Knowledge base
A knowledge base is the organised set of articles documenting how a product works and how to resolve what gets asked often. It serves two audiences at once: customers looking up the answer themselves, and the team using it as the source for their replies.
What is knowledge base?
A knowledge base is the organised set of articles documenting how a product works and how to resolve what gets asked often. It serves two audiences at once: customers looking up the answer themselves, and the team using it as the source for their replies.
Also: support documentation · docs
Knowledge base and help centre
The knowledge base is the content; the help centre is the site where it is published, with its search and its navigation. They get used interchangeably and it rarely matters, except when comparing tools: some sell the first and some the second, and the price is not the same.
Why it matters
What changes in a SaaS
It is the only support investment that pays for itself over time, because a well-written article answers an unlimited number of times. It is also the foundation any automated agent stands on: an AI system cannot answer better than what is written, so documentation quality sets the ceiling.
Knowledge base in detail
Title it the way the customer would
If you call it "retention policy" and the customer types "how long do you keep my data", the article has to be called the second thing. It is the most common mistake and the most expensive: the article exists, it is correct, and nobody finds it.
What a knowledge base cannot answer
Anything that depends on the specific account. "How many seats do I have left?" has no writable answer, because it changes depending on who is asking. Writing more articles does not reduce those questions, and confusing the two types is what makes a documentation project disappoint.
Maintaining it
An out-of-date article is worse than none, because the customer acts on what it says. Tying review to product changes is the only thing that works over the medium term; calendar reminders do not.
What to document first
Ordered by frequency times cost, not by frequency alone. A question that comes up five times a month and ends at engineering costs more than one that comes up fifty times and is answered in two minutes.
How Intake handles it
Questions about knowledge base
Are a knowledge base and a help centre the same thing?
Almost. The knowledge base is the content and the help centre is the public site where it is published. In day-to-day conversation the two are used interchangeably.
How many articles do you need?
Enough to cover the questions that genuinely repeat. Twenty articles answering 80% of volume are worth more than two hundred nobody can find.
Can a knowledge base be used to train an AI?
It is not trained on: it is consulted. The system retrieves the relevant passages at answer time, which is the difference between a fact you can update today and one frozen into a training run.
Related terms
A term on its own is only half understood. These come up in the same conversation.
Help centre
A help centre is the public site where a company publishes its support documentation so customers can look things up themselves. It combines the articles with a search box, category navigation and, normally, the route to get in touch when the answer is not there.
Self-service
Self-service is everything that lets a customer meet their need without talking to anybody: searching the documentation, checking the state of something in their dashboard, changing a setting or downloading an invoice. It is the cheapest form of support and, when it works, the one customers prefer.
RAG — Retrieval-augmented generation
Retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, is the technique of finding relevant information in your own sources and handing it to a language model so it writes the answer with that. The model does not memorise the content: it looks it up at answer time.
Deflection rate
Deflection rate is the percentage of questions resolved without a person getting involved, either because the customer found the answer themselves or because an automated agent closed it. It is the metric used to justify any investment in self-service or in AI.
Macro
A macro is a saved reply inserted into a conversation with one click, usually with fields that fill themselves in — the customer name, the order number. It exists so nobody rewrites from scratch what has already been answered many times.
Omnichannel
Omnichannel describes support where the customer can write through whichever channel they prefer — chat, email, WhatsApp, phone — and the conversation stays a single thread: the history travels with them and they repeat nothing when switching channel.
