This Data Shows Why Brands Need a Knowledge Base in 2023

In the age of the empowered customer, self-service has become a basic expectation. Across industries, consumers and business buyers alike strongly prefer to find answers themselves online before contacting customer service. To meet this demand, brands must cultivate robust self-service resources—and a knowledge base is a cornerstone of an effective self-service strategy.

What is a Knowledge Base?

A knowledge base is a centralized repository of information about a company‘s products, services, and processes. Think of it as your company‘s own version of Wikipedia. The goal is to make it easy for customers (and often employees too) to quickly find accurate, up-to-date answers and guidance.

Knowledge bases can include a wide range of content, such as:

  • Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
  • Step-by-step tutorials
  • Troubleshooting guides
  • Product documentation
  • Getting started guides
  • Glossaries of terms and concepts
  • Community forums
  • Videos and visual aids

A knowledge base is often a core component of a brand‘s website or help center. Many companies also make their knowledge base accessible across other touchpoints, such as their mobile app and social media profiles.

Leading knowledge base solutions offer powerful features to ensure users can easily find relevant content, such as:

  • Intelligent search that understands natural language queries
  • Chatbots that can surface articles based on a conversation
  • Suggested articles based on the page or product a user is viewing
  • Categories and tags to browse by topic
  • User ratings and feedback mechanisms
  • Content performance analytics

When designed well, a knowledge base becomes a go-to resource for customers looking to resolve issues and expand their product mastery on their own.

The Business Case for Knowledge Bases

Investing in a high-quality knowledge base offers significant benefits for B2B and B2C companies across all industries. Let‘s look at some of the most compelling reasons backed by data.

Customers overwhelmingly prefer to help themselves

Study after study has confirmed that customers increasingly favor self-service over contacting support:

  • A Forrester survey found that 70% of US online adults say they prefer using a company‘s website to get answers to their questions rather than contact via email or phone.

  • 81% of customers attempt to take care of matters themselves before reaching out to a live representative. (Harvard Business Review)

  • 88% of US respondents expect brands or organizations to have an online self-service support portal. (Statista)

  • Over 50% of customer say it‘s important to solve product issues themselves rather than rely on customer service. (Zendesk)

  • 67% of respondents said they preferred self-service over speaking to a company representative. (Superoffice)

  • 91% of survey participants would use a knowledge base if it met their needs. (Social Media Today)

Clearly, customers don‘t just appreciate the option to help themselves—they actively prefer it over other support channels. This is especially true of millennials. Research from Salesforce found that 89% of millennials will search for an answer online before making a call to customer service.

As millennials gain even more purchasing power (both as consumers and as business buyers), this self-service preference will become even more pronounced. Companies that don‘t provide robust self-service options risk appearing outdated and out-of-touch.

Knowledge bases significantly reduce costs

A knowledge base is one of the most cost-effective ways to scale support delivery. By enabling customers to help themselves, companies can dramatically reduce the volume of repetitive Tier 1 requests that otherwise bog down human agents. This has major cost implications:

  • Forrester found that it costs less than 10 cents to handle a self-service transaction, while a phone interaction averages $6-$12.

  • Knowledge bases and FAQ pages can reduce support tickets by as much as 80% and save companies over $400K annually. (eConsultancy)

  • Businesses spend an average of $1,011 per incident when relying on contact center support. Shifting even a fraction of those issues to self-service can add up to massive savings. (HDI)

With routine issues handled via self-service, agents can focus their time on higher-stakes, revenue-generating interactions. This ability to scale support without linearly increasing headcount is a major advantage as companies grow.

Self-service drives loyalty and revenue

Beyond cost savings, knowledge bases contribute to the bottom line by elevating the overall customer experience:

  • 77% of customers say they‘re more loyal to businesses that offer top-notch service, making it a key competitive differentiator. (Zendesk)

  • After having a positive experience with a company, 69% of US consumers would recommend that company to others and 50% would use the business more frequently. (American Express)

  • Low effort experiences reduce costs by decreasing up to 40% of repeat calls, 50% of escalations, and 54% of channel switching. (Gartner)

  • Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits anywhere from 25% to 95%. (Bain & Co)

When customers can easily find answers in your knowledge base, they‘re more likely to be successful with your offerings—and consequently more likely to stick around, buy more, and recommend you.

Knowledge bases boost employee productivity

It‘s not just customers who benefit from knowledge bases. Many organizations also use knowledge bases internally to:

  • Onboard and continually train employees, ensuring everyone has access to the latest information
  • Enable salespeople to quickly find answers to prospect questions
  • Empower field technicians with mobile access to service manuals and procedures
  • Provide front-line staff with a repository of approved responses to customer inquiries

According to McKinsey, employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average—searching and gathering information. A searchable knowledge base can dramatically reduce this wasted time.

Some of the most progressive companies are taking this even further by using AI to automatically suggest relevant knowledge base content based on the conversation an agent is having with a customer.

Best Practices for Creating a Top-Notch Knowledge Base

Of course, simply having a knowledge base isn‘t enough. To achieve the benefits above, your knowledge base must follow best practices:

  1. Understand your customers: Survey your customers or analyze support interactions to uncover their top questions and concerns. Prioritize your content accordingly.

  2. Focus on findability: Choose a knowledge base solution with robust search capabilities, and use tags, categories, and metadata to make content discoverable.

  3. Write clearly and concisely: Use plain language, short paragraphs, and formatting like bullets and bolding to make content scannable and digestible.

  4. Incorporate visuals: Screenshots, GIFs, and videos can often explain a concept faster than paragraphs of text.

  5. Optimize for mobile: Responsive design is a must-have. Ensure your knowledge base loads quickly and looks great on mobile devices.

  6. Adopt a continuous improvement mindset: Use knowledge base analytics to see what content is being used most and least. Gather user feedback via ratings and surveys. Regularly prune outdated content.

  7. Make governance a priority: Establish clear ownership and processes to ensure content stays accurate and consistent as your business evolves.

When done right, knowledge bases can become a tremendous source of value for both customers and employees.

The Future of Knowledge Bases

As artificial intelligence and natural language processing continue to advance, knowledge bases are poised to become even more essential and impactful.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, AI will power 95% of all customer interactions, including live telephone and online conversations. Chatbots and virtual assistants will increasingly be able to understand complex queries and pull relevant answers from the knowledge base.

This development will further accelerate the shift toward self-service as the primary support model. Savvy companies will treat their knowledge base as the foundation for this AI-powered future, ensuring the content is robust and well-structured so machines can parse and learn from it.

Even with these technological advancements, the human touch will still be needed for the thorniest issues. But by handling the bulk of routine interactions via AI and knowledge base-backed self-service, companies will be able empower agents to focus on the highest-value interactions.

Conclusion

In today‘s hypercompetitive business landscape, providing exceptional, low-friction service is no longer optional. It‘s a baseline requirement for success. A thoughtfully designed and diligently maintained knowledge base is one of the most powerful tools in the modern customer experience arsenal.

With a knowledge base, you can:

  • Meet the dominant customer preference for self-service
  • Scale support delivery in a cost-effective manner
  • Drive greater customer loyalty and lifetime value
  • Increase employee productivity and proficiency

If you haven‘t yet prioritized your knowledge base, now is the time. Your customers expect and deserve the speed and convenience of self-service. Implemented strategically, your knowledge base will become a major source of efficiency and competitive advantage. Those who lag behind in this area will find it increasingly difficult to catch up.

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