Lesson 3: Choosing the Right Knowledge Base Software

Serious talk. There are some questions you're gonna wanna ask yourself before you commit to your new Knowledge Base software 💍

How much do you want to customize? Do you want an all-in-one or integrated system? How are your customers going to engage with your content?

ALL THE QUESTIONS!

Don't worry—I've got you covered 💪

TL;DR

• All-in-one system or integrated Knowledge Base? That is the question 🤔
• Customers can engage with your docs collaboratively, in a forum, or read-only format
• There are many ways to customize a Knowledge Base. You'll need to keep this in mind when choosing the software that is best for you 🚀

Transcript

[00:00]

How do you choose the right Knowledge Base software for you? Well, there's a couple of questions you're going to want to ask yourself from, do you want your Knowledge Base to be tied in with your ticketing system? How do you want to engage with your users? Do you want to add customization to your Knowledge Base? And these are all questions we're going to jump into right now.

[00:20]

Do you want your Knowledge Base tied in with your ticketing? So there are a few options here you can do an all in one platform and this is where your ticketing, your CRM and your Knowledge Base would all be in one system. And these are often great for large teams or if you want to keep everything together in one place. Sometimes these can be less flexible because they offer less integrations. And the payments set up as often on a per user basis.

[00:48]

Another alternative is that you can use an integrated Knowledge Base. So your Knowledge Base is separate from your ticketing system, and this allows you to take your knowledge base with you as you grow and change platforms and tools. Payments are usually a monthly subscription on these types of platforms.

[01:03]

The next question you're going to want to ask yourself is how will your users engage? There's a few ways that your users can engage with your content. One way is collaborative documentation. An example of this would be Wikipedia. It's crowdsource content that when put together, creates a single document.

[01:18]

There's forum documentation. An example of that would be Quora where people can ask questions and then have them answered by a community, and then there's read only documentation where companies with a product or service can control the content to be shared with their users.

[01:33]

And lastly, how much customization do you want? You're gonna want to ask yourself, do you want templates fresh out of the gate that you can use, or do you want to be able to customize your Knowledge Base further to align with your brand? Are you going to be using widgets? There's different ways to display access to your knowledge base. For example, here at HelpDocs, we have the Lighthouse widget, which makes it plain sailing for your users to help themselves without ever leaving your app or website. So do you want to have widgets integrated in your knowledge base so that you can display your content in different ways to your customers?

[02:06]

Integrations is also something you want to ask yourself. Do you want to integrate with your team's communication tools like Slack, or do you want to set up your Knowledge Base with a ticketing system.

[02:16]

And do you have any custom behavior that you would want to create for your knowledge base? Are there aspects of your knowledge base that you need to customize, such as adding multiple languages, adding embeds, HTML elements into your articles? If you have B2C or B2B customers that you might want to click something when they land on your Knowledge Base to say what kind of customers they are. Customizations and integrations like that are something that you want to take into consideration when you're thinking about your Knowledge Base software.

[02:47]

Now that you've asked yourself these questions and really know what you need from a Knowledge Base. You'll be able to choose the right Knowledge Base software for you!