Companies set up knowledge bases to help customers find answers to their queries faster. However, not all help centers have the desired outcome of providing effortless resolutions to customers. In fact, they end up leaving users more confused and frustrated after accessing a poorly-designed knowledge base.
If you’re building your first help center or looking to improve your existing self-service experience, you’re in the right place. We’ve cherry-picked the best knowledge base examples from around the web and highlighted what they are getting right. Lessons from these examples will help you implement exquisite, user-friendly knowledge bases that your customers will find easy to use.
Benefits of owning a good knowledge base
88% of customers expect companies to offer an online self-service portal, and 39% agree that they can resolve issues faster with self-service options. Consumers today value their time and have grown to expect instant solutions – even if they have to find it themselves. That’s why customer self-service portals and knowledge base articles, in particular, are probably the most helpful addition to a website.
A well-curated knowledge base helps customers clear doubts, find solutions, and obtain important information almost instantly. It also eases the burden on your customer support team while improving customer satisfaction.
Apart from the benefit of immediacy, customers also want to find answers as effortlessly as a quick Google search. So providing a rich help center on the website that guides visitors to the right information is imperative to deliver a good customer experience and reduce ticket volumes for your support team.
What makes for a good knowledge base?
A good help desk knowledge base should fundamentally help visitors find the answers they’re looking for, effortlessly. There are many ways of making that happen.
However, a few critical aspects of a good knowledge base include,
- Great navigation that makes it easy to search for content.
- Topics meet customer expectations and are well-organized.
- The knowledge base articles are detailed and to the point.
- Consistency in tone and written in the voice of the customer.
- Interactive and visual design that aligns with the brand identity.
Without further ado, here’s our list of some useful knowledge base examples.
13 Best knowledge base examples
#1 Spotify
About the company: There’s a playlist for everyone at any moment on Spotify, isn’t it? With 422 million monthly active users as of March 2022, Spotify is the world’s largest music and audio streaming service provider.
What we like: Lists popular, frequently asked questions right at the top
You know your knowledge base design is an absolute success when your users take lesser steps—lower effort—to find the right solution. The Spotify help center nails effortless resolutions by understanding what most of their users look for in their knowledge base and listing those popular articles on the top fold of their website. The sections below are clearly categorized and prioritized as per customers’ needs by placing payment and plan topics at the beginning.
#2 Nordstrom
About the company: Being a renowned American fashion retailer, Nordstrom is known for its exquisite shopping experiences—both in-store and online.
What we like: A self-service portal that eases purchase decisions and not just support.
Tracking orders, returns, and order cancellation requests are easy to spot on Nordstrom’s customer service section. Beyond support, Nordstrom has neatly packaged all their other services within their elaborate self-service portal, making for a good e-commerce knowledge base example.
Buyers can quickly find resources and guides on accessing various services, including style help, gift wrapping, and alterations, making it easy for shoppers to purchase without any hassles.
#3 Canva
About the company: The Australian behemoth—Canva is a graphic design tool loved by amateur and experienced designers alike for creating breath-taking posters, social media posts, and other creatives.
What we like: Beautiful and intuitive interface, ease of navigation
The use of vibrant colors and illustrations on Canva’s knowledge base is an extension of their brand identity and serves as a great inspo for designing beautiful help centers. Popular article links are listed just below the search bar, and topics are classified based on users’ challenges for ease of navigation. Their ‘People also viewed’ section below every knowledge base article further simplifies a user’s search for solutions.
Related resource: Your in-depth guide to building a great knowledge base
#4 NAVBLUE
About the company: NAVBLUE is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Airbus that provides software services for flight operations and air traffic management.
What we like: Customized knowledge base theme that blends with their overall brand identity.
User experience is key for the successful adoption of a knowledge base. When your support portal is customized and designed in the same tone as the rest of your company website—in terms of both the visuals and the language tone—it adds more credibility to your knowledge base. Users are assured that the answers they’re looking for have been provided by the company and are authentic. Built on Freshdesk, NAVBLUE’s customized support portal is a great example of a help desk knowledge base that doesn’t break the experience provided by other sections of their company website.
#5 Dropbox
About the company: Dropbox is a one-stop solution for file hosting, storage, and collaboration used by millions of customers across 180 countries.
What we like: A simplified user journey within the knowledge base.
Without a doubt, Dropbox’s knowledge base stands out for its straightforward navigation and excellent search functionality, despite hosting a ton of content. Their knowledge management is impeccable, with relevant links to ‘related articles’ placed within every solution article. Robust knowledge base analytics helps you monitor user behavior within help centers and determine the pages viewed by the users after visiting a specific page. This avoids a lot of back-and-forth clicks for knowledge base visitors and helps them spot answers to queries related to a particular topic quickly.
Related resource: 4 ways to optimize your knowledge base with analytics
#6 Asana
About the company: Asana is a project management software used by more than 100,000 paying organizations across the globe to organize, track, and manage work as a team.
What we like: A simple layout with an easy-to-access table of contents
The homepage of Asana’s support portal has a simple, modern, and elegant layout that lists the different types of support resources available. This includes their online community forum, academy, onboarding guides, and feature FAQs.
Within their features help section, the topics are smartly grouped with a permanent index available at the left and a table of contents also available within every solution article.
Users can quickly navigate through the content both within a solution article as well as across the different feature sections.
#7 OneFile
About the company: A B2B SaaS EdTech company focussing on building apprenticeships and online training platforms, OneFile has supported over 1.2 million learners in the past 20 years.
What we like: Topic-based grouping, provision for submitting a support ticket from the help center
A great knowledge base is one that is well structured, puts the right information in the right places, and categorizes it in a way that facilitates the user journey. OneFile achieves this by creating appropriate headlines and topic buckets for their FAQs that immediately grab a user’s attention and helps visitors easily identify the section they are looking for.
They’ve intentionally placed guides and tutorials for new customers who’re getting started with the platform at the top to ease user onboarding. OneFile also has a clear call to action for users to raise a support ticket directly from the help center if they can’t find what they’re searching for.
The knowledge base articles and user guides in the support portal get around 7000 views per month. Even if only 10% of visitors find the answers that they were looking for, that’s potentially 700 fewer tickets than we would otherwise have had to handle – Adam Fogo, Head of Customer Service at OneFile.
#8 Altium
About the company: Altium is a leading electronics board design tool widely used by engineers of large electronics companies, including Philips, Siemens, and Bosch.
What we like: Complex topics arranged and phrased as actual user questions for quick troubleshooting.
Customers indeed find knowledge bases super useful in industries like retail or SaaS. But do self-service options hold good for other complex industries like electronics or manufacturing? Surprisingly, yes! Altium is the perfect example of a knowledge base that works for more complex domains, attracting close to 19,000 active users.
The articles in their knowledge base are developed directly from customers’ questions and displayed according to the number of views, making it easier for customers to find the answers to their queries in no time.
#9 BUX
About the company: Bux is a fin-tech company based out of Amsterdam offering an application that allows users to invest and trade in various financial markets.
What we like: Using design to emphasize branding
The Bux support page is very pretty to look at but also equally enjoyable to browse through. The color combinations are bright and happy, making the page pleasing to the eye. The font chosen for the text matches the brand colors of the website. Bux also has a prominent banner on top with the main message in a big font, with the search bar easily visible on its knowledge base homepage. Overall it’s a visual treat and reflects the brand and brand voice of the website.
Related resource: 8 Stunning knowledge base examples customized on Freshdesk
#10 American Express (Amex)
About the company: American Express is a payment card services company founded in the year 1850 and offers credit cards, gift cards, and rewards programs to individuals and corporates.
What we like: Minimalistic design
Amex’s customer service page is not cluttered with many sections but is divided into six major categories. The FAQs are arranged as simple lists in user-friendly language within each category. This is a smart approach to creating knowledge bases for the BFSI domain, where customers’ questions are more urgent and critical.
#11 Rightmove
About the company: Rightmove is a UK-based real estate website that helps connect buyers to sellers, with agents ready to help you out based on your requirements.
What we like: Focus on the most common questions
FAQ pages sometimes tend to be long and cluttered with a lot of unnecessary information people can get confused with. Rightmove has done a great job of decluttering their site real-estate and displaying the really important content people are looking for. The page is concise, with only 8 section names on the main page, and each section leads to a dedicated landing site with only the most relevant information.
Related resource: A guide to creating simple and effective FAQ pages
#12 Loom
About the company: Loom is a video-based work communication tool that helps users to capture and share videos for effective collaboration.
What we like: Generous use of screenshots and GIFs to explain solutions
Loom’s help center has the perfect example of crafting detailed yet simple knowledge base articles. They break down their instructions into short, easy-to-understand steps that a user can follow without ambiguity. Their solution articles and tutorials are sprinkled with GIFs and screenshots wherever applicable to convey the solution better to visitors.
Related resource: Learn how to write an effective knowledge base article
#13 FastModel Sports
About the company: FastModel Sports develops products that sports coaches can use to help prepare their players, manage their schedules, and even create playbooks and strategies for matches.
What we like: A variety of content formats
When you look at this knowledge base example, right off the bat, you’ll see that there are different types of content available for users to choose from. Blocks of texts are not everyone’s cup of tea, something that FastModel Sports understands. So they’ve ensured that there is a variety of formats ranging from video guides to FAQs that breaks the monotony for visitors.
Inspired? Start building outstanding knowledge bases
As you can see, you can draw inspiration from several examples to build your company’s knowledge base. You can choose from several strategies and knowledge base functionalities based on your customers’ needs. A robust knowledge base software like Freshdesk will enable you to deploy a modern and crisp knowledge base tailored to your requirements. With Freshdesk, you can have a knowledge base up and running in minutes, not months.
Create your own knowledge base with Freshdesk
Updated on June 14th, 2022.
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