What to look for in knowledge base software

In today’s fast-paced work environments, your whole team needs access to accurate, up-to-date information to best serve your customers and keep your business moving forward.

That’s why you need a knowledge base.

With a single location for everything your employees or users need to know, you can make one update, and boom — everyone has the latest information.

You can use knowledge base software to present information to customers, internal employees, or both.

In this article, we’ll cover what a knowledge base is, how it benefits your company, and what to look for in knowledge base software. Along the way, we’ll show you how you can build knowledge base software with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud’s Work OS.

What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is a centralized location for important company, product, and customer service information. It can work as a self-service solution for addressing customer needs or as a valuable internal resource for your team.

Knowledge bases can be client-facing —such as a help or support center housed on your website. You can also host a knowledge base on your company’s intranet, wiki, or other internal location.

While an online knowledge base frequently focuses on customer needs, many businesses miss out on the incredible benefits of implementing an internal one for your team.

80% of employees feel stressed at work due to poor communication, and 58% of employees say even when their organization uses communication tools, they do so ineffectively.

This lack of communication has a real impact on your company’s productivity, with 85% of employees reporting losing at least one to two hours per week searching for information they need to do their jobs.

With knowledge base software, you can create a single source of information — a single place where everyone in your company can find the information they need.

To create an effective knowledge base, you’ll also need to know a little something about knowledge management. That’s the practice of collecting and organizing the sum of knowledge in your company so it can be useful to your entire team.

Knowledge management is how you build a knowledge base, while the knowledge base itself consists of the support content and a self-service portal that empowers customers and employees alike to resolve their problems.

Get started with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud

The 8 key benefits of a knowledge base

Using knowledge base software to develop a central location for all of your company information brings benefits to customers and employees alike.

And when those two groups are happy, you can expect to see a boost to your bottom line.

Knowledge bases for customers and knowledge bases for employees carry a few distinct benefits. Check out some of the top advantages you can gain when you use knowledge base software.

Benefits of an external knowledge base

An external knowledge base, or a knowledge base intended for customer use, is a huge asset to any customer support or sales team. Also known as a help center, knowledge center, or support center, a customer knowledge base offers these benefits:

• Faster customer service solutions: 63.5% of organizations say average response time is a top customer experience (CX) indicator, and 62.3% say ease of issue resolution is a major issue in CX. A self-service solution like a knowledge base allows customers to get answers any time, without having to wait for an available customer support representative.

• More opportunities for SEO: a knowledge base that’s available on your company website can provide a ton of opportunities for search engine optimization. Each article in your knowledge base, when indexed and optimized properly, can target long-tail support keywords that are essential to understanding and solving customer problems.

• Improved customer satisfaction and retention: faster response times mean more satisfied customers, and satisfied customers are loyal customers. The better your knowledge base, the better your customer support, satisfaction, and retention.

• Better customer support data: knowledge base software includes analytics so you can see what topics are most important to your customers and how customers use your knowledge base. Leverage this data to improve customer support services across your organization.

Benefits of an internal knowledge base

Sometimes a knowledge base can do double-duty, serving as an open resource for customers and a handy reference point for employees.

Other times, your client-facing and employee-facing knowledge bases will be a bit different, with the internal knowledge base including information that’s unnecessary for customers to see.

No matter what your knowledge base set up, here are a few benefits of an internal knowledge base:

• Easier employee onboarding: with up to 25% more workers wanting to switch occupations in a pre-COVID world, getting new employees up to speed quickly is more important than ever. A robust knowledge base helps new employees find exactly what they need, even as they hit the ground running in their new position.

You can even create an onboarding-only section of your knowledge base specifically for new employees, like this one from staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud:

• Increased productivity: gone are the lost hours your team spends searching for information, giving you more time to produce results rather than sorting through your inbox or begging coworkers for insight.

• Improved accuracy: since your team has the most up-to-date information at their fingertips in your internal knowledge base, you’ll reduce the number of errors and inaccuracies in customer support responses, internal reports, and other deliverables.

• Improved internal communication and collaboration: rather than spending time asking colleagues about basic information, your interoffice communication can move to the next level. An internal knowledge base can also include information about subject matter experts in your company or field, helping employees collaborate more often and more effectively with the right people.

Knowledge bases in the new hybrid work environment

Pre-COVID, just 17% of workers worked from home 5 or more days a week. In the peak of pandemic lockdowns, about 44% of workers worked from home full-time.

As companies try to figure out what’s normal in the face of an unprecedented and unexpectedly successful work-from-home experience, you can expect to see hybrid work schedules show up more often.

In fact, McKinsey reports that 20-25% of the workforce in advanced economies could work remotely between 3 and 5 days per week over the coming years.

If your workplace is also making the shift to hybrid or remote work on a permanent basis, knowledge management is even more important for your newly dispersed team. Flexible work means a centralized knowledge source is paramount — anyone on the team should be able to access the information they need from anywhere in the world.

Get started

7 essential features to look for in knowledge base software

Clearly, a knowledge base brings a lot of benefits to your workplace. But how can you build one that’s sure to live up to the hype?

We recommend looking for a knowledge base software that offers the flexibility and other musts for any good knowledge base. To help you find the right knowledge base solution for you, we’ve compiled this list of the top features you need to look for.

Along the way, we’ll show you how to use staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud as a knowledge management software that boosts productivity, improves accuracy, and keeps those customers happy.

Scalability

Good knowledge management software grows as your business does. After all, your institutional knowledge never stops growing, so why should your knowledge base?

A scalable knowledge base software will have room for more questions and answers as your product line, knowledge base content, or company overall grows. It will also make it easy to maintain a good information structure.

Customization

You should set up your knowledge base in a way that works best for your team and customers. You’ll want to format your knowledge base articles so anyone who uses it can easily find and understand the information that’s presented.

For instance, you may want to organize your content in a common question and answer format. Or, you might sort files or articles by category, and present relevant knowledge base articles for each given topic.

Knowledge base software customization should extend to branding too, so you can add your own colors, logos, and images. That’s more important for a customer knowledge base system, but a little branding never hurts your internal team either.

Tool integrations

When looking for a knowledge base or knowledge management software, look for one that connects with external tools.

These tool integrations help keep your entire workflow in a single interface, saving time you’d normally switching back and forth between windows. When you connect analytics tools, you also help everyone see the same data at the same time.

On staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, for instance, you can connect your knowledge base with file-sharing tools like Google Drive or Dropbox, collaboration tools like Slack, or customer support tools like Zendesk.

Clean, intuitive interface

A knowledge base system’s primary purpose is to be helpful, so anyone who uses it should find it easy to learn and understand.

That goes for customers and employees alike. Making customer support experiences as pleasant as possible goes a long way in increasing customer satisfaction and persuading customers to stay loyal to your brand.

When it comes to employees, you don’t want to add yet another thing they need to learn. The knowledge base is the support, and it should solve more problems than it creates.

Search features

When it comes to knowledge management software, you want every knowledge article to be easy to find, whether through a Google search or the internal search engine in your knowledge base.

Be sure to choose a knowledge base software that provides the relevant knowledge base articles for any search query, and helps you optimize them for both internal and external search engines.

When you’re writing your knowledge center content, be sure to keep keywords and common questions in mind. This will help you naturally optimize your knowledge content for end users and search engines alike.

Data backups

Because your knowledge base is the sum total of your company’s institutional knowledge, you need a backup, a backup, and maybe one more just to be safe.

After all, the loss of that collective knowledge could have a devastating effect on your business.

Choose a knowledge base software that provides regular data backups to protect the information you’ve worked so hard to collect, write, and organize. That way, you’ll have peace of mind knowing that your hard work is safe and sound.

Dashboards and analytics

While data may not seem like the most essential feature of a knowledge management solution, there are plenty of uses for analytics in this kind of software.

You can use analytics to see how your knowledge base is used and how you can improve it for employees and customers.

On staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you can build a dashboard to keep an eye on important KPIs for your company knowledge base (or just about anything else you need to track.)

Build your custom knowledge base software on staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud

A knowledge base helps your team work more productively while providing top-notch customer service. You’ll empower customers to find their own solutions and offer accurate, useful information to your team.

With a knowledge management system in hand, you’ll see your profits and productivity soar. Plus, you’ll have happier customers and happier employees.

Build a knowledge base tool that suits your needs on the staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud platform today.

Get started