What is Knowledge Base Software?

Knowledge Base Software: Explained

Knowledge base software enables organizations to discover, source, synthesize, create, curate, and optimize trusted knowledge and expertise in a central hub to deliver correct, consistent, compliant, and consumable answers in the flow of customer conversations and work processes. It empowers teams to create, edit, and access a wealth of knowledge, including FAQs, troubleshooting guides, product documentation, standard operating procedures, process expertise, and more.

Knowledge Base Software: Why you need one

Efficient Information Management: Knowledge base software enables businesses to organize vast amounts of information in a structured manner, making it easily accessible to employees and customers alike. This ensures that valuable information is not lost amidst the chaos of disparate documents and email threads.
Enhanced Customer Support: By providing customers with self-service access to a knowledge base, businesses can empower them to find solutions to their queries independently. This reduces the burden on support teams, decreases response times, and ultimately leads to higher levels of customer satisfaction.
Consistency in Communication: With knowledge base software, businesses can maintain consistency in their messaging across various channels. Whether it’s answering customer inquiries or onboarding new employees, having a centralized repository ensures that everyone is aligned with the latest information.
Scalability and Flexibility: As businesses grow and evolve, their knowledge management needs change. Knowledge base software offers scalability and flexibility, allowing organizations to adapt to new requirements and seamlessly expand their knowledge base to accommodate additional information.
Data-Driven Insights: Advanced knowledge base software provides analytics and reporting features that offer valuable insights into knowledge usage, search trends, and customer behavior. These insights enable businesses to refine their knowledge management strategies and continuously improve the effectiveness of their support processes.

Knowledge Base Software: Benefits for the Business

Knowledge base software serves as a single source of truth and central resource for information and operational knowledge. Businesses experience significant benefits by making policies, operating procedures, documentation, expertise, and other resources easily accessible by leveraging knowledge base software.

Improved Efficiency: By centralizing information and promoting self-service, knowledge base software reduces call volume and wait times while delivering 24×7 service. Call deflection frees up valuable human resources to focus on strategic initiatives.
Cost Savings: With fewer support tickets, improved agent productivity, and reduced reliance on manual processes, businesses can achieve significant cost savings by implementing knowledge base software.
Increased Productivity: Empowering employees with easy access to trusted knowledge resources contained in a central knowledge base software boosts their productivity and confidence.
Operational Continuity: When subject matter experts retire or leave, knowledge base software allows organizations to capture their valuable knowledge at scale with AI automation.
AI readiness: Best-in-class knowledge base software includes comprehensive content management capabilities that enable teams to make it correct, compliant, consumable, and AI-ready. This ensures that AI does not generate garbage answers and eliminates hallucination.
Enhanced Brand Reputation: Providing customers with comprehensive, easily accessible information demonstrates a commitment to transparency and customer satisfaction, thereby enhancing brand reputation and fostering trust.
Competitive Advantage: In today’s competitive landscape, businesses that leverage knowledge base software to deliver superior customer support gain a distinct competitive advantage, positioning themselves as industry leaders.

Knowledge Base Software: How do you measure ROI?

ROI metrics for knowledge base software depends on the use case. For example, call deflection, first-contact resolution, average handle time, and service cost reduction are common metrics in the context of the customer service use case. Reduction in employee training time and acceleration of speed-to-competency are common in both contact centers and L&D organizations.

Knowledge Base Software: Types

Vendors across various market spaces often define knowledge base software to fit their product strengths and/or marketing messaging. The following software types have been positioned as knowledge base software as well or as a broader solution that includes knowledge base software as well:

Document management
Content Management
CRM
Contact center infrastructure
Do-it-all suites
Point product startups
Whole-product solution

Items #1 through #4 are self-explanatory. #5 refers to vendors that offer applications that they claim to do everything from ERP to CRM and are not focused on any one space. #6 refers to point product startups that address one narrow aspect of knowledge base software like a standalone chatbot or search.

Whole-product knowledge base software refers to a vendor like eGain that offers a complete solution for modern, AI-powered knowledge management that has all the building blocks to make you successful: best-in-class technology unified and orchestrated in a hub of trusted knowledge, proven methodology for quick value creation, implementation and managed services, support services, training and certification, pre-integrations with existing systems, partnerships, and a rich API library for solution extension and innovation, along with an ROI calculator and a track record of at-scale success with clients.

Knowledge Base Software: Key Features

Modern knowledge base software comes equipped with a variety of features designed to improve knowledge management, accessibility, and user experience. The most effective solutions include the following key features:

Comprehensive content management: AI-assisted, collaborative authoring and curation, WYSIWYG editor, best-practice templates, compliance workflows, and much more
Categorization and tagging: Hierarchical organization of knowledge with customizable taxonomies
Advanced search capabilities: AI-powered semantic knowledge search that understands context and intent to help customers find answers, not just keywords.
Analytics and reporting: Insights into search patterns, content gaps, and user behavior resulting from the use of the knowledge base software
User feedback mechanisms: Rating systems and comment sections to improve knowledge content quality
Personalization options: Customized knowledge content display based on user roles or preferences
Integration capabilities: Seamless connection with CRM, helpdesk, and other business systems
Multilingual support: Knowledge content translation and localization features
Pre-built connectors: Integrations with third-party document and content management systems, CRM, CCaaS, and more

These features work together to create a knowledge ecosystem that grows and improves over time.

Knowledge Base Software: AI Orchestration

Best-in-class knowledge base software tools like eGain’s leverage and orchestrate a portfolio of AI technologies—ML, GenAI, agentic AI, conversational AI, reasoning (generative and deterministic), and more, using the right AI for the right task at the right time. Moreover, eGain’s knowledge base software is built on a BYOX composable and open architecture that allows organizations to plug in any LLM, chatbot, and so on into the solution. Monolithic, non-modular tools might lock you in with one vendor, reducing your flexibility and raising your cost of ownership.

The Best Knowledge Base Software: Selecting the right one

The best knowledge base software meets the following requirements:

Functionality: Does the solution come with rich functionality out of the box, including content management, content access controls, search, AI capabilities, and more?
AI integration: Does it include embedded AI capabilities while integrating with third-party AI building blocks at the same time?
Scalability: Can the knowledge base system grow with your organization? Can it handle increasing content volume and user base?
Ease of use: How intuitive is the interface for both administrators and end-users? Will internal and external users be able to navigate and adopt this system in their day-to-day tasks?
Customization options: Can you personalize the system to match your brand and specific requirements? Can you personalize user interfaces based on skill and role type?
Support and maintenance: What level of technical assistance does the vendor provide? Are they able to provide content and design recommendations based on your specific needs?
Integrations: Does the solution come with pre-built connectors to existing enterprise systems?
Architecture: Is it built on a composable, BYO architecture?
Total cost of ownership: Beyond initial licensing, what are the long-term costs? Can you identify the processes where the system can drive costs down over time?

Other Considerations

What are your primary goals for implementing a knowledge base?
Who will be the main users of the system (customers, employees, or both)?
What types of content will you need to store and manage?
What are your requirements for search functionality and content organization?
Do you need advanced features like AI-powered recommendations or chatbot integration?
What metrics will you use to measure the success of your knowledge base?
What is the vendor’s track record of success in enabling superior CX and operational performance at scale with knowledge base software?

The Best Knowledge Base Software: Top 6 and the #1

1. Do-it-all vendors

These vendors position themselves as end-to-end platforms designed to address nearly every enterprise automation requirement—ranging from knowledge base software and CRM to ERP and beyond. Examples include Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM. However, knowledge management is not a core competency for these providers; it represents only a small fraction of their overall offering and is not their innovation focus.

2. CRM vendors

This category includes vendors whose primary focus is customer relationship management. While they may offer knowledge base capabilities, it is typically an add-on rather than a core strength. As a result, knowledge functionality often lacks depth and sophistication. Examples include Salesforce, Infor, SugarCRM, and similar platforms.

3. Contact center vendors

These vendors specialize in providing voice and interaction infrastructure for contact centers. Although many claim to include knowledge base features, they offer very basic capabilities and often source knowledge base tools from OEM partnerships or third-party integrations. As a result, they are not able to address enterprise requirements for knowledge base software.

4. Content management vendors

While these vendors often position their solutions as knowledge base software platforms, their primary focus is content lifecycle management—specifically the collaborative creation, storage, and publishing of documents. Knowledge base and access features are very basic. Examples include SharePoint from Microsoft, which is commonly used as a document repository, and OpenText Documentum.

5. Brochureware vendors

You already know who these vendors are. They promise much, deliver little, and rely heavily on marketing materials rather than proven capabilities or a track record of success. Many of today’s AI startups fall into this category.

6. Knowledge base-focused vendors

These vendors are dedicated to delivering knowledge base software designed to enhance and automate business processes and operations. While some offer more features than the previous categories, most fall short of addressing enterprise requirements and ROI at scale and speed. Few provide AI-powered knowledge base software that allows enterprises to set up a central hub that combines content management, multiple search modalities, conversational and process guidance, and robust knowledge analytics—along with implementation services, training, managed services, and a proven track record at scale.

7. The top knowledge base software

The clear exception to the above is eGain, as evidenced by the transformational ROI we deliver, strong customer feedback on trusted review platforms like Gartner Peer Insights, and top ratings from KM communities and leading industry analysts!

Knowledge Base Software: Case Studies

eGain is a leader in knowledge base software. Below are some success stories where our clients have transformed CX and operational performance with knowledge base software.

Top 5 global bank

Struggling with siloed knowledge chaos, the bank migrated over thousands of content artifacts from platforms like SharePoint, intranets, and Salesforce into the eGain knowledge base. The platform is being used by 125,000+ users to find trusted answers and AI-powered process guidance from a single source of truth. Within a few weeks of deployment, the knowledge base software has reduced average handle time for contact center agents by 14%!

Federal Government Agency

A large U.S. federal government agency partnered with eGain to modernize its citizen service operations and enhance knowledge accessibility across departments. To address these issues, the agency deployed eGain’s knowledge base software, integrated across web, contact centers, and virtual assistants. These solutions enabled:

70% call deflection through AI virtual assistants and self-service knowledge
25% faster case resolution with contextual guidance and automated workflows
92% agent engagement, far exceeding the government sector benchmark of 67%

By consolidating the knowledge base and automating guidance, the agency not only improved citizen satisfaction but also set a new benchmark for digital government efficiency.

BT/British Telecom

BT serves 30 million customers across mobile broadband and television services. Through the eGain partnership, they aimed to improve customer experiences and elevate agent productivity.

By leveraging eGain’s knowledge base software, they were able to achieve:

30-point boost in Net Promoter Score (NPS)
37% improvement in first contact resolution (FCR)
Training time for advisors was reduced by 50%
Industry recognition: Selected for the KMWorld Reality Award for creating transformational value from knowledge base software

Read the full story here.

Knowledge Base Software: Experience eGain’s Solution

eGain offers comprehensive knowledge base software that enables robust content management, pre-built workflows, advanced search, guided help, analytics, and much more, powered by AI and ML.

Want to see how effective knowledge base software works in practice? Try our Innovation in Thirty Days program. This is a no-cost, no-obligation trial of the eGain’s Knowledge Base Software, which features advanced features like AI-powered search, contextual recommendations, and seamless integration capabilities.

Our team of experts can help you assess your needs, explore solutions, and develop a knowledge management strategy that drives measurable results for your organization. Contact us to learn more!