Knowledge Base; Definition, Types, And Uses

The internet age has changed and revolutionized how customers look to brands, changing how brands carry out customer service.

Any capable customer service team should possess a central and accessible knowledge base to simplify simple inquiries.

What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is a collection of documentation that typically includes answers to frequently asked questions, how-to guides, and 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.

The knowledge base is 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 all of that information into a useful form.

Tips On Writing A Knowledge Base Article

Know Your Customers: Understand how your customers think and what their purchase behavior is like, to write the right knowledge base information.

Take A Generalized Approach: Write the information to satisfy every customer. Do away with complex and technical terms and make the information easy to decipher.

Concise: Keep it short and sweet.

Use infographics: Visual works are always more appealing to the eye.

Organize your work: High levels of organization increase the levels of sale and purchase conversions.

Why you need a customer service knowledge base

To clearly see how customers react to their customer service journey, let’s look at some statistics from a recent Harvard Business Review.

• 65% of customers expect a resolution to their issue at first contact.

• 50% of consumers are only willing to wait one week to respond to their questions before taking their business elsewhere.

• 62% of customers think that having knowledgeable employees is the third most important aspect needed to provide good customer service.

A knowledge base is not for your clients and customer alone. Your customer service team needs that information too. While talking with clients, they need to be speaking from an informed view.

Let's see how your team can use the knowledge base:

• IT: It simplifies everything from troubleshooting to training/onboarding and general how-to and support questions.

• HR: Again, great for everything from training/onboarding to distributing company policies and pay schedules.

• Legal: Helps with contract and other approval processes, policies, trademarks and registrations.

Types Of Knowledge Bases

There are six main types of knowledge bases.

Internal Knowledge Base: One created by your organization strictly for employees.

Hosted Knowledge Base: One that collects and stores information for both your (internal) team and your (external) customers or stakeholders.

Self-hosted Knowledge Base: One hosted on your organization’s own servers.

Customer Knowledge Base: One that organizes information to make it easy for your customers to access and use.

Open Knowledge Base: One that is openly accessible to the public.

External Knowledge Base: One that contains publicly accessible knowledge about a product and/or company.

Benefits of using a customer service knowledge base

Organizations that adopt a knowledge-based approach to customer service can very quickly begin to reap the benefits of implementing a knowledge base such as those listed below.

• Improved efficiency Implementing a knowledge base program with user-friendly processes, which encourage agents to use the knowledge base database.

• Reduced resources and costs A knowledge base can help customers resolve issues themselves, which leads to reduced call and email volume.

• Increased customer trust and loyalty Providing consistent information across all channels help to builds trust from customers in the brand and company, which ultimately will improve customer loyalty.

• Improved content quality and consistency Focusing on improving the knowledge base quality will improve the quality of content and information across multiple service channels.

When combined, these operational improvements can have an extremely positive effect so that organizations to optimize the customer experience.

Final Word

Customers need information about your brand and services, and by extension, so do the employees, so they can be answering queries from an informed position. he way you use a knowledge base depends, of course, on what your organization does and who it serves.

MonkeyPesa is here with a ready-made Business Management Suite that helps streamline everything from Leads to Deals, Tasks, Accounts, and contacts. MonkeyPesa is genuinely built for Sales teams. It is simple but well streamlined and organized. Are you an entrepreneur? Please leave your details here & we will contact you: https://www.monkeypesa.com/sales​ Learn everything you need to know to help empower your grow your business through the roof. We shall be learning to integrate services like Email Marketing, SMS, Social Media marketing, and customer support, all in a single business system. You can contact us on or by a phone call or WhatsApp at +256757537658