The benefits of a knowledge base and why your company needs one

If I need help with a new product or service, you can bet that I’m going to try to find the answer on my own if it means I can avoid reaching out to customer support.

I initially thought this may just be my millennial nature, but it turns out that I’m part of the 81% of customers who say they’d rather take matters into their own hands when trying to solve a problem.

Companies can meet this desire to self-service by creating a knowledge base — but the ability for customers to find their own answers is only one of many benefits.

In this article, I’ll provide an overview of why it’s important for companies to have a knowledge base and dig into things like:

• What is a knowledge base?
• Tips for Building a Knowledge Base
• Why are knowledge bases important?
• Benefits of Using a Knowledge Base

HubSpot's Knowledge Base Software

Enable customers to get answers quickly with a searchable knowledge base built from common support questions.

• Create self-serve help articles that are optimized for search
• Make it easy to browse knowledge base articles by topic
• Improve knowledge base content and fill gaps with insights
• And more!

Learn More

Knowledge bases host information that customers need to effectively use your product or service and can include a variety of different content types, such as FAQ documents, help articles, video tutorials, and more.

Knowledge bases allow customers to quickly and easily find answers to their questions, removing the need to reach out to customer support for simple or common needs.

Why are knowledge bases important?

As the saying goes, “Customers are the backbone of any business.” Providing a great customer experience is critical to keeping your customers happy — yet I know firsthand that customers today have extremely high expectations.

Since 90% of consumers expect an immediate response to their customer support needs, any delay in resolution time can negatively impact their overall experience with your product.

While today’s customers may have high expectations, luckily, they’re also pretty resourceful. Nearly 70% of customers say they’ll try to solve their problem on their own first before reaching out to customer support.

This is where knowledge bases come in. Think of it this way:

• Desire of customers to self-service = need for a knowledge base. If customers expect 24/7 access to resources and want to self-service, then every company should have a knowledge base.
• Lack of a knowledge base = customer frustration. If your customer can’t self-service, they’re not only going to be frustrated about waiting to hear back from someone about their issue, but they’ll also experience a delay in value realization with your product.
• Robust knowledge base = satisfied customer. Offering your customers a robust knowledge base enables you to provide 24/7 access to the information they need to be successful with your product.

Benefits of Using a Knowledge Base

Now that we’ve covered why having a knowledge base is important, I’ll go over a few key benefits of implementing a knowledge base at your company.

Creates Happier Customers

In my experience, when customers can easily access what they need and get quick answers to their questions, they tend to be happier. By giving your customers access to a knowledge base, you’re ensuring they don’t have to wait around for answers to many of their time-sensitive questions.

Beyond that, a knowledge base shows your customers that you understand their needs and you care about their overall experience.

I asked Nicole Theohary, director of customer experience at Slang.ai, how she goes about building a knowledge base for their customer base of busy restaurants. I love what she had to say!

Theohary told me, “A great knowledge base is like a really attentive host at a restaurant — it anticipates your needs, makes answers easy to find, and leaves you feeling taken care of.

“At Slang, we think about support as an extension of hospitality. We create resources that are ready-to-go and easy to access, because restaurants don’t have time to wait — they need answers fast.”

I think we can all agree that faster time to resolution equals happier customers.

Meets Customer Expectations

Customers don’t just expect a speedy resolution, they also expect you to provide self-service options for them to try finding that resolution on their own.

Customers want to try to solve their own problems before reaching out to someone, and most of them really want to avoid talking to someone at all if they can. (And this is increasingly true with millennial and Gen Z customers, which Gartner calls the “self-service or no-service” mindset.)

In fact, one study showed that 73% of customers want the ability to solve product/service issues independently. Interestingly, the same report found that a third of those surveyed would rather clean a toilet than speak to customer service!

Additionally, 98% of customers said they rely on online self-service resources like help articles and FAQ documents, meaning they don't just want it, they need it.

In other words, if you require your customers to email or call your company to get help, you’re not meeting their expectations — and you’re delaying the time it takes for them to see value with your product.

Increases Product Adoption

You don’t just want your customer to use your product — you want them to love using it. There’s nothing better than having my customers get excited about new features or finding a new use case for the product.

Your knowledge base can drive product adoption in two key ways: foundational product adoption and enhanced product adoption.

• Foundational product adoption. First, you’ll want to start with creating content that helps your customers master the foundations of your product. This helps make sure customers don’t get “stuck” somewhere and give up on your product altogether, and ensures they see value early on.
• Sophisticated product adoption. Next, you can use your knowledge base to increase the level of adoption for your customers, helping them see even more value with your product.

I suggest using your knowledge base to provide self-service content that helps customers find more enhanced or sophisticated ways to use your product.

For example, in one of my previous roles, we included documentation in our knowledge base about how to build and test three of our most popular “advanced” chatbot use cases. These were considered a more “sophisticated” level of adoption, and the content we built for this included a video tutorial so that customers could build this flow on their own.

By creating content related to a variety of use cases, you help your customers discover new potential outcomes with your product and help make your product “stickier.”

Increases Retention and Revenue

It’s no secret that product adoption is integral to retention and revenue. For your customers to renew or expand their contract, they need to be happy with what they’re currently using and seeing value from it.

And in order to fully adopt a product or service, customers need help.

When customers run into issues, they’re either going to:

1. Try to solve their own problem in real time, or
2. Create a support ticket and wait for a response.

A simple way to increase your customers’ time-to-value is to help them self-service.

Providing a library of self-service resources helps remove friction for your customers by enabling them to complete whatever they need to accomplish with your product. And when customers have the resources they need to fully adopt what they’re currently paying for, chances are they’ll be more likely to renew and maybe even upgrade to more advanced functionality.

Reduces Support Ticket Volume

A customer support rep’s work is (seemingly) never done, and I’ve yet to work for a company that didn’t have a never-ending queue of support tickets and pressure to meet SLA’s.

Many products and online services take time for a customer to learn. Understandably, they’re going to have questions and need assistance. But in my experience, when a company provides an opportunity for customers to self-service for more common questions, it frees up support reps to help customers who have more complex needs.

Interestingly, 91% of customers said that they would use a knowledge base if it fit their needs. By ensuring your knowledge base adequately addresses your customer’s most common questions in a way that’s easily searchable, you:

1. Help your customers find their own answers (leading to quicker resolution time).
2. Keep customers out of the support queue (decreasing ticket volume).

Saves Costs

With every self-service interaction that your customer makes, your company sees significant savings. While you do need to make an initial investment to build and maintain your knowledge base, I promise that the return on investment will be worth it.

Forrester Research found that while a live agent interaction can cost between $6-12 each, a self-service interaction can cost as little as $0.10. This can add up to significant savings, especially if your customers are reaching out to live agents for repeating topics or common questions.

By enabling customers to find their own answers to more “Tier 1” questions, you ensure that your support reps can use their knowledge and expertise on more nuanced and complex customer interactions.

This not only saves you money, but also creates a better experience for both your rep and the customer. Win-win!

HubSpot's Knowledge Base Software

Enable customers to get answers quickly with a searchable knowledge base built from common support questions.

• Create self-serve help articles that are optimized for search
• Make it easy to browse knowledge base articles by topic
• Improve knowledge base content and fill gaps with insights
• And more!

Learn More

Helps Scale Your Organization

Any organization that’s focused on growth should also be focused on scaling effectively. I was pleasantly surprised to uncover how a well-maintained knowledge base helps your organization scale in today’s rapidly changing digital landscape.

As Nic Brown, senior customer education manager at Salesloft told me recently, “A solid knowledge base is crucial for any growing company. It’s not just about helping customers find answers — though that’s a big part of it.

“It’s really about making sure your team isn’t constantly reinventing the wheel. When you centralize your knowledge, it becomes easier for support teams to respond faster, for new hires to get up to speed, and for everyone to stay aligned on how things actually work.”

I agree with Brown’s point about any growing company needing a knowledge base, and I think a knowledge base is especially necessary for:

• Companies with smaller teams, since they’ll have a limited bandwidth of customer-facing employees.
• Companies that lean on AI tools to help with customer interactions. Using your knowledge base to train your model creates a better self-service experience for your customers.

Improves Internal Productivity

If I’m being honest, nothing makes me more frustrated than doing the same task repeatedly. Productivity and efficiency are critical these days, especially if you’re in a customer-facing role like me, where the hours in your day are precious.

Having a centralized repository of resources enables your internal teams to have a one-stop shop for information.

Whether it’s a CSM helping a customer enable a new feature or a technical support rep helping a customer troubleshoot their integrations, your teams can feel confident in the process of navigating to the knowledge base to look for the right information.

When you build a knowledge base, you enable your employees to follow the same process that you’ve built for your customers — i.e., trying to self-serve first. Much like your customers’ experience, this process helps your employees get answers more quickly and ensures they aren’t delayed in responding to their customers.

Creates Consistent Messaging

If you’ve ever played a game of telephone, you know how skewed a message can get when it’s relayed over and over. Luckily, if you have a centralized knowledge base, your internal teams all have access to the exact same messaging right down to the last word. This ensures that everyone in the company is relaying the same message.

A knowledge base not only ensures that a customer gets a consistent response no matter who they interact with from your company, but it also ensures that the customer is receiving the same information from your teams that they would find on their own if they searched the knowledge base. (We’ve all been in a situation where a customer said, “But so-and-so told me I could do this!”)

Consistency is important when setting expectations with customers, and by ensuring your internal teams and your customers are accessing the same information, you create a consistent experience.

Pro tip: In order to maintain consistent messaging, I suggest providing your teams with a process to follow if they can’t find the answer in the knowledge base. I never want to give my customer the wrong answer by just guessing when I couldn’t find the right answer in our help docs.

Improves Decision-Making

A knowledge base doesn’t just surface information to your customers — it can also surface valuable information to your company as well. Brown pointed out that using a knowledge base can actually improve your company’s decision-making by showing you key insights about your customers.

When talking to Brown about this, he told me, “In my experience, a well-maintained knowledge base surfaces trends you might otherwise miss. You start to notice what people are struggling with most often, and that can feed directly into product improvements, onboarding strategies, or even how you talk about your product externally.

“So while it might seem like a simple support tool, it actually plays a big role in how a company scales and stays connected.”

I think having these sorts of insights is a huge benefit to having a knowledge base. By leveraging the data within your knowledge base to uncover areas of friction in your customer’s journey, you can improve and enhance the overall customer experience.

Enables Faster Onboarding

Starting a new job comes with a steep learning curve, and it can take a new employee up to 12 months to be “fully productive” in their new role. (I know many of us can relate to that!)

When I’m new to a role, I spend a lot of time in my company’s knowledge base. If I’m meeting with a customer and they ask me a question that I don’t know the answer to, I’ll search for a help center article while screen sharing and say, “I’m not entirely sure, but let’s find out together.”

Having a knowledge base enables your employees to ramp faster, and is especially valuable for employees who are customer-facing.

For example: New customer support reps can lean on help center articles and FAQs to find answers to customer questions while they’re still learning the ins and outs of the product. This means they can jump into the support queue and start taking tickets more quickly.

As a CSM, using a knowledge base helps me feel like I can still deliver value to a customer in real time even if I don’t automatically know the answer to their questions. It enables us to find out together and remove whatever blocker they have to keep things moving for them.

Improves Internal Enablement

If you’ve ever worked for a software company, you know that sometimes the “speed of innovation” is faster than the speed of internal enablement.

When new products or features get released, a help center article should follow shortly after. By ensuring your knowledge base contains new (and updated) information about your products’ features and enhancements, you reduce the time it takes for employees to find information or get answers to their questions. You not only create a culture of self-service for employees, but you also build trust with your internal teams by consistently creating the content you know they’ll need to do their job.

Pro tip: If you lead a CX function at your organization, work directly with your product team to make sure there’s a plan in place for quickly creating knowledge base content related to new feature rollouts. There’s nothing worse than trying to support customers with new features or products when there’s no documentation to help you.

Now that you’re (hopefully) excited about reaping the benefits of a knowledge base for yourself, let’s talk about some tips for building one.

1. Define the goals and vision for your knowledge base.

Before you dive into creating knowledge base content, take a step back and define a plan for your project. What problems are you currently facing, and what metrics do you care about influencing?

I recommend taking some time to perform a gap analysis to really outline the current state versus your desired future state. This process can help you set tangible goals for the future that also help drive your project plan.

For example: If your support ticket volume is up by 15% or your product adoption of a new feature is lower than desired, you can use these metrics to map out the potential impact of your knowledge base.

If your company decides that support ticket volume and product adoption are the two most important metrics to track against, you’ll want to focus your efforts on building content that aligns with those two specific areas.

This means that any other content requests would be out of scope for right now and can be added to a “phase 2” of your project plan.

Pro tip: Don’t forget to align on who will be responsible for maintaining your knowledge base moving forward. This should be included in your project plan.

2. Find a knowledge management system that fits your needs.

Once you have your project plan and goals defined, you’ll need to decide which knowledge management system you’ll use to build and host your knowledge base.

I suggest using Hubspot’s Knowledge Base Software as it’s customizable to your brand, offers great AI features, and provides insights and analytics to help you measure performance.

Source

As with any software purchase, your needs and requirements will be unique to your business, but here are a few things to consider as you shop around.

• User experience. The interface should be easy to use and allow you to easily add images, hyperlinks, or videos to your knowledge base. Some tools will offer article templates, but I suggest testing them out to see if they work for your content.
• Robust search. Your search function should make it easy for customers to quickly pull up what they need. Implementing a federated search is a game-changer for the customer experience.

At my company, our knowledge base uses federated search to pull up results from the help center articles, our community hub, and our customer academy. This offers our customers multiple content sources to find what they’re looking for.

• Integrations. Make sure your knowledge base tool can integrate with other software like your support ticket center, your chatbot, or your CRM. If your support ticket software and your knowledge base are integrated, you can easily use support ticket data to drive new content creation.
• AI features. Many support tools out there offer AI features that can help you write or rewrite knowledge base content. My favorite AI feature that I’ve seen is when the tool can make suggestions for new content based on what users are searching on your site — and offer to write it for you. (Talk about making your job easier!)

Pro tip: If your company is global, AI features can often help with translating content into additional languages, which is a huge time saver.

• Analytics. Make sure the knowledge base tool you choose meets your requirements when it comes to reporting and insights. You’ll want to know how your content is performing and understand what your users are searching for so you can address any content gaps. I’ve also seen tools that include a “helpful” rating on articles so that customers can rate the level of value they received from the content.

3. Identify and segment your audience.

Who will your knowledge base content be written for? Be sure to consider all of your customer personas and their overall customer journey.

For example, if you’re in B2B and have an admin and a core user, chances are your admin is likely doing tasks in the platform that your core user is not.

If this is the case, you’ll likely want to create knowledge base content that caters to what each of those personas is trying to accomplish. A good place to start is with your product or service’s RBAC list.

Don’t overcomplicate this, though — just make sure you’re considering the knowledge base from all of your users’ perspectives. From there, focus on differentiating knowledge base content only where necessary so that you don’t end up with a million articles that require constant upkeep.

Common examples of different audiences you may want to consider:

• Buyers/Executive Sponsors.
• Platform admins.
• Core users.
• Partners/Consultants.

Example: Gong does a nice job of this by segmenting their knowledge base into categories like “using Gong” and “configuring Gong.”

4. Make your knowledge base easy to navigate.

Since the goal of a knowledge base is to find quick and easy answers, it’s important to set up your knowledge base in a way that’s easy to navigate.

How will your landing page and user navigation be organized? Here are a few things to think about when it comes to setting up your knowledge base:

• Will you create categories for your content? If so, how will you display your categories? You could consider using category boxes, links, or a combination of both.
• Will you highlight the most frequently viewed articles or popular categories?
• Will your content categories be organized by product, specific features, tasks, or desired outcomes?
• Make sure you have an easy way for customers to get more help if they can’t find an answer. You could include a chatbot widget on the knowledge base that lets them create a support ticket or chat with someone.

When organizing your knowledge base, I strongly suggest adding personalization to your approach. With 80% of consumers saying they prefer to do business with companies that personalize the experience, it’s worth taking the time to understand your customers’ unique experience.

For example, in my past roles as a CSM, I spent so much time training new admins and users on how to use our product. Because of this, I am a huge proponent of creating “user guides” and “new admin” resources that can serve as a one-stop shop to help get customers up to speed. You’d be surprised how often customers ask me for this!

I also like when knowledge bases have a section for new product releases. This makes it easy for customers to see what’s new and exciting, and also ties into the benefit I mentioned around product adoption.

Pro tip: However you organize it, make sure you have a search bar so that your customers can easily find what they’re looking for. Bonus points if you offer federated search and can bring in content from other data sources.

Need inspiration? Check out my list of the best SaaS Knowledge Bases!

HubSpot's Knowledge Base Software

Enable customers to get answers quickly with a searchable knowledge base built from common support questions.

• Create self-serve help articles that are optimized for search
• Make it easy to browse knowledge base articles by topic
• Improve knowledge base content and fill gaps with insights
• And more!

Learn More

5. Use data and analytics to define your content.

You should be using data to make informed decisions about what type of questions you want to answer. Whether you analyze support tickets or see what customers are searching for on your website, you’ll need to find data that helps you understand exactly what your customers need help with.

The most common place to start is with support ticket data — especially if your goal is to improve ticket deflection. However, here are a few questions you can ask to uncover other areas that may benefit from content creation:

• Where do customers get “stuck” with the product or service?
• Does your churn analysis point to any gaps that can be addressed with customer education?
• If you’re in retail or ecommerce, what are the most common return reasons?
• Are you checking other sources of customer feedback related to pain points, such as NPS data or Gong call analysis?

Once you have your data sources, look for the topics that come up repeatedly and start there with content creation.

Pro tip: Brown told me that, “An underused tactic is watching how people search — not just what they click on. Tools like search analytics or ticket deflection tracking show where users are getting stuck, or what terms they’re using that don’t match your wording.

“Those gaps are gold. They tell you where to improve, what to rename, or even which articles to prioritize. Most users tend to abandon a search after 2-3 page views; so knowing how they are searching and knowing what keywords they are using can go a long way in getting the content into their hands.”

6. Create cross-functional alignment for new content.

Make sure there’s alignment with your product, enablement, and customer-facing teams about the process for pushing content related to new features into your knowledge base.

Customer support reps, CSMs, and onboarding managers rely on this information to support their customers with new releases.

Pro tip: In order to keep your content consistent, I like using knowledge base article templates.

7. Continue to improve your knowledge base.

Unfortunately, a knowledge base is not a set-it-and-forget-it resource. As your product or offering changes and your company grows, you should be updating your knowledge base and creating new content.

You’ll want to measure your knowledge base's performance as a whole as well as the impact it’s having on the business (aka, those metrics I talked about earlier in the planning process).

There are a variety of factors you can use to measure your knowledge base’s performance, but here are a few to consider:

• Content consumption like page views, video plays, downloads, etc.
• Customer effort score.
• Article views versus support tickets on certain topics.
• Click-through rates for search results.
• Article ratings. Try to implement a rating score for customers to give you feedback on your content’s helpfulness.

When it comes to creating new content, make sure you’re routinely looking through the knowledge base’s analytics (like search results) to see what customers are looking for help with. I also suggest routinely reviewing support tickets for an uptick in new topics.

Pro tip: Brown shared a great tip with me on writing good knowledge base content. “Write for future you, not just current users. Most people focus on documenting things that are immediately useful — but great knowledge bases anticipate growth, change, and turnover. That means building content that’s easy to update, repurpose, and hand off to someone else down the line.”

A knowledge base is non-negotiable.

Throughout my career in customer success, I’ve definitely seen the value of a knowledge base firsthand. However, I was surprised to discover that there are so many additional benefits to using a knowledge base.

As a customer experience enthusiast, I love that a knowledge base delivers double value. It not only supports customers with their needs, but it also delivers actionable insights to your company, empowering you to make improvements to the overall customer experience.

A knowledge base doesn’t just benefit your customers and enhance their experience. It also benefits your employees, your cross-functional teams’ productivity, and the future growth of your company.

HubSpot's Knowledge Base Software

Enable customers to get answers quickly with a searchable knowledge base built from common support questions.

• Create self-serve help articles that are optimized for search
• Make it easy to browse knowledge base articles by topic
• Improve knowledge base content and fill gaps with insights
• And more!

Learn More