides ongoing value to your customers, staff, and business, using technologies that may yet not even be fully realized.

Creating a knowledge base: software, platforms, and tools

The platform you use to host your knowledge base will depend on your project's scope and requirements. If you sell a simple app, a single page or basic wiki may be enough to fully explain it to your users. For even basic use cases, however, being able to structure your data and expand it readily as you add new features or gain an unexpected influx of users is vital.

Below are a selection of the different kinds of tools you can use to build a knowledge base, and a comparison of their use case and features:

These tools are not comprehensive solutions, and for scaling projects, a combination of them is required to effectively serve users. Composable content is becoming increasingly popular in combination with other support tools for building knowledge bases. By splitting up documentation into smaller components, the same text snippets and documentation pieces can be cut together in different ways for different purposes.

For example, you may have a common element in many different places in your app (like a form input for choosing a delivery time window). Rather than writing out the explanation of how to use it multiple times for every page you need to show it to the user, you can write it once and then just reference that component. Then, if it changes, you only need to update it in one place for it to change across your whole knowledge base, website, help emails, and apps.

Key knowledge base features you should consider

The key features users expect in a modern knowledge base include:

• A frequently asked question (FAQ) section: Ideally, these can be created with assistance from your support teams based on common queries.

• Categorization and functional search: If you have the answer but users can't find it, it may as well not be there. It's no secret that search functionality on many online products falls short, so making sure yours actually works is imperative.

• 24/7 live help, when customers need it: AI chatbots are always available and can be backed by real support agents that can help users of business critical applications if they cannot resolve their issue quickly.

• Customer forums: Sometimes customers find unique use cases or solutions that leverage your product and may attract other users — give them a place to share them.

• Support for responsive, rich media: Plain text doesn't cut it anymore. Make sure your platform supports responsive media content so that you can both show and tell on any screen size. 

• Multi-language support and accessibility: Not all of your customers will be speaking U.S. English or reside in North America. By breaking your knowledge base content down so that it can be translated and regionalized, you can expand your audience.

• Support for internal documentation: Internal documentation is enhanced by all of the knowledge-base features listed above, but should not be publicly accessible. Ideally, your documentation solution will allow you to configure multiple knowledge bases with different access permissions. You can also self-host your own internal knowledge base on your own infrastructure to control access.

From a business perspective, it is important that the technologies you choose to implement your knowledge base enable collaborative ownership, and include a comprehensive export feature so that you can maintain control of your content. Your knowledge base should also integrate into your existing websites, apps, and support tools.

How to build a knowledge base: 7 steps to enable effective self-service

Your plan for building a knowledge base should be mapped out in advance, to make sure it covers all of the functionality, use cases, and other information your users require; that it meets your own support teams' and stakeholders' requirements; and that it includes all of the functionality available in modern support platforms.

Below is the 7-step framework that you can adapt to create a knowledge base that meets your own unique requirements: 

1. Research: Look at other knowledge bases for competing products and the services you use yourself, and pay attention to what works and what doesn't. 

2. Choose your tools: The knowledge base platform or tools you use will define what your customers can and cannot do to self-service. You should make sure your choice meets future needs, and can be expanded or built on for new use cases, as well as integrate new technologies.

3. Gather your documentation: Gather all of the information you want to include in your knowledge base. This will include design documents, implementation notes that document functionality, and existing support tickets from customers with questions that you can preemptively answer for others.

4. Establish organization and structure: Content duplication wastes resources, as the same information has to be kept up to date in different documents. This can lead to user frustration if one copy is overlooked, which in turn can lead to conflicting information. You should pre-plan your documentation and pages so that you can eliminate duplication by linking to relevant articles. A clear, logical structure also makes your knowledge base easy to navigate for users, and discourages orphaned pages that have nothing linked to them, which makes them effectively invisible to search engines.

5. Establish article guidelines: Your documentation articles themselves should follow a consistent structure and format based on the content you will be publishing. Articles should look the same so that users know where to find the relevant information. Create a template for your documents that enforces a logical hierarchy of information, including subheadings, paragraphs, links, lists, tables, and diagrams.

6. Write it: This is a collaborative effort: You may start with your product design teams building out the intended functionality, then pass it by your tech team to make sure that it’s consistent with their implementation, and then finally hand it over to your customer support teams for fine-tuning based on customers’ previous support requests. Your support reps can then add tutorials, FAQs, and other articles that are helpful to your specific audience.

7. Publish, test, and iterate: Does your knowledge base work? There's only one way to find out. You should test your documentation internally by having your teams run through it to check it for accuracy and clarity, and once that's done, integrate it into your website so that you can start directing users to it. If your knowledge base is effectively improving your customers’ self-service capabilities, you should see a reduction in your support requests, as well as other measurable impacts to your customer outcomes.

Best practices for building a knowledge base

The larger your project is, and the greater the scope of the documentation, the more you need to maintain control over it. Vendor lock-in is a real concern when you're dedicating potentially hundreds of thousands of hours to perfecting your documentation and messaging. Composability is a key component of maintaining control of your toolchain, letting you pick the products you want to use and tying them together in your own bespoke solution.

You should also keep the following in mind when designing and implementing your own knowledge base:

• Make it visible! Don't bury your knowledge base in a link on your website footer. Your documentation showcases your products’ features and attention to your users’ satisfaction, so put it up front!

• Focus on the customer and what they are trying to accomplish with your product, and tell them how to do it. 

• Leverage analytics and your support teams’ experience, and regularly consult your users to find out where they need the most help. 

• Make updating your knowledge base part of your product development process so it's always up to date.

• Make it part of the product design and improvement cycle so you can inform stakeholders of existing functionality.

• Break complex processes down into simple tasks, and make sure your language is accessible.

• Leverage composability for consistency and completeness across your documentation.

Building a knowledge base isn't an administrative task to be finished and left alone — it's a living document that requires continual input from different stakeholders and constant evolution to meet new requirements as your product develops and your business scales. 

Maintaining control of your platform and being able to fully integrate your own analytics and meet other unique requirements often makes the development of bespoke platforms attractive for larger organizations. This is especially important in a global context where content can be broken down, translated, and presented in a familiar way, from mobile devices to support emails or even voice-powered assistants.

To see how the Contentful® Composable Content Platform can be used to create a cohesive, streamlined knowledge base for your customers, take a look at our Live demo: How to build a streamlined knowledge base. In this demonstration, you will see how Contentful lets you create and manage knowledge base content, use analytics to track your customers’ success, and uncover new product opportunities based on their activity.

Take a tour

Chat with our team

We'll show you how our composable content platform can enhance 1:1 customer connections and drive growth for your business.

Subscribe for updates

Build better digital experiences with Contentful updates direct to your inbox.