12 Reasons Why You Must Invest in a Knowledge Base

A knowledge base plays a crucial role in developing a knowledge management protocol in your organization. With the immense benefits and attractive budget-friendly packages that a knowledge base comes with, every organization must invest in a viable knowledge base solution.

Companies are spending a huge amount of money on KM. For example Ernst & Young spends about 6% of its revenue on KM, McKinsey and Co. spends about 10% of its revenue on KM, Buckman Laboratories, a specialty chemicals firm spends around 2.5% of its revenues on KM, and an author, Duane Sharp finds that where KM practices have been successful, the returns generated by these practices (ROI) have often exceeded 10 times the original investment (Sharp, 2003). Moreover, companies like Rank Xerox (the European arm of Xerox Corporation), have saved more than $1.5 billion over the past several years by identifying and replicating internal best practices.

Many world-class corporations have adopted highly dedicated KM practices. To name a few Ernst & Young – Knowledge Process Landscape, Hewlett & Packard-Knowledge Links, and KPMG Peat Marwick US have developed an intranet called Knowledge Web (K-Web) as the basis of their KM practices. Studies found that sharing knowledge is a crucial part of knowledge management and hence the success of knowledge management depends on effective sharing of knowledge.

Why investing in a knowledge base can be an excellent decision?

Here are 12 reasons why investing in a knowledge base is an excellent decision for your business.

1. A single source of consistent information

A customer might receive two very different responses from two different people from a customer support team. While both the responses might be valid, these inconsistencies can harm customer experience and cause mistrust, ultimately affecting the company’s credibility. A knowledge base works as a consistent and single source of information for your customers and all your executives. This standardizes the processes, definitions, best practices, and ideal solutions throughout the organization, resulting in lesser chances of a disparity in information.

2. Cost reduction

Web self-service has fast overcome phone service when it comes to customer communication. This implies that you can have the best customer service even without hiring a vast team of resources, and secondly, you can offer a good service even with less budget. A knowledge base is a budget-friendly alternative to massive call centers as it provides quick answers to customers’ questions with resources like troubleshooting guides, FAQs, and tips. The cost of staffing, maintaining, and scaling a customer service team in a call center far exceeds the cost of employing, creating, and maintaining a knowledge base.

3. Quick Access to Information

Information is the most valuable resource today, and as an organization, you must provide quick and easy access to information to your stakeholders. Customers want to know more about the product they purchase or are keen to purchase. The availability of quick, trustworthy information can significantly influence the customers' purchase decisions. With a knowledge base, you can provide the required information for your product in a single repository that is easily searchable and accessible. A knowledge base works beyond business hours. It provides consistent, contextual, and correct information at the right time to your stakeholders, thus improving customer experience and ultimately building brand credibility and reputation.

4. Reduces the Response Time

Solving help desk tickets takes considerable effort and money and also takes time. The average length of a first-level customer support call is around 5 minutes, which can be reduced to mere seconds with the help of an organized and highly searchable self-service knowledge base.

5. Better Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction plays a crucial role in creating repeat customers and, eventually, a loyal customer base. With better customer service via the knowledge base, you add to your loyal customer base every minute.

6. Valuable Customer Insights

With a knowledge base, your customers can find the information they need, and you too can also analyze what your customers are looking for. A knowledge base provides valuable customer insights like page hits, search data, and other insights that can come in handy to improve your product, service, and the knowledge base content for your customers.

7. Prevents Knowledge Loss

A knowledge base serves as a unified and single repository of information for your organization, avoiding any knowledge loss on the human level. It keeps a punctual record of your product offerings, product updates, organization growth, expansion, and many other crucial details. When your employees keep on sharing their knowledge in the company knowledge base, it remains there even when an employee leaves the job. Thus, making it easy for new employees to learn from the knowledge shared by past employees.

8. A resource pool for employees

The knowledge base is an excellent resource for your employees too. Your new employees might find it advantageous to get acquainted with the organization’s processes in their initial phase. Old employees, too, can refer to the documentation in cases of doubt. Even HR can pull out information about onboarding and training from the knowledge base.

9. Improves your SEO

Search Engine Optimization involves the addition of value-adding, keyword-rich articles or blogs to your website so that they rank higher on the search engine result page. With a knowledge base, your site is consistently packed and updated with practical, relevant, and keyword-rich content that helps search engines like Google rank it higher on the search results, ultimately improving your brand visibility.

10. Unburdens the Help Desk

When your customers utilize the self-service option of a knowledge base, you will witness a reduced load on the help desk. The number of queries that come to the help desk will reduce to less than half. With extensive content in the form of FAQs, wikis, community forums, and guides, the customer will find it easier to solve their queries themselves.

11. Useful for onboarding and training

A knowledge base serves as the perfect candidate for a training, onboarding, and performance support tool for your employees. It can consist of organizational knowledge such as Standard Operating Procedures, Case Studies, Best practices, Tips and Tutorials, Frequently Asked Questions, and much more to guide employees and the HR department.

12. Small Investment but a Huge Impact

Knowledge base systems are low-cost, high-impact applications that can cause a massive difference in improving your customer service. You might not even need to pay for the annual package upfront with the availability of monthly subscription packages. Additionally, you don’t need to spend on your knowledge base maintenance, up-gradation, storage, and upkeep.

With the plethora of benefits that a knowledge base offers, it is only natural that companies are increasingly investing in knowledge base solutions. With its flexible packages and a FREE trial, PHPKB, a leading knowledge base software, lets you efficiently employ a top-notch knowledge base that can be customized as per your requirements.

References:

1. Sharp, D. (2003). Knowledge Management Today: Challenges and Opportunities. Information Systems, 32–37.