Learn what a knowledge base is and why your business needs one. Discover types, benefits, best practices, and how to create effective knowledge bases that reduce support tickets.
You’ve probably found yourself answering the same questions repeatedly, whether it’s from customers, team members, or new employees. That’s where understanding what is a knowledge base becomes crucial for your business operations.
Simply put, it’s your organization’s central hub for storing and sharing information—from product details and troubleshooting guides to company policies and procedures.
In this blog post, we’ll explore what a knowledge base is and why every growing business needs one. We’ll also look at how Trupeer helps streamline this process.
What is a Knowledge Base?
A knowledge base is basically your company’s Wikipedia. It’s where you document everything from how to reset passwords to complex technical procedures, company policies to product tutorials.
When someone has a question, they should be able to find the answer without hunting through emails or bothering their colleagues.
Most knowledge bases include search functionality, categorized content, and user-friendly navigation. Some even incorporate AI-powered features that can suggest relevant articles or provide instant answers to common questions.
The best knowledge bases also integrate with your existing workflow. If people have to go out of their way to use it, they won’t. That’s why modern platforms connect with help center software, chat systems, and other tools your team already uses.
👀 Did You Know? Wikipedia is the world’s largest public knowledge base, with over 6.7 million articles in English alone, and it’s maintained almost entirely by volunteers.
Types of Knowledge Base
Depending on your audience and goals, you’ll want to choose the right type for your needs. 🧑💻
1. Internal knowledge base
An internal knowledge base serves your team members and employees. It’s your go-to resource for company policies, procedures, training videos, and institutional knowledge that keeps your business running smoothly.
This type of knowledge base typically includes HR policies, technical documentation, onboarding guides, and process workflows. It’s particularly valuable for remote teams where knowledge sharing can’t happen through casual hallway conversations.
Your internal knowledge base becomes especially crucial during employee transitions. When someone leaves the company, their knowledge doesn’t walk out the door with them if it’s properly documented. New team members can get up to speed faster, and existing employees can reference procedures without constantly asking colleagues.
The key is making sure your internal knowledge base stays current and comprehensive. Dead links and outdated information can frustrate employees and reduce adoption rates.
👀 Did You Know? In some organizations, the knowledge base doubles as the company’s collective memory. When employees leave, their documented processes and fixes remain, preventing knowledge loss.
External knowledge base
Your external knowledge base faces customers and prospects. This is your first line of support; it handles common questions automatically so your team can focus on complex problems that actually need human intervention.
Customer-facing knowledge bases typically include product documentation, troubleshooting guides, getting started tutorials, and answers to frequently asked questions. They’re often integrated with your website and support channels.
The best external knowledge bases reduce support tickets by 40-60% while improving customer satisfaction. Customers prefer finding answers immediately rather than waiting for email responses, especially for simple questions like pricing information or basic troubleshooting.
Additionally, external knowledge bases also serve a secondary purpose as sales tools.
Prospects researching your product can find detailed information about features, use cases, and implementation details without talking to a salesperson.
💡 Pro Tip: Embed micro-feedback in every article. A simple ‘Was this helpful?’ button or emoji reaction gives you constant signals on what to fix or expand without a massive survey.
Why Most Businesses Struggle Without a Knowledge Base
Let’s talk about what happens when information is scattered across different systems, living in people’s heads, or buried in email threads. ⬇️
Your customer support team becomes a bottleneck.
Every password reset question, every ‘How do I do this?’ inquiry, every policy clarification requires human intervention. Your support agents spend 70% of their time answering the same ten questions repeatedly while complex issues pile up in the queue.
New employee onboarding becomes expensive and slow. Each new hire needs individual attention from busy team members. They interrupt colleagues with basic questions that could be answered in documentation.
It takes months for them to become fully productive because they’re gradually piecing together institutional knowledge.
Then, your team duplicates work constantly.
Marketing creates a feature comparison that sales already built. Customer success develops training materials that product has already documented differently. Nobody knows what resources exist or where to find them.
These problems compound as you grow. What works fine with five people becomes chaos with 50. The companies that scale smoothly are the ones that systematize their knowledge early.
Benefits of Having a Knowledge Base
Now, let’s explore the concrete ways a knowledge base transforms your operations.
1. Creates a single source of truth
When all your important information lives in one searchable location, everything becomes more efficient.
New employees can find onboarding materials without bothering their managers. Support agents can quickly locate troubleshooting steps for complex issues. Sales teams can access the latest product information without hunting through shared drives.
🎥 Trupeer Insight: Knowledge bases often get ignored when they’re dry. Trupeer’s automated zooms, highlights, and captions make walkthroughs more engaging so your team actually uses the resources you’ve built.
Drive Knowledge Base Adoption Using Trupeer
Dramatically reduces support workload
Here’s where you’ll see immediate ROI. A comprehensive knowledge base handles 60-80% of routine customer inquiries automatically. Password resets, billing questions, basic troubleshooting, feature explanations—all resolved instantly without human intervention.
Your support team transforms from answer-providers to problem-solvers. They tackle complex technical issues, handle escalations, and focus on scenarios that genuinely need human expertise. Response times improve for important issues because agents aren’t swamped with routine questions.
💡 Pro Tip: Start tracking your most common support tickets right now. These become your knowledge base priorities because solving them automatically provides immediate value.
Accelerates employee productivity
Self-service information access changes how your team works.
New hires find personalized onboarding videos, company policies, and job-specific resources without interrupting busy colleagues. Existing employees reference procedures, look up technical details, and stay updated on changes independently.
This shift frees up significant time for experienced team members. Rather than answering routine questions from newer employees, they focus on strategic work, mentoring, and complex problem-solving.
Speeds up customer onboarding and training
Getting new customers to success quickly determines whether they stick around and expand their usage. A well-structured knowledge base guides users through setup processes, feature adoption, and best practices without requiring extensive hand-holding from your team.
AI tools like Trupeer help here. Rather than creating static documentation, you can build engaging video tutorials that walk customers through complex processes step by step.
Even better? Trupeer’s AI-powered video editor lets you turn simple screen recordings into studio-quality tutorials with realistic voiceovers that automatically sync to your recording.
For example, a SaaS company rolling out a new dashboard can capture a quick walkthrough and publish it directly in the knowledge base. Customers follow along step by step, reducing the time it takes for them to get familiar with the product.
Maintains current documentation effortlessly
Keeping documentation updated traditionally requires significant ongoing effort. Product interfaces change, procedures evolve, and policies get updated, but the documentation lags behind because updating it is time-consuming and tedious.
Trupeer solves this maintenance challenge.
When your product interface changes, you can quickly update visual content by recording new interactions. The AI refines your video script automatically, removing filler words and grammar stumbles, so updated tutorials maintain professional quality without extensive manual editing.
You can also edit videos by simply making changes to your script in Trupeer. Yes, it’s that simple!
What to Include in Your Knowledge Base
Strategic content selection determines whether your knowledge base gets used or ignored. Here’s what you should be adding. 👇
Start with frequently asked questions
Your FAQ section should solve real problems, not just list obvious questions. Look at your actual support tickets, chat logs, and sales conversations to identify what people genuinely ask about repeatedly.
Structure your FAQs strategically:
Group by user intent, not company departments: Someone troubleshooting login issues doesn’t want to scroll through billing questions
Write complete answers that anticipate follow-ups: If someone asks about refunds, cover timeline, required information, and initiation process in one comprehensive response
Use clear, searchable headings: Match the language your users actually speak, not internal jargon
Include links to related resources: Connect FAQs to tutorials, policies, or contact options for complex issues
The best FAQ sections feel conversational and helpful, addressing the complete user journey rather than providing minimal responses that generate more questions.
Build comprehensive tutorials and how-to guides
Step-by-step tutorials form the backbone of most successful knowledge bases. These guides should walk users through complete processes, from initial setup to advanced features, with clear instructions and visual support.
The most effective tutorials combine written instructions with visual elements. Screenshots show users exactly what to expect at each step, while videos demonstrate complex interactions that are difficult to explain in text.
Trupeer takes this further by turning a simple recording into a complete guide. It automatically captures screenshots from the video, creates step-by-step instructions, and generates summaries and titles.
For example, recording a product walkthrough of how to create a sales order in SAP instantly produces steps such as:
Step 1: Navigate to the SAP dashboard and select the ‘Sales’ tab
Step 2: Click on ‘Create Sales Order’
The output is a structured tutorial with clear visuals and text, ready to add to your knowledge base. You can fine-tune the content in a seamless word-like editor, add callouts where needed, and publish it directly.
Hear it from nSpire, who augmented their knowledge library with Trupeer: “Trupeer simplified video creation for me, allowing me to create a knowledge library of 20+ videos in just a few days.”
Add community discussion areas
Community sections transform your knowledge base from a static information repository into an interactive resource where users help each other solve problems and share insights.
User-generated content often addresses edge cases and specific scenarios that your team might not document otherwise. Experienced customers share creative solutions, workarounds, and best practices that benefit the entire community while reducing your support workload.
To make community sections successful:
Moderate actively for quality and accuracy
Highlight exceptional contributions
Incorporate valuable community answers into official documentation
Create clear guidelines for participation
Maintain news and updates sections
Keep users informed about product changes, new features, and important policy updates through dedicated announcement areas. This prevents confusion when things change and helps users discover new capabilities they might otherwise miss.
Organize your updates strategically:
Categorize by audience type: Technical updates for developers, feature announcements for end users, policy changes for administrators
Prioritize by impact level: Major changes get prominent placement and detailed explanations
Use consistent formatting: Users should quickly understand what’s changed and how it affects them
Archive older updates: Keep recent information accessible while maintaining historical records
Read: How to announce your SaaS product updates
Include comprehensive reference materials
Technical products need detailed reference documentation covering APIs, configuration options, and feature specifications. This content serves users who need specific technical details for implementation or troubleshooting rather than step-by-step guidance.
💡 Pro Tip: Keep reference materials separate from tutorial content to avoid overwhelming users who simply want to complete specific tasks. Many users bookmark reference pages for quick lookup during development work, so design them for repeat visits rather than linear reading.
4 Best Practices for Managing a Knowledge Base
Following these practices helps your team build a resource that customers trust and return to.
1. Design intuitive organization systems
Think of your knowledge base like a library: sections, tags, and folders guide readers to the right shelf without confusion.
For example, an e-commerce brand could have high-level folders such as Orders and Payments, Shipping and Delivery, and Returns and Refunds.
Within each folder, tags like Track order, Cancel order, or Payment methods help customers quickly zero in on the article they need. This cuts down browsing time and reduces unnecessary support tickets.
🎥 Trupeer Insight: A cluttered KB loses trust fast. Trupeer’s Brand Kit keeps your visuals, colors, and layouts consistent across every guide, so your knowledge base looks professional and polished without manual formatting.
Maintain Visual Consistency Easily Using Trupeer
2. Implement powerful search capabilities
Even the best-written content loses impact if users cannot find it.
AI-powered search makes knowledge bases more intuitive by understanding queries written in natural language.
For instance, a customer who types ‘my payment is stuck’ will still land on an article titled Resolving failed transactions. Without AI search, the same query might return no results, leaving the customer frustrated.
🚨 Fact Alert: Gaming communities were early innovators in creating self-service knowledge bases. Wikis built by fans often became more detailed and up-to-date than the official manuals.
3. Prioritize visual content and multimedia
Written explanations help, but visuals take a knowledge base to the next level.
Screenshots give users a reference point, and videos demonstrate actions that might be confusing in text alone. A well-placed walkthrough video can turn a lengthy explanation into something users understand in seconds.
🎥 Trupeer Insight: Trupeer makes creating these assets effortless.
For example, if you document how to connect a CRM integration, Trupeer outputs step-by-step screenshots, a structured article, and a polished tutorial video. You can also add an avatar presenter for a more engaging experience, giving customers multiple formats to learn from.
Use Trupeer To Build Learning Resources
4. Support multiple languages
Customers prefer learning in their own language, and a multilingual knowledge base shows that you value accessibility. If your company serves users in Europe, offering articles in English, French, and German can immediately improve customer satisfaction.
Trupeer makes this process faster with built-in translations in 30+ languages.
For example, a software guide recorded in English can be automatically translated into Spanish and Hindi in just a few clicks. This helps support teams avoid the heavy manual work of recreating the same user guide for different markets.
🎥 Trupeer Insight: Monitor usage analytics to understand which languages have the highest demand for translated content, then expand your multilingual offerings based on actual user needs rather than assumptions.
Optimize Global Training Easily With Trupeer
Examples of Top-Notch Knowledge Bases
Learning from successful implementations helps you understand what works in practice. These are some stand-out knowledge base examples. 📃
Stripe’s developer documentation
Stripe has created one of the most respected knowledge bases in the developer community by focusing relentlessly on user success. Their documentation combines comprehensive reference materials with practical tutorials and real-world examples that developers can implement immediately.
What makes Stripe exceptional is their interactive approach:
Code examples are live and testable directly in the documentation
Error scenarios are covered thoroughly with specific solutions
Content stays current with frequent updates and community contributions
The visual design prioritizes clarity and scannability, while the information hierarchy is logical and consistent.
🚨 Fact Alert: Open-source communities often rely heavily on knowledge bases built by contributors. For example, Linux distributions maintain detailed wikis where volunteers document fixes and updates in real time.
Zendesk’s help center
Zendesk demonstrates how to structure content for different user types effectively. End users, administrators, and developers each have tailored sections with appropriate depth and technical detail.
Their knowledge base excels at progressive disclosure by starting with basic concepts and linking to detailed information as users need it. Visual elements break up text strategically and illustrate complex concepts clearly.
The integration with their support platform is seamless, making it easy for users to escalate to human help when self-service doesn’t resolve their issues.
HubSpot Academy
HubSpot has transformed its knowledge base into a comprehensive learning platform that serves both customers and prospects. They combine traditional documentation with structured courses, certifications, and community elements.
Their strategy involves creating educational and engaging video content that helps users succeed with digital marketing generally, not just with HubSpot’s tools. This approach builds trust and positions them as thought leaders while serving immediate documentation needs.
Additionally, HubSpot’s extensive use of video demonstrates the value of investing in high-quality tutorial videos.
💡 Pro Tip: Write articles with intent signals in mind. If someone searches ‘reset password,’ they’re probably in a hurry—give them the answer up top, then add detail below for those who want context.
Keep Your Knowledge Base Sharp With Trupeer
Building a knowledge base takes effort, but maintaining one takes even more.
Trupeer gives you the systems to keep pace without the extra workload. You don’t start from scratch each time something changes: a recording turns into written steps, screenshots, and a tutorial in minutes.
New features, new workflows, and even global translations happen on the same timeline as your product releases. It shifts documentation from a catch-up task into a natural part of your workflow.
If you want a knowledge base that scales as smoothly as your product, try Trupeer for free today! ✅
FAQs
1. What does a good knowledge base look like?
A good knowledge base is well-structured, easy to navigate, and written in clear, simple language. It should include FAQs, how-to articles, troubleshooting guides, and product walkthroughs that help people solve problems quickly. The best examples support both customer self-service and internal knowledge sharing, improving overall support efficiency.
2. What is a synonym for knowledge base?
A knowledge base can also be called a help center, resource library, support hub, or information repository. The term often depends on context: a help center for customers, an internal wiki for employees, and a knowledge repository for knowledge management systems.
3. Do I need a knowledge base?
Yes, most businesses benefit from one. A knowledge base reduces repetitive support tickets, helps customers solve problems on their own, and enables smoother internal knowledge sharing across teams. If you want to improve support efficiency, investing in knowledge base software is a smart step.
4. What does it mean to manage a knowledge base?
Managing a knowledge base means regularly updating content, organizing information logically, and ensuring accuracy. It’s part of knowledge management, where the goal is to keep information useful, relevant, and easy to find for both customers and employees.
5. What are the seven knowledge bases?
In educational and organizational contexts, the seven knowledge bases often include content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, curriculum knowledge, general pedagogical knowledge, knowledge of learners, knowledge of context, and knowledge of educational ends.
6. How do you create a knowledge base?
To create a knowledge base, you need to organize your topics, write helpful articles, and choose the right software.
With tools like Trupeer, you can record your screen once and automatically generate both the video and a step-by-step written article, perfect for help centers and internal knowledge sharing.
