Knowledge Base Management: How to Maintain and Update Your Knowledge Base Regularly

In today’s fast-paced business environment, knowledge is one of the most valuable assets for any organization. Consider it as the roadmap guiding your team through unfamiliar terrain. Without a well-maintained knowledge base, navigating challenges becomes like wandering through a new city without a map or guide—disorienting and inefficient. A robust knowledge base provides the necessary signposts and directions, empowering your team to find their way and make informed decisions.

Effective knowledge base management involves the systematic creation, maintenance, administration, and distribution of knowledge within your organization. The objective is to facilitate seamless information sharing, fostering collaboration and teamwork. By consistently managing and updating your knowledge base, you not only enhance operational efficiency but also strengthen your brand's position as an industry leader.

In this article, we'll present 10 essential tips to help you maintain and update your knowledge base regularly, ensuring it remains a valuable resource for your team and organization.

1. Set a regular review schedule for knowledge base management

New innovations, facts, and information are always springing up everywhere. If you want your business to always be at the forefront of progress and success, employees should have ready access to upskilling and retraining as well as reference materials and resources. This should be prioritized especially for staff who are customer-facing.

For this reason, knowledge base management is paramount. To maintain the integrity of your information database, the entire system needs to be evaluated periodically. Establish a consistent schedule for reviewing and updating your knowledge base. This can be done weekly, monthly, or quarterly as long as it’s done every now and then. The aim is to ensure that information such as workflows, SOPs, and best practices remain accurate and relevant.

Although you may assign someone or a team to carry out checks and update your knowledge base, there has to be a process wherein updates and new additions are vetted and verified before they’re published. As for the schedule and if you’re in the business of selling, you can get these done during the lean season when people are not too busy. That way, even your customer service and sales teams can participate and help out in the process, and contribute. Then, you can be sure your knowledge base is fresh and ready for use before the peak season begins.

2. Assign content ownership, especially for knowledge base maintenance

As much as managers and leaders may want to, they cannot (and should not) handle every task, including knowledge base management for their company. Since it’s crucial for your encyclopedia of how-tos to remain up to date and reliable, it’s wise to delegate this responsibility. You can assign the ongoing task of maintaining your company’s knowledge base to a dedicated team.

Another way to go about it is to designate specific team members or departments as owners of particular sections of the knowledge base to ensure accountability and regular updates. It makes sense because they’re the first people to try out new initiatives, approaches, and campaigns. These team members are also usually the first ones to find out about new trends along with emerging issues and problems before they get bigger.

Even when you delegate knowledge base maintenance to a team, it’s important to establish a clear chain of command for reviewing and approving changes. This process should encompass thorough proofreading and editing of proposed updates, ideally following brainstorming sessions and before final approval for publication and distribution to the workforce.

3. Gather user feedback to find out what works and what doesn’t

Feedback makes growth possible. It is your best tool for continuous improvement and learning. It almost never happens where business leaders and owners get things right on the first try. Carrying on and believing that everything you have in place is perfect and should never be changed would be foolish. There is a lot of progress that can be achieved when we have a grasp of what we’re doing that needs changing and how. These little nuggets of wisdom can be picked up from feedback from users to help maintain knowledge base integrity.

Actively solicit feedback from users on the usefulness and accuracy of the knowledge base content through surveys, feedback forms, or direct inquiries. Your encyclopedia of references is a valuable resource for your teams to carry out their tasks so these need to be accurate and up-to-date. Review and redo outdated policies and procedures.

These feedback-gathering sessions should be conducted as regularly as your knowledge base maintenance exercises. Listen to the people who frequently consult your library and adjust what you have accordingly. As always, get a person from the company’s management team to review the proposed update before it’s approved and published.

4. Monitor your knowledge base user analytics

Utilize analytics tools to track which articles are most and least frequently accessed, identifying areas that may need updating or additional information. It’s best to do this periodically to keep the content fresh and guaranteed accurate. This is also a good time to purge the spam articles, those that have not been used in the last six months or so. If you don’t feel good about deleting these for good, you can keep them in a separate folder that people can still access without cluttering the main library.

Apart from user behavior, usability, and engagement, you can also use data and analytics to gauge what’s missing from your current knowledge base and what your teams need. Identifying these areas for improvement is vital so further improvements can be made quickly. Part of the purpose of having a knowledge base in place is to ensure independence and self-help success for your agents. Being able to look for answers and help themselves is essential mostly for remote and hybrid workers who are online when very few other people are.

5. Implement a version control system

Imagine if you took great care to put something together and make it useful and helpful until someone comes along and rearranges everything, causing chaos to your knowledge base management. The worst thing is when one whole article ends up missing as opposed to just one relevant paragraph. It would be highly unfortunate if it happened that your system did not have some form of revert or recovery system. To combat this you can use version control to manage changes to the knowledge base, allowing you to track updates and information such as:

• Version number – These numbers go up as a document is updated. They usually look like this: Version 11 or Version 11.2 depending on how your system is configured

• Author – Whoever made the last update

• Version date – When the update was made

• Article title - The document title at the time the update was made

• Article content – Article’s entire composition

• Related keywords – Keywords that would have made searches a lot quicker for respective users

• Summary – A description of the article at the time that version was created

Version control systems typically show crossed-out parts of a specific article so anyone viewing can know where the changes were made. Business leaders and managers usually have the authority to walk back changes and revert to previous versions on top of locking documents to avoid unintentional editing and granting editing rights to a limited number of people. For your peace of mind and if only to have something on file, be sure to keep a clear record of content changes just so you have a chronology of a document’s updates.

6. Encourage team contributions to your company knowledge base

Team leaders, project managers, and company owners are not omniscient. With the ever-changing landscape of business industries, we need all the help we can get. As part of your knowledge base management initiatives, foster a culture of communication and collaboration by encouraging team members to contribute new content and updates based on their expertise and recent experiences.

You’ll be surprised at the untapped wealth of knowledge you’ll unlock just by galvanizing your staff in this manner. This is even more useful and fruitful considering they will be the ones who’ll use the resources and benefit from them.

How do you encourage your team members to contribute to the company's knowledge base? Here are a few things you might like to try:

• Ask – A simple appeal for input via email or you can open the topic at a meeting

• Start a discussion – Get a loose, relaxed conversation started about your current SOPs and procedures to get an idea as to which ones need updating

• Give rewards – Sweeten the deal by offering something of value in return

• Conduct brainstorming sessions – Get your teams in one conference room and toss ideas around

• Highlight the benefits – It would help greatly if you can remind your employees that their contributions will help them immensely as they carry out their jobs

For guidance and consistency of the content, you can enjoin your contributors to follow the following guidelines:

• Avoid jargon and use simple language at all times

• Make good use of white spaces in breaking up large blocks of text

• Be as descriptive as possible with illustrations, screenshots, and even videos

• Support accessibility by adding alt texts to images

• Optimize search functions by implementing keywords

7. Update your knowledge base solutions based on support tickets

Gaps in knowledge and training can be detrimental to your team and, in relation, your company. Knowledge is power, and you can’t expect greatness from your staff if you fail to provide them with the resources and references they need to get the job done. As illustrated in point 4 of this article, the more comprehensive your knowledge base is, the better equipped your team will be.

Regularly review customer support tickets and queries to identify recurring issues and update the knowledge base accordingly. You can use reports and analytics for this along with feedback from peers. You should take into account customer commentary and criticism as well. Leverage quality assurance scores and coaching notes from team leaders and managers. Offer your employees additional training if necessary. Incorporate this crucial step into your knowledge base management strategy to ensure that your agents stay up-to-date.

8. Keep up with industry changes for better knowledge base management

Stay informed about industry trends, product updates, and new technologies to ensure your knowledge base reflects the latest information and best practices. Adopt the ears-to-the-ground technique and pay close attention to the buzz. What are the up-and-coming techniques for dealing with concerns? Is there a new way to approach agitated people that you want to try? Are there any news tools available to your teams that you can consider using?

Market demands, technology, and methodologies change all the time and you’ll be doing your team a great disservice if you allow them to fall behind. You can get ideas from social media and utilize online trend alerts. For example, do you think you can use AI to scale the business? Would chatbots help you assist customers quickly? Whether it’s new software, equipment, or product, it’s worth looking into if it will keep your company on level with the times. Industry standards, as well, change all the time and you have to be prepared to meet them.

9. Add automated routine updates to your knowledge management solution

We’ve mentioned in this article that it’s important to schedule regular reviews and updates to your internal knowledge base. However, how can you see to it that it’s done when you and everyone else are busy with a hundred other things such as tasks and projects? On the other hand, it’s safe to say that redundancy can be dull and boring for anyone. So, how can it all be done?

Thanks to advances in technology, business heads have the capability to automate routine updates to their knowledge base. You can get a lot of use out of AI by allowing it to help you with the following:

• Automatically updating internal knowledge base content

• Identifying and archiving out-of-date articles

• Filtering and sifting through feedback and comments for AFIs

• Sorting references based on engagement and usability

• Optimizing search functions

If you have a fairly small but very busy team, you can relinquish the task of automating your knowledge base updates to tools and software. You can always conduct spot checks, review updates, and even recall those that need a bit more work if necessary.

10. Communicate knowledge base updates to end users

Whether it’s updates to your internal or external knowledge base, it’s paramount that they’re communicated to the end users quickly so they can be used right away. Short of getting a town crier, how do you go about doing that? Here are some of the things you can try:

For internal knowledge base users:

• Post an intranet bulletin

• Send out a blanket email

• Put up a corporate announcement in your company feed

• Call a meeting and provide the update then

For external users:

• Add the update announcement to your newsletter

• Incorporate it in a marketing email

• Include an eye-catching teaser on your homepage

• Capitalize on social media

When communicating knowledge base updates, don’t forget to include a link to the actual article along with a summary of the update. Lastly, invite users to come to you with their questions, comments, or suggestions to make the enhanced content all the better.

Make knowledge base management an enjoyable task with Bitrix24

It sounds like a tall order but with a powerful knowledge base management platform, you have a fighting chance at getting the job done successfully. Bitrix24 has all the features and functions you need to build a reliable, robust, and engaging knowledge base. With customizable templates, easy content organization, and seamless integration with other tools, Bitrix24 allows you to create a dynamic knowledge base that evolves with your business needs. You’ll have well-informed and proficient team members along with self-sufficient and happier customers.

Bitrix24 doesn’t stop there. It’s built chockfull of nifty tools and software that makes completing any project or task not just possible but also, in a way, enjoyable. Sign up today and benefit from our knowledge base management tools and much more right away.

FAQs

How often should a knowledge base be updated?

A knowledge base should be updated regularly, ideally in alignment with new product releases, policy changes, or whenever there is significant feedback from users. Regular reviews, such as monthly or quarterly, ensure the information remains accurate, relevant, and useful for both employees and customers.

What are effective methods to gather user feedback for a knowledge base?

Some of the effective methods to gather user feedback are:

• Surveys

• Focus groups

• Online reviews

• Social media communications

• Feedback widgets

• Customer service interactions

• Support tickets

How can automation help in maintaining a knowledge base?

Automation can help maintain a knowledge base by automatically flagging outdated content, suggesting updates, and integrating new information based on user behavior and feedback. It can also streamline the process of content approval and publication, ensuring that the knowledge base remains accurate and up-to-date with minimal manual effort.