Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

If you're tasked with writing knowledge base articles, you might wonder how to make your content compelling. After all, the whole point of a knowledge base is to provide users with the information needed, so it's essential to get it right. This is how your company communicates instructions, processes, and more, thus becoming a key part of customer support.

Knowledge management is the ITIL practice that increases service desk resolution rates, and improves technical skills and everyone’s experience. Done well, a shared knowledge base will help technical teams and end-users. In this sense, knowledge base articles are a great way to build a library that provides valuable insights into how things work. By giving access to these articles, we are spreading resourceful information (a great asset!) across the organization.

Companies set up knowledge bases to help customers find answers to their queries faster. However, not all help centers have the desired outcome of providing effortless resolutions to customers. In fact, they end up leaving users more confused and frustrated after accessing a poorly-designed knowledge base. If you’re building your first help center or looking to improve your existing self-service experience, you’re in the right place.

You’ve heard it before: knowledge is power. For organizations, the collective knowledge of employees and stakeholders about a products, customers, and internal business processes is one of their most essential assets. But where is that knowledge stored, and how can it be accessed? Depending on the organization, that knowledge might be documented in a number of places and formats. As a business, it’s crucial that this knowledge is readily available for whoever needs it.

We all know the story. The "knowledge hero," the one Subject Matter Expert on the team, whose expertise everyone relies on. This sounds good in theory but of course reliance on one single point of authority creates problems. What happens if that person is sick or on annual leave? What you really want is for all team members to share their knowledge and expertise. Enter the knowledge management practice.

We’ve been pretty enthusiastic about teaching you how to create a solid knowledge base. Yet knowledge base mistakes are still very common despite our best attempts to crush them into oblivion. This article is here to help you avoid those pesky sandtraps. According to an IDC survey, Fortune 500 companies lose a staggering $31.5bn yearly from knowledge base mistakes alone. Or, in other words, companies lose money from their inability to effectively share knowledge.

Customers want answers, and they want them fast. About 60 percent of consumers say quick problem-solving is a mark of great customer service. But how do you deliver speedy service without sacrificing quality? By creating a knowledge base. Knowledge bases provide on-demand support by answering common questions and explaining how to use products or services successfully. With this resource, customers can solve problems independently.