What is a knowledge base?
A knowledge base is an organized collection of articles, guides, and answers about a product or subject. It can provide public help for customers, internal reference material for a team, or source information for an AI assistant.
What a knowledge base contains
How-to articles explain how to complete a task. Reference articles describe fields, settings, or limits. Troubleshooting articles help readers investigate a problem, and FAQs answer recurring questions.
Organize articles around the tasks and product areas readers recognize. Use descriptive titles, explain prerequisites, and link to related instructions when a task depends on another step.
Who reads it
Customers use a knowledge base to find answers and learn tasks. Support teams use it to share consistent instructions and record troubleshooting knowledge. AI assistants can retrieve articles as source material for their answers.
Each audience needs accurate information. An article with an outdated permission requirement can mislead a person or an assistant, even if the rest of the instructions are correct.
Keeping articles current
Review documentation when workflows, labels, policies, or permissions change. Check the instructions against the product and assign an owner to correct mismatches. Customer questions and failed searches can help identify missing coverage.
The freshness tax discusses documentation maintenance. The help center was a stopgap examines the role of a help center alongside in-product assistance.
Writing for people and assistants
Give each article a clear purpose. Keep the answer close to the question, use the product's terms, and state which roles or plans the instructions apply to. Include screenshots where they explain something text alone would leave unclear, and review them with the instructions.
How Frigade fits
Frigade Assistant learns workflows from your product and can use documentation for additional context. Frigade Knowledge compares help articles with what it learns from the product and proposes corrections for your team to review.
Read how to keep a knowledge base up to date when the product changes every day for the approach, or explore our customer support AI comparison.
Common questions
- What is the difference between a knowledge base and a help center?
- A help center is a place where customers find support information, often including knowledge base articles. A knowledge base can also be internal, with troubleshooting notes, policies, or reference material for a team. The terms overlap, so it helps to specify the audience and access rules.
- What is knowledge base software?
- Knowledge base software provides tools for writing, organizing, searching, and publishing articles. Depending on the product, it may also offer access controls, feedback, and review workflows. The team still needs a process for checking whether the information is accurate.