Last updated - January 9, 2024
A knowledge base is an important part of your customer service efforts. It enables your customers to find answers to their own queries more quickly. Moreover, the support queries on your site will reduce, as customers are able to find their own resolutions to issues. That way, it creates a win-win situation for your customers as well as you. If you are maintaining a WordPress site, you will find several interesting tools to help you create a knowledge base. In this article we will look at some of the popular WordPress Knowledge Base Plugins that will help you in managing customers better. We will also explore some best practices that will equip you for better handling of a knowledge base.
The advantages of having a good knowledge base
When they encounter an issue on your site, customers are looking for an instant solution. They probably wouldn’t have the patience to contact you over the phone or email for minor issues. In many cases, the availability of simple solutions in a structured manner would contribute immensely to customer experience. When you notice recurring issues from multiple customers, you will know it would be really helpful to have it documented. You can include several forms of knowledge like instructions to install or configure a product, FAQ, common troubleshooting steps, etc.
And, you can start creating a knowledge base pretty easily. You can simply compile some of the common problems that your customers are facing, and provide systematic answers to them. Once customers start to access these snippets of knowledge, you can start improvising on it to make it more extensive. Your customers will soon start thanking for all that. Now, a comprehensive database will help your team members as well. Sharing knowledge among the team, particularly between new members, would be easier with a good knowledge base.
So, there are obvious advantages when you invest in a good knowledge base solution. You will notice faster resolution of customer issues, and a consistent improvement in customer satisfaction. Moreover, you can provide more efficient knowledge transfer to the new members on your team.
Best WordPress Knowledge Base Plugins
Maintaining a knowledge base on your site will definitely boost customer satisfaction. Thankfully, you will find several good plugins that will help you with varied needs of creating a knowledge base. Let’s explore more.
WP Knowledgebase
This plugin helps you create an exhaustive and professional knowledge base on your website. It is quite user-friendly and compatible with most WordPress themes. The fully responsive plugin ensures that your customers find a consistent experience when they access your site through different devices. The plugin helps you customize the way your knowledge base looks, even if you are no expert in coding. You can define the colors used and the layout, so that the knowledge base doesn’t look out of place with the other design elements of your site.
It makes sure that your customers are able to find what they are looking for easily with an advanced search option with predictive text. This would make searches extremely easy and useful on your site. The plugin offers you an option to pick from a choice of sidebar widgets including search, categories, tags, etc. It also provides an option to selectively display breadcrumbs and comments on your knowledge base. In addition, you can easily change the order of articles and categories with the help of a drag and drop option.
Knowledge Base for Documents and FAQs
This is another good option to create a knowledge base for your documentation and FAQs. It helps you create a professional appearance for your documentation by organizing them so that it is accessible to customers. You can choose to display articles in alphabetical or chronological order, as well arrange them in a custom order that you choose. The plugin offers up to three levels of categories and sub categories that will give you flexible options to organize articles.
The plugin comes with 16 pre-defined color themes and four style combinations. While creating articles, you will be able to use either the template of your existing theme, or a unique knowledge base template. You will have the choice to add breadcrumbs, tags, comments, etc to your knowledge base articles. Any changes in configuration can be viewed live with the help of the live preview option.
Moreover, the plugin offers Ajax-enabled search option that will make searches extremely easy for your customers. The plugin also allows you to choose a custom url for your knowledgebase articles, which can be supportive of your SEO efforts. Furthermore, if you have the help of an expert developer, you can achieve much more powerful customization.
You can read more on some useful SEO strategies for your WordPress site here.
Helpie WP Knowledge Base plugin
Helpie WP is an advanced knowledge base plugin for creating a customer self-helpdesk. You can put precise, accessible documentation for your all products and services, and let your customers find the answers themselves. It reduces the sheer volume of support tickets and emails you receive so that you can focus your precious time on sales and conversions. It has a blazing fast Search, automated Table of Contents, Navigation with Breadcrumbs and many other features to help your customers find the answers quickly.
Helpie Knowledge Base has Dynamic Capabilities with which you can limit access to who can view, edit, publish, and approve at Global, Topic and Article level. Its Front-end Editor, Publishing Capabilities, Revision System, and Insights help you to create a very practical knowledge base website to enhance your customer service. It is fully integrated with the Elementor page-builder and has specialized Elementor widgets which can be used on your main page and single pages. For best styling and customization, you can use Helpie and Elementor together.
You can get Helpie at $49 for a single-site. Check our detailed review of Helpie Knowledge base plugin here.
Very Simple Knowledge Base
Another free option that you can find in the WordPress plugin repository, this one will help you create a professional knowledge base without hassles. To display categories and posts on a page, you can use either shortcode or widget. It helps you customize the knowledge base according to your preferred layout and article structure.
You can get started with this plugin quite easily. Simply add one of the shortcodes on the particular page to get the desired column layout for your knowledge base article.
Heroic Knowledge Base
This is a premium plugin that would help you save time and money in terms of customer support. It will be an actual boost to your customer satisfaction rate too, as studies point to the fact that customers will be more happy when they find solutions on their own. The Ajax-enabled option would help customers to find answers to their queries in quick time. Heroic Knowledge Base plugin comes with three widget options that will enable you to display article, categories and authors across the site.
Moreover, it gives you total control over the layout of your knowledge base. You can re-order and organize categories the way you like it with the help of the drag and drop sorting option. The plugin also helps you provide attachments to knowledge base articles, which can be really handy when you are resolving complex issues of customers.
Heroic Knowledge Base also has comprehensive analytics options, which helps you understand the efficiency of your knowledge base articles. Moreover, there is an option to collect feedback for each article, to know which ones are doing good and which ones are not. You will find it integrating seamlessly with your WordPress site and themes, and it allows easy developer-level customizations as well.
The basic version of the plugin is available for purchase at $129, which can be used on a single site.
Knowledge Base | Helpdesk | Support | Wiki WordPress Plugin
You will be able to create an extensive knowledge base with the help of this plugin. This plugin offers drag and drop sorting option to organize categories and knowledge base articles. It allows you to create custom slugs for your articles and posts, as well as optionally display breadcrumbs. The plugin offers quite a lot of options to customize the layout and structure of your knowledge base. With the help of shortcodes and widgets, you can experiment with the display options for your articles and categories.
You can purchase a regular license of this plugin for $40.
Integrating Knowledge base with your help desk system
A help desk system would be something a lot of your customers would be depending on to raise a support request. You can find quite a few great WordPress help desk plugins here. A creative way to deal with customer requests would be to integrate your help desk system with a knowledge base.
WSDesk offers a great option by integrating knowledge base articles to its support form. By enabling the option for Auto suggestion in the plugin settings, you can manage to do this on WSDesk. Based on the keyword that the customer searches for, the plugin will display a relevant article from the knowledge base.
How to create a useful knowledge base?
Now, if you are setting out to create a knowledge base for your WordPress site or WooCommerce store, you might have to consider a few things. Here are a few aspects that you need to pay attention to.
Assess the requirement
First of all, you need to assess what difference a knowledge base can offer to your business. Analyze your support requests, and understand how there are are repeated queries on your store that is taking up a lot of time of your support agents.
Collect relevant articles from all departments
Depending on your business structure, there will be several scenarios where customers interact with you. You can collect repeated queries from each of these interaction points and include them in your knowledge base.
Organize the content
When you maintain a knowledge base, you need to make a consistent design and layout for it. The major advantage of using one of the solutions discussed in this article would be the control you will have over this aspect. You can create knowledge base that has a conssitent and interesting design.
Make it easily accessible
A knowledge base is supposed to resolve issues faced by customers in quick time. For this to happen, you need to make them easy to find. Most importantly you need to organize in a systematic fashion.
Measure the success
Like any content initiative on your site, your knowledge base too needs to be measured thoroughly. You need to analyze how customers are using it, and what difference it makes to their lives. Constantly updating the knowledge base would help you keep it consistently relevant.
Knowledge base for self service
Businesses are continuously trying to improve the way they deal with customers. Being able to instantly resolve customer issues would help your business a lot. A good knowledge base is thus an asset to a good customer service department. Most of the plugins discussed in this article would help you organize your knowledge base in a professional manner. In addition, they provide features like Ajax search to help customers to find your knowledge base articles. By maintaining an extensive and systematic knowledge base, you can improve the customer experience on your store quite significantly.
