Growth in a business means more potential visitors wishing to learn about your products and services. This is desirable, but it’s also a lot of work for your support staff. If your help desk can’t answer queries and support requests in a timely manner, your customers may look elsewhere.
However, today’s consumer is independent and resourceful. By creating a knowledge base, you can reduce the pressure on your support staff, while providing customers with instant access to the information they need.
Not all knowledge base software is created equally. Here, we’ll share five knowledge management platforms that have lots to offer businesses of all shapes and sizes.
What Is a Knowledge Base (And Why Is It Important)?
A knowledge base is a self-help resource that typically contains information about a product, service, topic, or department. Knowledge bases can be used externally, for example by your employees or partners. They can also be public facing. For example, you might provide customers with helpful tutorials, guides, and FAQs regarding your products and services.
Ultimately, a knowledge base helps people resolve their problems independently, without having to contact customer support. By offering a knowledge base, you can often reduce the number of support requests you receive and minimize your support costs.
There’s also evidence to suggest that consumers want self-help resources. Forrester found that customers prefer finding answers themselves, compared to contacting customer support.
5 Best Knowledge Management Software Solutions To Try
Although customers want self-help resources, if your knowledge base isn’t comprehensive, intuitive, and helpful, your customers may look for answers elsewhere.
To help organize and deliver your self-help resources, here are five knowledge management platforms that you may want to try.
1. SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD)
Web Help Desk is a ticketing and asset management solution that also provides a centralized knowledge base. As a combined ticket system and self-help resource, WHD recommends relevant knowledge base articles during the ticket creation process. This helps customers find the information they need, without having to wait for a response from a customer support representative.
WHD also uses artificial intelligence to suggest relevant knowledge base articles based on each inbound ticket. This helps your technicians access the resources they need, in order to resolve customer queries as quickly as possible.
If WHD can’t find a suitable knowledge base article, it will help your technicians translate their resolution notes into new self-help resources. This helps you address any gaps in your knowledge base.
2. SolarWinds Service Desk
SolarWinds Service Desk is a cloud-based IT service management (ITSM) solution. You can use this platform to streamline a number of support tasks. This includes updating your software inventory, managing software licenses, assigning tickets to the appropriate team member, and automating your release schedule.
Service Desk also features a knowledge base that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies. This enables Service Desk to identify support articles that align with incoming tickets and recommend these materials to your support staff. Your staff can then use these resources, to help them resolve incoming tickets more efficiently. Users can also access the knowledge base through the service portal, which can suggest recommended self-service solutions as they start typing their query.
3. Document360
Document360 lets you create different versions of your knowledge base. This makes Document360 a good fit for documenting products that have multiple versions, for example a mobile application or software platform.
To help your employees and customers find the resources they need, Document360 provides AI-powered search. You can also use Document360 to assign different permissions to different team members. This enables you to restrict access to specific features, or areas of your knowledge base.
4. Knowmax
Knowmax places an emphasis on actionable modules. These include decision trees, how-to guides, learning and quiz management, and self-service modules such as live chat.
Knowmax supports a range of documents, including PDFs, Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets. It also features AI-powered search that monitors your most frequently searched queries. Knowmax will use this information to prioritize your most popular content. This should help your users find useful information as quickly as possible.
To provide a good level of customer service, it’s important you identify any gaps in your content. Knowmax tracks the top search queries on your website. You can then improve your knowledge base, by producing self-help resources that address these specific gaps.
5. Zendesk Guide
Zendesk Guide is a flexible, cloud-based platform for your knowledge base. To help you populate your knowledge base, Zendesk provides both a Google Docs importer and a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor.
Zendesk Guide places an emphasis on providing a consistent experience across your support channels. You can create resources once, then distribute them across all your channels. If you want to provide in-context support inside your products or website, you may also be interested in the Zendesk Embeddables feature.
To help improve your resources, Zendesk Guide provides built-in reporting and analytics. It also uses machine learning to identify content that may require editing or updating.
Conclusion
Lots of interest in your products and services is a success metric, but it can also put your help desk under significant pressure. A comprehensive, user-friendly knowledge base can reduce your staff’s workload and overall support costs.
There are a number of knowledge base platforms on the market, and the right platform will vary depending on your business. When it comes to knowledge base software, there may be no one-size-fits-all solution, but we’d recommend looking at the following:
- SolarWinds Web Help Desk – An automated ticket management system with a knowledge base feature. By leveraging ticket management and self-help resources, WHD can display relevant knowledge base articles to your customers and customer service representatives.
- SolarWinds Service Desk – An employee self-service portal with a built-in knowledge base help desk. This platform is designed to help employees resolve their issues independently and increase efficiency for service technicians.
- Document360 – A cloud-based help desk that you can use to create a public or private knowledge base.
- Knowmax – A knowledge management platform with some unique features, including an interactive decision tree builder.
- Zendesk Guide – A knowledge base solution that enables you to write your self-help resources once, and then publish them across multiple channels.