What Is a Knowledge Base?

• Knowledge Base Definition

  Knowledge Base Definition

  Knowledge base refers to the documentation that can include FAQs, how-to guides, step-by-step processes, video demonstration guides, introductory articles, and troubleshooting instructions to help users find solutions to their queries.
• What is the purpose of a knowledge base?

  What is the purpose of a knowledge base?

  A knowledge base is the end product of collecting and organizing helpful information through a process known as knowledge management. Once the information is gathered, you can use a knowledge base software to create, manage, and deliver the information as a knowledge base to your end-users.

  The purpose of a knowledge base is to provide technical information and answers to common questions about a specific product, service, or system. Your IT teams can use their knowledge base to promote self-service, helping users diagnose and resolve their own issues, or to help guide technicians to the appropriate resolution.

  Unique issues can also be resolved with a knowledge base. Rather than starting from scratch to identify the solution of a query, your IT teams can turn to the knowledge base to look at the history of similar issues. This helps your team save time and efficiency and focus more on other business-critical tasks.
• Importance of a knowledge base

  Importance of a knowledge base

  Answering common queries repeatedly is frustrating and time-consuming. End users want access to in-depth information quickly.

  This is where the knowledge base plays a crucial role. It acts as a self-service platform and is important from an efficiency and productivity standpoint, helping end users and technicians alike. With a comprehensive knowledge base, you can enable end users to resolve the queries on their own and, at the same time, empower service agents with the right resources they need to address end-user queries independently. In addition, it helps to consolidate technical resources into one and easy-to-access location.

  Additionally, an advanced knowledge base can include information in different formats and styles such as annotation images, text, video, audio, or other formats.
• What are the components of knowledge base management?

  What are the components of knowledge base management?

  Knowledge base management includes:

  • People: People are the most important component of the knowledge base. Building a knowledge base requires thinking, planning, and execution and needs human resources. However, you can use knowledge base management solutions to simplify, streamline, manage, maintain, and update a knowledge base.
  • Process: Define a process around creating, gathering, approving, publishing, and sharing knowledge. To sustain a relevant and accurate knowledge base, create processes to maintain and improve its impact across the organization. These processes improve the efficiency of supporting employees and their decision-making capabilities.
  • Technology: Along with the content, technology plays a crucial role in a knowledge base. It helps accelerate the efforts utilized for knowledge transfer. It also helps process, automate, and collect valuable information quickly.
  • Strategy: Building a knowledge base requires proper planning, strategy, and design. Different strategies are adopted to understand and gain knowledge. A help desk knowledge base software can help strategize and establish a rich knowledge base for your organization.
• What should a knowledge base contain?

  What should a knowledge base contain?

  A knowledge base is a repository of articles with information to help customers, employees, and technicians troubleshoot frequently asked questions to deflect cases. It contains business-critical information such as service, product, or guidance about a specific topic. Some knowledge bases are indexed encyclopedias, while others are structured around artificial intelligence that can interact and respond to user input, making suggestions about content to guide users in the appropriate direction.
• How to create knowledge base content

  How to create knowledge base content

  Here are a few best practices to use when creating a useful knowledge base:

  • Know your audience: One of the most important steps you need to consider while creating a knowledge base is writing easy-to-understand documentation or articles. The documentation needs to be broken down into clear steps highlighting each action needed to resolve the issue.
  • Organize the content: Clearly structuring and arranging all the information is key to a successful and widely adopted knowledge base. You can organize the articles hierarchically by assigning them proper categories to make it easier for end users to search for relevant answers. Consider using tags or custom fields in your KB to answer customer queries quickly.
  • Be precise: To make your knowledge base helpful for the end-users, it’s important to provide clear and concise information. Try offering exact troubleshooting steps to help users resolve issues efficiently. Moreover, you can use a knowledge base software to centralize the information and define a process to routinely check the articles’ viability or if there are duplicates.
  • Add media elements: Adding media elements helps improve the quality of your knowledge base and may make your content more easily consumed. Attaching collateral like videos and relevant screenshots of the steps makes it easier for end users to cross-check the progress at each step by looking at the resources.
  • Edit, proofread, and get feedback: Editing and proofreading is crucial for checking mistakes as it can hinder query resolution. Once the article gets published, gather responses and feedback from end users. This helps to rectify and improve your knowledge base. You can also enhance the search filters to help users navigate through articles conveniently. Finally, introduce feedback forms or social media widgets to get feedback and make your knowledge base sustainable.
• How do you maintain a knowledge base?

  How do you maintain a knowledge base?

  You can use the following steps to maintain a knowledge base:

  • Set an update schedule: It’s a best practice to update your knowledge base regularly, so set a cadence for updates. Include all the product or service-related changes to ensure your knowledge base is up-to-date and delivers relevant information to the end users and service agents.
  • Find events that require frequent updates: Frequent updates are needed for product, service, or feature upgrades. Create a new category or provide detailed guidance related to new feature releases or procedural changes. You may also consider including the steps to resolve high-impact or recent issues from a known error database.
  • Optimize knowledge base: Constant optimization of your knowledge base content at regular intervals is essential to deliver a better end-user experience. Review the history of support tickets and gather similar questions to ensure all queries have relevant answers as KB articles.
• What is knowledge base software?

  What is knowledge base software?

  To more easily create, manage, and maintain a knowledge base system, companies may implement a help desk knowledge base software. With a proper knowledge base management solution in place, it becomes easier to create and organize complex resources. The tool can help you sort, catalog, share, store, and create information in a streamlined way.

  A centralized knowledge base management solution can deliver valuable and rich information across the service desk. It helps organizations in multiple ways, such as:

  • Suggested FAQ articles and hot links: A knowledge base solution helps support agents deflect the number of inbound requests by automatically suggesting the self-service knowledge base articles relevant to the request.
  • Varied knowledge accessibility: Exert varying degrees of visibility and access on the knowledge base, catering content based on roles. Publish content consumable for requesters on the portal to help end users self-serve and find a solution to their queries without the need to contact service agents. Users can quickly sort, filter, and search the information or knowledge they’re looking for. This enables service agents to focus on complex queries or technical requests that need proper attention. On the other hand, consider crafting an internal knowledge base solely for service desk agents or internal purposes. This may include proprietary information accessible to only a group of technical staff.
  • Article submission: Knowledge base management tools can help refine knowledge management practices, ranging from submitting, creating, or archiving knowledge content. For example, create a service request outlining the elements needed in a knowledge article paired with a workflow for approval to publish. Once approved or fulfilled, you can embed audio or video, or attach files and relevant documents to support the answer and rich text formatting. Robust and feature-rich articles can significantly increase the success rate of self-service solutions.
  • Knowledge import: If your organization has an existing knowledge base, resources, articles, or FAQs, you can import the articles into a centralized system to make it easily accessible.