Before understanding the importance of why the knowledge base is a key factor, let’s first try to get the basic idea about what a knowledge base is and how it can be constructed and why any organization needs that. So let's dive into it.
What is a knowledge base :
A knowledge base is a well organized, crafted collection of information about a particular subject area, organizing in a way that makes that information more useful, usable and understandable. As the organization grows it will become more complex & more challenging to manage & maintain all the information about every part of your product. To get rid of that, Knowledge Base came into the picture which brings an effective and efficient way to capture, manage and maintain all the information about relevant subjects over the period of time with an ease. The term ‘Knowledge Base’ basically refers to the knowledge which is stored in the form of information in any organization’s system.
A knowledge base can hold, contain and build by covering many of below subjects areas :
- Introduction about your product and relevant articles to that
- Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
- Guides to follow the process step by step and many more.
Typically a knowledge base will act as a repository, containing various critical information about every aspect of your business daily processes. It provides a convenient way to store prime information about an organization's product OR services.
How to construct a knowledge base :
There are several tools created by different people and companies to manage and maintain their own knowledge base. Depending upon the organization’s services and individual’s needs everyone chooses to stick with different architecture for a knowledge base which suits them the best.
There are mainly 2 types of knowledge base most of the organizations are following
- Internal Knowledge Base (For Internal Company Purpose)
- External Knowledge Base (For External Client Purpose)
Whenever you are starting to build the knowledge base, whether it is internal OR external, the first step one should follow is to decide the platform on which knowledge base is going to reside and which architecture pattern knowledge base has to follow. After deciding the step, next is to decide the knowledge base categories which act as main root branches of one giant tree that contains another sub-branches in form of sub category and knowledge base topic as one of the various leaves of that sub-branch.
It is extremely required that each one has to decide their category and sub category very precisely according to their product size OR no of services and organization type and size.
After deciding the Category and Subcategory, it is really essential to explore and identify the topic and their related content which covers all the common use cases about your product OR service which is experienced commonly by the majority of the customer when they start to use your product and service. It implies that without getting in contact with you they are able to get the answers of their questions with ease and fast. And as soon as the customer got the resolution of their query and question that eventually resulted in customer satisfaction and retention.
Why any organization needs a knowledge base :
Depending upon the individual organization workforce & product size and no of services offered, it is extremely necessary that all team members have detailed knowledge and insight about each and every part of the product OR service. So whenever any question OR query arrives from the customer, they can efficiently provide the quickest answer/solution to the customer. A knowledge base will ultimately help you to achieve that goal.
In a large organization it is extremely difficult to train each and individual employee OR department separately. Also it will incur more cost to the organization by arranging the training session on a frequent basis. To overcome this scenario, a knowledge base will play a crucial role to achieve the target to distribute an equal level of knowledge among the employees of the organization.
Moreover you can use it to document all the company’s current process, upcoming strategies, product update and all the relevant features which give in-depth knowledge about different parts of the organization. And the masterstroke of maintaining a healthy knowledge base is the whole organization follows the single source of truth which neglects the cross opinion and debate for correct info/way for a particular topic. Irrespective of the organization size each should have to create and maintain an awesome knowledge base which always acts as a key to success.
Conclusion: Knowledge base as a key factor
Now the final question appears to be how knowledge base can act as a key factor in any organization's progress and success.
A well crafted, beautifully organized and timely maintained knowledge base can resolve hundreds or thousands of future queries of your customers without requiring any help OR assistance of a live person (support agent).
It ultimately helps you to train your new staff and behave as an incredible SEO tool which develops a great opportunity to generate a lead to new potential customers. It is extremely essential to keep the knowledge base updated over the period of time so it can exhibit all the latest information and mitigate the chance of misleading information.
After going through all the points from the importance of knowledge base to crafting one and knowing the importance, one can undoubtedly consider a knowledge base as a key factor of any organizations’ acceleration and success.
So what are you guys waiting for, just go ahead, identify potential topics of your organization OR product and create an awesome Knowledge Base.