20% of your team’s time goes to hunting down information. That’s eight hours every week lost to searching through emails, Slack threads, and asking colleagues “quick questions.”
The problem grows as your company grows.
You’ll need a structured knowledge base to fix this, so your team will have one reliable source to find what they need, when they need it.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to build one that actually gets used.
Why productivity suffers without a structured knowledge base
You can hire great people, provide them with high-quality laptops, or hold daily stand-ups. Doesn’t matter if they can’t find the info they need; everything slows down.
Teams often get stuck in the following instances.
Time wasted searching for information
49% of employees can’t find the documents they need for their work.
And that’s not just about little inconveniences.
Say the Customer Success team needs to quickly reference the latest client onboarding checklist or an updated troubleshooting guide to help a customer. But instead of accessing it in seconds, they spend 15–20 minutes digging through Slack messages, old Notion docs, or pinging someone from Product.
Now imagine this happens multiple times a day, across dozens of employees. This will compound into hours of lost productivity.
Your teams will keep recreating work that already exists somewhere, simply because finding the original would take longer than starting from scratch.
Knowledge silos and repetition
29% of developers find knowledge silos impacting their productivity ten or more times per week, and all these lead to repeated work and a reliance on internal experts to answer basic questions.
Developers rewrite code snippets that already exist, sometimes ten times a week or more. A simple reference API standards set by the backend team, stored in a centralized knowledge base, can save a lot of working hours here.
Breakdown in onboarding and training
Without structured documentation, your new hires will spend weeks piecing together information from various sources (bothering busy colleagues with basic questions).
Despite companies’ best efforts, only 29% of new employees feel fully prepared for their roles after completing onboarding.
They’ll also make preventable mistakes (like using the wrong templates, missing important steps in a workflow, or escalating issues that have simple fixes) that a structured knowledge base could have avoided. It keeps your process layouts defined, answers common questions, and provides your team with a single reference point to consult without interrupting others.
How to build one that your team will actually use
Now that you know the “why”, let’s get into the “how”. Here’s how you build a structured knowledge base right from scratch.
Get team input early, and make it collaborative
Document both the formal procedures (SOPs, work instructions, employee guides) and the informal expertise of employees (troubleshooting tricks, customer insights, process shortcuts they’ve developed)
A knowledge base is only effective if it reflects how your team actually works. That’s why it’s important to involve them from the start (both to identify high-need areas and to shape how information is captured).
And you’ll see higher engagement and shared ownership.
Document high-need areas
First, sequence the customer end areas. Look for,
- FAQ by customers,
- Troubleshooting content documents,
- Onboarding checklists/notes,
- Workflow overviews/setups,
- Step-by-step task guides
Start with high-impact details, where the results will be achieved in demanding numbers.
On a regular work day, we’ll have had that moment, “the answer exists somewhere in Notion, Slack, emails, but ain’t sure exactly where.
Prerender tackled it head-on, it restructured the knowledge base with a customer-first mindset. Now, they’ve a simple and sleek setup, where anyone can fetch answers in just a go.
A 30% drop in support ticket was recorded, resulting in less stress for support teams and faster assistance for customers — a win-win, indeed.
Likewise, pick five to ten burning topics where teams request help, get stuck, or repeat the same explanations. Work on these subjects, and you’ll have it.
A documentation that people actually use, scoring some quick wins.
Integrate a knowledge base chatbot
Add a chatbot widget to your structured knowledge base to diminish repetitive questions.
The chatbot will automatically route questions to the knowledge base and fetch instant answers for the queries being asked.
The bot handles password reset instructions, leave policies, expense procedures, and all those questions that interrupt actual work.
A report claims that chatbots handle 70% of routine customer tickets. It works around the clock, and if you need the bot to find the quarterly report template even for the hundredth time. It has got you covered,
For budget-conscious teams, knowledge base chatbots are a viable go-to.
Create interactive decision trees for common workflows
Processes with multiple possible paths often have N reasons to define solutions. The savvy way here is to integrate a decision tree (no pressure, we’ll tell you how)
Imagine you are figuring out a decision tree for a query: Customer wants a refund?,
Now, branch out causes….
1. Is the request within the refund period?
→ Yes → Go to next step
→ No → Direct to policy article explaining refund time limits
2. Is the subscription billed monthly or annually?
→ Monthly → Check eligibility (e.g., within 7 days of billing?)
→ Annual → Is the request within 30 days of purchase?
3. Has the product been actively used?
→ Yes → Link to documentation on prorated refund policy
→ No → Link to full refund policy or direct support form
Each choice reveals only relevant next steps to keep things manageable.
Creating interactive decision trees is a viable approach for escalation processes. With this, your new hires can ramp up onboarding tasks with less support but greater ease.
Choose the right tool to rely on
Creating a knowledge base is the surface, but making it productive is the grail.
Pick the right knowledge base platforms that scale along…
Look for tools with supportive integrations, the ones that fit with your existing stack (Slack, Teams, your help desk).
Test the search function with queries your team often bumps into. Test whether non-technical roles can utilize it on the go with minimal training. User-friendliness is a needed green light when the knowledge distribution is wide and to break silos.
Document360, for instance, hit the grade: clean interface, solid search, and straightforward editing. With support for multi-language content, categorized articles, and real-time updates, the platform scales well for both internal and customer-facing documentation.
Before you commit, run a pilot. Most vendors offer trials; use them to stress-test.
Assign ownership and maintenance responsibilities
In the spirit of breaking silos, ensure access is not dispersed throughout. A knowledge base access is to be granted for a dedicated set of people to keep it organized. Have the right mix:
- Managers to oversee the whole operation, tracking what’s working and coordinating updates.
- Content creators who write and update articles.
- Analysts to watch search terms and usage patterns to spot what’s missing.
- Plus, subject matter experts to review technical content.
Note: Limit edit access to authorized members to maintain quality control and security.
Conclusion
A structured knowledge base gives back all those wasted hours in search for information during productive work.
Start this week….
Pick your five most-asked questions and document the answers. Or the smart route, test-trial providers, and use the right knowledge base platform. Within a month, you’ll see collaborative wins across teams.
The best part: once your knowledge base gains momentum, it maintains itself. And your teams update their own sections because they see the value.
