In Layman’s terms, a Knowledge Base is a centralized repository where information is collected, stored, organized, and shared.

A knowledge base is a set of information related to your services/products. This information is managed and organized by your team and shared with your customers when necessary.

What Is a Knowledge Base?

Anyone from your team/organization can add the information to your Knowledge Base. Usually, individuals who are well versed in a particular subject add and expand the knowledge base of a product.

This helps your customers find a quick resolution for any questions that they might have regarding your product, thus decreasing the dependency on your support team, which helps in increased productivity of your team.

What Is a Knowledge Base Used For?

While the content inside a Knowledge Base differs by different factors, it generally contains General Information about the product, Pre-sales Queries, Billing, FAQs, and other Troubleshooting guides.

Knowledge Bases are the end product of combining all of the above information in an organized manner. The process of combining, organizing, and managing all this information is also referred to as “Knowledge Management.”

Knowledge Bases can also be divided further into External and Internal Knowledge Base.

• External Knowledge Base: External Knowledge Bases are created by companies for customers who use their products and require help in Getting Started, Pre-Sales, Billing FAQs, and Troubleshooting guides.
  
• Internal Knowledge Base: Internal Knowledge Base is created by companies for easier onboarding of their employees, explaining product development cycle, helping your Customer Support team be more productive and efficient, internal field guides for product features and overview.

Why Knowledge Base Is Important for Your Business?

1. Make Your Customers More Autonomous

These days technology is evolving at rocket speed, and everyone is diving deep into it. It will be incorrect if we say that most customers contact Customer Support without trying to solve the issue first by themselves.

A recent survey by Salesforce shows that 89 percent of millennials use a search engine to find answers before making a call or an email to get customer service when they get stuck with an issue. They prefer to solve these issues by themselves immediately. Thus, having a Knowledge Base that shows up in search results would help your users

2. Knowledge Base Works 24×7

No matter where a customer is from, they can always get help if you have Knowledge Base for your users. Custom Support Representatives need a break, and there may be a time when a user has a query, but no one is available to answer it. Here, the Knowledge Base comes to the rescue.

3. Reduces Support Workload

Nowadays, Customer Support Representatives have different tasks from answering support queries via emails, phones, and texts. Thus, by having an External Knowledge Base, you can free up your Customer Support so that they can handle more important issues.

4. Reduced Resources and Costs

A Knowledge Base saves your customer support representative time in answering basic troubleshooting, billing, and getting started queries, thus helping in overall reduced resources and costs to your business.

5. Helps in Building Credibility With Customers

A Knowledge Base keeps everything public in the eyes of the customers. Every document like getting started, billing, product guide, troubleshooting steps related to your product that you keep public helps build credibility with customers..

6. Enhance Productivity

As we discussed above, a Knowledge Base helps in reducing your team’s Support Workload. Your support team can now focus on getting to know your customers, have conversations with them regarding your products, like, what specific feature are they looking for, and take their feedback to improve the product further, thus improving the overall Customer Experience (CX) while also enhancing the productivity of your team.

Knowledge Base Plugin for WordPress

While empowering more than 1/4th of the internet, WordPress has become one of the most popular content management systems. According to a survey, around 455,000,000 websites are using WordPress, and from the above points, you probably understand the importance of having a knowledge base on your website.

Using WordPress, you can create any website and embed any functionality; however, creating and maintaining an effective knowledge base is quite a hurdle & tiresome process. In order to create a well-functioning documentation process on a WordPress website, you’ll surely need help from some third-party sources.

There are many plugins and themes that you can choose from, but if you are looking for a free documentation plugin, the SmartDocs documentation plugin works wonders for you.

SmartDocs can help you with easily creating and maintaining in-depth documentation of your products. You can create a functional knowledge base of your products so that your customers can easily understand what your product is, how it works, and how it can benefit them.

The plugin comes with an interactive interface that allows your customers to easily navigate between docs and find the right piece to solve their issue.

Learn More: How to Create a Knowledge Base for your Website for Free?

Final Remarks!

I hope now you have completely understood knowledge management, types of knowledge bases, and why knowledge base is important for your product’s success.

Let us know your thoughts about Knowledge Bases and how you use them for your Product/Business.