In 2025, businesses need to be fast and responsive to stay in the good books of their customers. In today’s fast-paced economy, customers expect quick answers to any of their queries. Just a minute’s delay is enough to make them seek out a different company and ditch yours.
So, the ability to deliver customer support instantly is necessary. The number one tool that enables businesses to do this is a knowledge base (KB). A knowledge base is a tool that can provide knowledge to both your employees and your customers. It allows for self-service, and in case of more complex requests, faster resolution by providing the right data to your teams.
For SaaS companies, e-commerce brands, and service-oriented startups, a good KB is mandatory if they want to be competitive.
Today, we will learn how KBs empower both customers and internal teams in making the right decisions and providing the best service.
Why Customers Prefer Self-Service and How KBs Empower Them
Before we can learn why KBs empower customers, we have to learn why customers prefer self-service. After all, KBs are intended for self-service. This goes against the norms of the traditional service sector, where customers don’t do research on their own; the service provider does it for them.
However, that has changed in the past decade. According to HBR, 81% of customers across all industries prefer to do self-service. According to Vanilla forums, 77% of customers view brands positively if they have excellent self-service options.
This is mostly because customers are simply tired of waiting on hold for an over-encumbered support agent to handle their call. Instead, if they can find a good resource that provides them with the right information quickly, they are much happier.
This also means that they can look up any issue at any time without having to wait for office hours.
This is where knowledge bases come in. Customer-facing knowledge bases provide all of the above benefits to customers who want self-service. So, creating one and making it publicly accessible will automatically bring more customers to your proverbial doorstep.
When done right, your knowledge base becomes:
- A first-stop resource for customers navigating your product
- A confidence builder for new users (especially in SaaS)
- A scalable way to handle increasing support volume without increasing headcount
Customers feel more in control, and support teams get fewer redundant tickets. Customers also feel more favorably towards a service that trusts its customer base to be intelligent and do their own research and make their own decisions instead of being nudged towards a specific one.
Internal Teams Run Smoother with a Knowledge Base
A knowledge base specifically created for your internal teams empowers them to be more productive and perform better. Customer support agents are perhaps one of the most overworked classes of workers. They have to deal with so many requests, some of which are new, others are follow-ups, and some are just redundant requests.
With a knowledge base, a lot of that work can be streamlined and simplified. For example, some knowledge bases have ticket tracking built into them. This can help support teams manage more urgent requests first and deal with minor requests later.
Knowledge bases can easily scale with your operations, so your teams can handle more requests with ease. There are several other advantages as well.
Here are some examples:
- Onboarding new hires becomes faster with centralized product/process documentation and tutorials.
- Support agents answer more confidently and quickly by referencing verified internal articles and previous instances of similar queries.
- Cross-team collaboration improves, since everyone accesses the same information. So there are no redundant tickets, and different agents can easily pick up from where others left off.
So, whether you just want to improve your team’s performance or make them better at handling requests, a KB will help either way.
Key Features Required in a Knowledge Base
Knowledge bases are very advantageous, but make no mistake, how well they aid your customers and teams depends on several key features and functions. If a KB doesn’t provide these features, then you may have to reevaluate whether you should use it or upgrade to a different alternative.
The strength of your knowledge base lies not only in what it stores, but also in how it delivers, as well as how easy it is to use. Keeping that in mind, here are some of the key features that your knowledge base should have.
- Clear categorization and hierarchy. This makes it easy to navigate the KB.
- Concise, jargon-free writing. This is so that non-technical users can understand. It’s a key feature in a customer-facing knowledge base. However, this is more dependent on how the documentation is written, not on the KB itself.
- Continuous feedback loops. A good KB has analytics to identify knowledge gaps. It utilizes user feedback, searching behavior, and performance of individual articles to identify the gaps.
- Decision Trees. This is a powerful search technique that lets people find the right content based on context and previous queries.
These features are necessary to provide a great self-service experience to your customers and empower your agents. That’s why you must look beyond common household names in the customer support space. For example, Zendesk is a popular customer support software. However, it is not the best fit for everyone. For smaller companies, it appears to be overbuilt and expensive.
That’s why you should explore Zendesk alternatives that are more suited to your customer base and company.
When comparing tools, consider:
- Does it support both external and internal documentation?
- Can it scale with your team as you grow?
- Does it offer analytics to track search success and content gaps?
- Is it easy for non-tech users to update and manage articles?
- Does it have customization options for documentation to match your brand aesthetic?
Whether you’re a startup needing agility or an enterprise seeking structure, the right knowledge base can become your most powerful support asset.
Conclusion
A KB is not just a customer service add-on. It is a strategic investment to make your operations smoother and provide faster resolutions to customer queries and complaints.
The best KBs allow your customers to help themselves and enable support teams to focus on the important stuff. They can scale with your operations and ensure that your customers can always find the answers they need.
So, invest in a good KB and ditch the static FAQs and dumb chatbots. You will thank yourself for doing so.
