Are customers frustrated and agents overwhelmed, despite your self-service efforts?
The right external knowledge base software features can make all the difference.
An external knowledge base acts as a self-service hub, providing customers with readily available answers, troubleshooting guides, and tutorials, empowering them to find solutions independently.
In this blog, we’ll explore the essential features of external knowledge base software, highlighting the functionalities that can transform your customer support and drive self-service success.
What Is External Knowledge Base Software?
External knowledge base software is a platform designed to create and manage a public-facing knowledge base or help center that empowers customers with self-service support. It’s a centralized repository of information, typically accessible through a company’s website or a dedicated self-service support portal.
It’s like a digital library of helpful resources, available 24/7, that guides customers toward solutions and reduces their reliance on contacting your support team. External knowledge base software typically offers content authoring tools, customization options, search functionality, and analytics to help you create, manage, and optimize your knowledge base content for a seamless customer experience.
For example, an e-commerce company might use an external knowledge base to provide customers with comprehensive information about its products, shipping policies, return procedures, and FAQs. The knowledge base might include articles on tracking orders, troubleshooting common product issues, and understanding warranty information.
Why Do You Need External Knowledge Base Software?
External knowledge base software helps businesses empower customers, streamline support operations, and enhance brand image. Let’s explore these and other benefits in detail.
Enables Self-Service for Your Customers
Customers today expect instant access to information and solutions. An external knowledge base provides a readily available resource where they can find answers to their questions, troubleshoot problems, and learn about your products or services independently, without needing to contact your support team.
This empowers customers to resolve issues on their own, improving their experience and fostering a sense of self-sufficiency.
Helps Reduce Your Support Costs
By providing customers with self-service options, you can significantly reduce the volume of support tickets and inquiries. This frees your support team to focus on more complex issues, optimizes resource allocation, and lowers overall support costs.
A well-maintained knowledge base can deflect a significant portion of support requests, leading to substantial cost savings.
Enhances Your Customer Satisfaction
When customers can easily find solutions to their problems, their satisfaction levels increase.
A knowledge base provides readily available answers to common questions, troubleshooting guides, and tutorials, leading to happier customers, reduced churn, and increased loyalty. Satisfied customers are more likely to recommend your brand and make repeat purchases.
Improves Your Product Adoption
A knowledge base can provide a comprehensive guide to your products or services, helping users understand their features, functionalities, and benefits.
This can lead to improved product adoption, as users become more confident using your offerings and are more likely to realize their full value.
Boosts Your Brand Credibility
A well-structured and informative knowledge base enhances your brand’s credibility and professionalism. It demonstrates your commitment to customer support and product excellence, building trust and confidence among your audience.
A knowledge base can also be a valuable resource for content marketing, showcasing your expertise, and attracting organic traffic to your website.
Enables 24/7 Support for Your Customers
Unlike your support team, a knowledge base is available 24/7, providing customers with instant access to information and solutions whenever they need it, regardless of time zones or business hours.
This ensures that customers can always find help, even outside normal business hours, improving their experience and reducing frustration.
Maintains Consistent Information
A knowledge base ensures that all customers receive the same accurate and up-to-date information, eliminating inconsistencies and confusion that can arise from relying solely on human support. This consistency contributes to a more professional and reliable brand image.
What Are the Key Features to Look for in External Knowledge Base Software?
Choosing the right external knowledge base software is crucial for creating a self-service platform that empowers your customers and streamlines your support operations. Here are some key features to look for in external knowledge base software:
AI-Powered Content Authoring
An AI-powered knowledge base writer can significantly simplify and accelerate content creation. Look for features that leverage AI to generate content ideas, suggest improvements to language and style, and even translate articles into multiple languages.
The content authoring platform enables a WYSIWYG editor, which allows you to create comprehensive, error-free, visually appealing guides and documentation. You can insert images, videos, and links directly into your documents, enhancing the instructional value of the content.
Customization & Branding
Your knowledge base should seamlessly integrate with your brand identity. Look for software that allows you to customize the look and feel of your knowledge base with your logo, colors, fonts, and custom domain. This creates a consistent brand experience and reinforces your brand image.
It should provide you with multiple pre-approved knowledge base templates that enable an advanced home page builder with drag-and-drop functionality to manage various elements of your landing page.
Collaboration Tools
Creating and maintaining a knowledge base is often a team effort. Choose software that facilitates collaboration with features like co-authoring, version control, and internal comments. This allows multiple users to contribute, edit, and review articles, ensuring accuracy and incorporating diverse perspectives.
It should enable internal comments to engage in real-time conversations, share insights, and refine your content collectively, allowing your customers and employees to rate your knowledge base articles or comment on them.
Analytics & Reporting
Track the performance of your knowledge base with analytics and reporting features. Monitor key metrics like article views, search queries, user feedback, and popular content to identify areas for improvement and measure its effectiveness.
The reporting feature should also let you fetch a list of all inactive and broken links along with the page titles for easy link maintenance.
Integrations with Other Tools
Integrate your knowledge base with other business tools, such as your CRM or help desk system, to streamline workflows and provide a unified customer experience. This will allow for seamless data exchange and ensure that your knowledge base is an integral part of your support ecosystem.
It should also support API integration to help you extract the entire list of articles from your knowledge base via API. Also, integrating your knowledge base with in-house tools like Chat, Help Desk, and Survey to Knowledge Base software makes it a perfect customer support suite.
Multi-Channel Accessibility
Your external knowledge base should be available across multiple platforms to ensure users can access information whenever and wherever they need it. Customers today interact with businesses through various channels, from desktop websites and mobile apps to social media and live chat.
Also, features like embeddable widgets enable businesses to place relevant knowledge base articles directly within their product interface, reducing friction for users seeking answers. Some solutions even provide offline access, allowing customers to download guides and reference material when they don’t have an internet connection.
Self-Service & Community Engagement
Your external knowledge base should do more than store information—it should actively encourage self-service and community-driven support. Customers expect to find answers quickly without contacting support teams, and a well-structured knowledge base helps them do just that. It should include detailed FAQs, step-by-step tutorials, and troubleshooting guides that are easy to navigate.
Also, to improve content quality and relevance, users should be able to provide feedback on articles, such as rating their helpfulness or suggesting improvements. Some knowledge bases also integrate discussion forums where customers can engage with each other, share insights, and troubleshoot issues collaboratively.
SEO Optimization & Analytics
A knowledge base is only useful if users can easily find the necessary information. To maximize its effectiveness, you must ensure your knowledge base is optimized for search engines and provides insights into user behavior.
SEO-friendly features such as keyword optimization, meta descriptions, and clean URLs make articles more discoverable through Google and other search engines, helping customers find solutions on their own. Internal search analytics also play a crucial role by tracking user queries, identifying common search terms, and highlighting gaps in content where users struggle to find answers.
Privacy Features
Protecting your knowledge base content and user data is crucial. Look for software with robust security features, such as encryption, access controls, and regular security updates. This safeguards your information and maintains user trust.
You should be able to restrict access to specific IP addresses or networks to ensure secure viewing. It should also let you customize folder visibility, enable private sites for employees, and secure authentication with SSO via Okta or Azure AD.
Security Compliance
As businesses grow, their knowledge base should scale with them. Look for software that supports unlimited articles, high traffic, and compliance with security standards like GDPR, HIPAA, or SOC 2, ensuring data protection and reliability.
Compliance with industry regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 is essential for businesses handling sensitive information, ensuring that data is protected from breaches and unauthorized access.
Choose Feature-Rich External Knowledge Base Software & Enable 24/7 Self-Service
External knowledge base software is a powerful tool that can transform your customer support and empower your customers. By providing a centralized repository of information readily accessible to users 24/7, you can significantly reduce support costs, improve customer satisfaction, and enhance your brand reputation.
When choosing your ideal tool, consider key features such as AI-powered content creation, customization and branding, user management and access control, robust security, collaboration tools, analytics and reporting, and other tools.
ProProfs Knowledge Base, with its intuitive interface, powerful AI capabilities, and customizable options, ProProfs Knowledge Base can transform how you support your customers and drive your business forward. You may explore the tool more or request a demo below.
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