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The more information you have about a product or service, the better equipped you are to help answer any inquiries. For the customer, the better you will be at making decisions about the purchase.
Knowledge is the key that unlocks all the doors. You can be green-skinned with yellow polka dots and come from Mars, but if you have knowledge that people need instead of beating you, they'll beat a path to your door. - Dr Ben Carson, Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence
What is a knowledge base?
A knowledge base is a collection of documentation that typically includes answers to frequently asked questions, how-to guides, troubleshooting instructions, the ins and outs of your HR or legal department to explain how a product works, manuals, troubleshooting guides, run-books, and other information. Its purpose is to make it easy for people to find solutions to their problems without asking for help.
Features Of An Effective Knowledge Base Software
An effective Knowledge Base software must have the fundamental features that would help anyone across the board, employees or customers.
1. Search function
This will help users find solutions to queries quickly rather than peruse through an entire collection of information searching for something small.
2. Dashboard
This software is built to help the customer. But, let's not forget the in-house staff. They should easily create all these types of content using a simple and easy-to-use back-end system that will go a long way to serve your customers better.
3. Categorise the information
Different people are looking for different information. Endeavor to break down the vast information into categories to make the work of the customer and support staff easier.
4. Allow for review and feedback The only to assess how helpful your knowledge base is if you allow for feedback.
5. Reporting and Analytics
With analytics, you can learn which knowledge base posts perform better and which creates more bounces. This will allow you to keep improving your knowledge base and create more helpful guides.
The Best Knowledge Base Software
1. Monkeypesa
1. Monkeypesa
Monkeypesa is a customer support software catering to multiple arms of your business - from sales marketing, automation and customer support. With the spirit of helping small and medium enterprises grow and thrive in business, Monkeypesa is a user-friendly tool. The pricing, features, analytics, easy to interpret dashboard makes it simpler for the users.
MonkeyPesa Features:
Team collaboration
360-degree view of customers
Livechat software
Ticket routing
API
Automation
Community forums
Self-service portal
Insights, analytics and reports
Human Resource and payroll
Live Chat
Bulk SMS and email management
Monkeypesa has a live-chat portal that allows customers to interact with a customer service agent right from the company's website. Clients use this chat-enabled service to reach out to the company for inquiries. The service is very pertinent for businesses and companies relying heavily on their websites for traffic and customers.
It is important to note that clients do not want to be stranded for long waiting for replies. Therefore, employ a large team or use multiple software such as chatbots to automate some chat interactions. Live chat software enables agents to solve customer issues in real-time and from wherever they already are. It makes the process comfortable as it is instant and doesn't need a physical meeting. Here, the reps can catch issues instantly during the conversation.
Email management is another crucial aspect of MonkeyPesa customer support software. Email interactions are notorious for being slow, especially if few monitoring agents and a high volume of emails daily. Customers may need a response faster than some email service strategies can provide, especially when the conversation requires more than an initial email and a reply.
Any capable customer service team should possess a central and accessible knowledge base to simplify simple inquiries. MonkeyPesa lets you build a knowledge base backed up by well-written articles for customers to peruse through searching for answers. Without the articles, there is no knowledge base. A knowledge base is the end product of collecting and organizing that information into a usable form. This feeds directly into the self-service portal. This is the ultimate test for your customer support. This section is filled with an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) database and a knowledge base that contains other information like product specs and case studies. Customers can easily comb through these and find answers from queries of those before them.
Social Media is a very relevant tool of sales and marketing today. Every passing day, there is a new social media channel your clients and prospects sign up for. MonkeyPesa provides a centralized location for all your social media interactions — tweets, posts, reels, videos, comments, replies, Direct Messages. Accessible Communication is a giant step into maintaining good relationships with clients. Strong relationships generate more sales and support, improve client satisfaction, and can even reduce business expenses.
KnowAll is a theme built for WordPress. WordPress is a free platform you can use to build all kinds of websites, including complex knowledge bases. It’s powering over a quarter of the internet.
It’s free, has no subscription and will allow you to customize every aspect of your knowledge base completely. The KnowAll theme will add all the functionalities you need to build a well-structured knowledge base. Plus, by adding plugins to your WordPress site, you can add new features, functions and integrate third-party apps with your knowledge base in just a few clicks.
Benefits of Using WordPress
Affordable Pricing: Compared to other knowledge base software, WordPress is much cheaper to set up and use.
Extensibility: You can easily add and extend features using WordPress plugins, including third-party integrations like Zapier and HubSpot.
Choose Your Own Design: With thousands of WordPress themes to choose from, you can change the knowledge base design however you like.
Easier Management: Easily manage articles, media, and categories using the beginner-friendly WordPress admin dashboard.
Full Control: When using WordPress, you’re in full control of your knowledge base. You don’t have to abide by the rules of a corporate company.
To start building your knowledge base in LiveAgent, sign up for a free account or purchase a paid plan. You also have the option to sign up for a free 14-day trial.
Once you’re logged into your LiveAgent account, you can start building your knowledge base, consisting of articles, videos, FAQs, feedback and suggestions, and community forums.
LiveAgent’s knowledge base is fully customizable and therefore gives you full creative freedom. Easily modify colours, change themes, upload logos, or edit the HTML to match the style of your knowledge base to your company’s website.
Benefits of using LiveAgent
Fully Customizable Software: Almost everything in LiveAgent is fully customizable. Customize your dashboard theme and colours, alert sounds, app language, live chat buttons, pre-chat forms, customer portals, and knowledge bases.
Advanced Tools: In addition to being a knowledge management solution, LiveAgent is a fully-featured help desk software with over 179 features.
Competitive Pricing: LiveAgent offers three paid plans, as well as a forever free plan.
Stellar Customer Support: LiveAgent’s customer support is available 24/7 with an average email response time of 30 minutes.
Helpjuice is a popular SaaS platform that specializes in knowledge base software. They provide software that’s geared towards companies with big teams. It also features a very beginner-friendly knowledge management system.
One of the best features of Helpjuice is its customer support service. They even provide free customization to set up your knowledge base fast and easy. And promises a 5-minute response time to your support tickets.
Benefits of Using Helpjuice
Beginner-Friendly: Helpjuice features a straightforward user interface and a beginner-friendly editor. You can use it to create, format, and edit content without effort.
Google-Like Search: Helpjuice claims its search function to be as innovative as Google search.
Multiple Designs: Unlike most other platforms, Helpjuice lets you choose from dozens of themes to customize your knowledge base design.
Analytics: Helpjuice provides deep insights into your knowledge base statistics, including for searches.
You can find virtually any support feature in the Zendesk toolset — and the knowledge management system is no exception. It comes as part of the Zendesk Suite.
In terms of knowledge base features, you can create articles in a rich text editor and customize your help center with custom themes — you know, the usual stuff. However, customer service representatives will definitely enjoy the Google Docs importer offered by Zendesk. Moreover, the Answer Bot can automatically offer relevant knowledge base articles to customers and ease off support reps’ workload dramatically.
Benefits of Using Zendesk
Complete Suite: ZenDesk comes with a complete list of tools for creating an effective customer support system.
Support Tickets: In addition to creating knowledge base systems, you can use ZenDesk to manage customer support tickets, chat, and more.
Advanced Tools: ZenDesk also includes a CRM called Sunshine for managing your customers as well.
Better Designs: ZenDesk features modern and beautiful knowledge base designs.
ProProfs offers a set of different tools for all kinds of purposes — from live chat to training maker to even brain games. And yes, this list also includes knowledge base management software.
It offers a rich text editor which, by its own description, looks like Microsoft Word. It has numerous editing tools for styling and formatting, but can feel a little outdated compared to its modern competitors. You can make your knowledge base crawlable and available for search engines and specify meta descriptions for each page.
In terms of appearance customization, you can choose any of the default knowledge base themes and customize it with your brand logo and color scheme. There are templates for all kinds of purposes like user manuals, wikis, technical documentation, or private knowledge bases.
Benefits of Using ProProfs
Easy to Use – Thanks to its simple user interface, setting up a knowledge base is a breeze with this software.
Feature-rich – The tool has almost all features you can think of. From content authoring and publishing to customization and collaboration, name anything you want, and ProProfs has got it covered.
Plays well with other tools – ProProfs integrates beautifully with third-party tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Wufoo, Salesforce Desk, Google Analytics, and more.
Simple Pricing – ProProfs offers two paid plans and a forever free plan.
Document360 is a straightforward software designed for doing nothing but creating well-organized knowledge base platforms. The software is trusted by many leading brands such as Microsoft and Harvard University as well.
The cloud-based app features a beautifully minimal and clean user interface for making both private and public knowledge bases. It also includes an easy-to-use markdown editor.
Benefits of Using Document360
Ease Of Use: Document360 puts a complete focus on content and offers a straightforward user interface to manage and organize your knowledge base.
Markdown Editor: Document360 editor supports markdown for easier content writing and editing.
Intelligent Search: The search system supports auto-suggestions when typing in the search box.
Private Or Public: You can also create private knowledge bases to serve your team and public knowledge bases for customers.
Analytics: Going beyond user analytics to collect the article's feedback, it is more granulated to the team, search and user analytics. Search analytics collects all search queries, also the failed searches.
HubSpot's Knowledge Base Software is a powerful tool — here are some of its most notable capabilities:
1. Saves your team valuable time when building your knowledge base.
You can get your knowledge base up and running in just minutes with HubSpot. You won't have to work with templates, and you don't need a domain either. This tool actually guides you through creating knowledge base content for your highest-impact topics and themes that customers need support on by analysing your ticket and conversation data.
2. Makes sure your knowledge base is findable.
HubSpot's Knowledge Base comes with SEO capabilities to ensure your library is discoverable. Additionally, it integrates with other channels used for rep-to-customer interaction, such as email and chat — this helps users find your knowledge base and the most relevant content to them within it.
3. Offers an engaging user experience for your customers.
When it comes to a knowledge base, you want to make sure yours has a great user experience (UX) and is easily navigable. HubSpot guides you as you work on and write knowledge base articles to ensure your content and information are easy to find, browse, read or watch, and refer to again in the future.
4. Helps you measure the performance of your knowledge base.
HubSpot provides a look at the success of your knowledge base with powerful insights, including engagement, sentiment, search, tickets and conversations, ticket deflection, and maintenance suggestions.