How to know when your company needs a knowledge base

There may come a time in the evolution of your company where you are in need of a knowledge base. Of course, people who sell knowledge base software tell you everyone needs a knowledge base.

Any type of company could benefit from a knowledge base, and you don’t have to be in particular industry or sector.

However, subscription businesses like Software as a Service companies can really benefit from self-service content, as they’re cultivating a relationship with their customers over time. SaaS companies may also have a significant onboarding process and update their product frequently.

Not every company is ready for their own knowledge base, so ask yourself these questions before making any kind of investment.

Questions to ask

• Are we getting so many support requests that a knowledge base would make our operations more efficient?
• Do we need to find a way to reduce our telephone hold times or email response rates?
• Do we need a way to improve customer satisfaction? (Customer Satisfaction Score)
• Are support agents repeating the same kinds of responses on a regular basis?
• Is our product sufficiently complex to warrant a knowledge base or will FAQs suffice?
• Are we losing customers because we lack sufficient self-service documentation? (Churn)

You’ll need to survey your customer support team and look at your analytics for your customer enquiries, as well as your Customer Satisfaction Score.

If you don’t currently keep track of these metrics, consider putting systems in place to measure them for a few months to collect some meaningful data. Then you can decide if a knowledge base is for you, or whether to wait.

Internal knowledge base

You may not require a knowledge base for your customers but instead for your employees. Internal knowledge bases (sometimes called wikis) are a popular way to share information within your organization.

In that case, ask yourself these questions about your company:

• Are our employees in need of a way to access centralized information?
• Is it taking too long to train new staff because they can’t find the information they need?
• Is our organization losing productivity because we don’t have a way to share knowledge?
• Is our company’s knowledge held by individual employees who would take it with them if they left?

An internal knowledge base is similar to a customer knowledge base, but requires more effort from you to get buy-in from your staff and convince everyone to participate. 

Decide if you can support a knowledge base

So you may well determine that you need a knowledge base, but next you need to look at whether you have capacity to do this.

• Do we have the willingness and resources to devote to building a knowledge base?
• Do we have the capacity to employ a dedicated knowledge leader to manage the knowledge base?
• Do we have a consistent tone and style that we can use for our knowledge base? (If not, get one!)
• Can we afford to pay for dedicated knowledge base software?

A knowledge leader (sometimes called a Documentation Coordinator or Manager) is someone who will be responsible for collecting the content from your team, writing it as documentation and publishing it on your knowledge base. It’s not something you can ask an existing team member to do in their ‘spare time’.

If the answer to any of these questions is no, consider reallocating your budget or resources so you can afford a knowledge base and a knowledge leader. Ask your marketing team to develop a brand you can use for your company, or a hire a freelancer to do it.

If you’re just launching a new knowledge base, gather the most popular queries you receive from your support operatives to turn into help content. Also, you can have a look on social media to see what your customers are asking.

Things to consider

You’ll be following in the footsteps of the best if you create a knowledge base for your company, but this approach won’t be for everyone. Despite popular opinion, a knowledge base is not a quick fix, and will need significant investment to maintain properly.

It should be highly targeted to the needs of your customers, which means finding out what they want and how you can help them. Then you need some way of recording this information, translating this into useful help content, and ensuring your customers can find it.

Your documentation must have a strong Information Architecture to help your users find their way around the content. You’ll have to develop a plan for the content over time, and it’s important to regularly prune away outdated content or make updates. It’s not the kind of thing you can make once and forget about.

How you should approach your knowledge base

It’s important to create a knowledge base that’s on brand and appears as an official part of your company. This means creating your support site as a subdomain of your main website, and using your brand fonts, colors and tone (although perhaps toned down to help maintain a focus on the content).

You’ll also have to spend significant effort in training your staff how to use your new knowledge base, creating a process to continually collect the knowledge you need, as well as get your support agents to promote your new knowledge base to your customers.

It’s not quite as simple as writing some content and posting it online, but with the right amount of effort, your knowledge base will some become a valuable support resource for your company.

If you’re ready to start setting up your new knowledge base, check out our reviews of the top dedicated knowledge base software solutions out there.

Alternatively, take our knowledge base software KnowledgeOwl for a free spin today! Our agents will be happy to help you get going. 

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons