Call Center Knowledge Base: What It Is, Best Software and How to Create One

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Written By: author avatar Shankar Chavan
Featured image for call center knowledge base guide

When it comes to customer service, knowledge base shines 🌞 the most.

For call centers, it can be the secret tool that you are looking for.

Use it as a portal to train your agents, or as a way to offer a self-service option to the customers. There are certainly many benefits and little to worry about.

So, why not start working on a knowledge base for your call center today?

Join us in this comprehensive guide where we have shared our experience and the best way to proceed with a call center knowledge base.

Let’s start!

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What Is a Call Center Knowledge Base?

A call center knowledge base is a centralized repository of information designed to train customer service agents and customers, or to quickly provide answers to common questions and resolve issues.

The most common types of content you will find in a call center knowledge base are:

Benefits of the Call Center Knowledge Base

Call center agents need both soft and hard skills to perform their day-to-day tasks.

skills acknowledged by customer service leaders

While the knowledge base may not directly help with developing soft skills, it will surely help with hard skills, such as helping employees navigate systems and technologies.

Call center knowledge base benefits include:

  • Improve response time
  • Reduce training time and costs
  • Consistent service delivery
  • Improve customer satisfaction
  • Enhanced productivity
  • Supports omnichannel service
  • Enhanced knowledge sharing and retention
  • Support remote teams
  • Boosts First Call Resolution (FCR) rates

Let’s explore some of these benefits in more detail.

1. Improved Response Time and Customer Satisfaction

Call center agents have to be responsive compared to other customer support formats, such as email or chat box support. And they have a very small window of time to respond with something helpful.

With a knowledge base, you have a wealth of information in a centralized, searchable repository. Agents no longer need to hunt through multiple documents, rely on memory, or give vague answers.

Helping you improve response times and satisfy customers by resolving their issues faster.

2. Reduced Training Time and Costs

There is typically a huge outpouring of unconverted value in the call center industry where training and agent retention is concerned.

It goes like this.

Call center jobs, although skilled, are typically considered entry level roles and remunerated in line with this.

Therefore, such positions tend to attract career starters looking for a step onto the first rung of the ladder. And once on-board and trained to proficiency, they quickly seek promotion or better pay, moving on, vacating the role.

This employee churn presents:

  1. An institutional loss of (medium to long term) unrealized training and development investment.
  2. A new cost requirement for training a new recruit.

And where each call center employee spends on average 6-12 weeks in training, up to 45%1 of call center staff vacate their posts annually. Call centers find themselves in a continual state of training readiness.

This is where a knowledge base shines. It’s the hub of your digital learning center. Once it is established, all you have to do is maintain it and promote its use among employees and managers.

It will help to:

  • Standardize day to day operations
  • Share system and product knowledge
  • Retain knowledge
  • Focus on real issue
  • Reduce the need of expert trainers

Ultimately, helping you with the training processes, and reducing overall cost involved around employee training.

How To Build a Call Center Knowledge Base

Building a knowledge base for call centers is a huge task. It’s best to break it down into smaller steps to make it easier to get there.

Step 1: Define Objectives and Scope

Is knowledge base the solution you are looking for?

It’s best to answer this question before you start building a knowledge base for your call center.

Define what your knowledge base will help you with. For example, training new employees, improving processes, and increasing efficiency. Create objectives around it and decide how big it will be (its scope).

Often knowledge base in call center field is created to:

  • Streamline processes
  • Train new employees
  • Provide customers with a self-service solution
  • As a resource hub from where your agents can quickly access response templates, or find answers to the common questions

The scope of the knowledge base can include:

  • Internal use: Password-protected system for internal use.
  • Public use: To provide self-service options to the customers.
  • Intranet system: Offline system/web that can be only accessed from a local network or computers.
  • Content coverage: A call center knowledge base can include content such as support and troubleshooting guides, FAQs, Agent training and onboarding materials, policies and procedures.

Defining objectives and scope prior to any project will help you with the cost calculation and solving unnecessary hurdles.

Step 2: Best Call Center Knowledge Base Software

As of 2025, you have tons of free and premium options to create a knowledge base website.

Knowledge base software

One that stands out is Heroic Knowledge Base (Heroic KB). It’s a WordPress based plugin that provides necessary and advanced functionality at an affordable price.

WordPress was launched back in May, 2003 since then it has rapidly become a world-beating web building platform. It literally powers 43%2 of all websites on the internet.

WordPress

Now classified as the market leading content management system — it is the backbone of choice for many development projects ranging eCommerce to ERPs and knowledge bases.

WordPress offers a secure, free, open-source supported web solution. The user-friendliness of themes and plugins to avoid development roadblocks. And integration / interoperability to sync in with your most favorite online business apps.

Heroic Knowledge Base is one of such plugins, and with it you get features like:

  • Advanced search bar
  • Advanced visual editor to create beautiful guides and tutorials.
  • User restriction and access roles to create agent and customer access-based systems.
  • Built-in analytics, reporting and feedback collection system
  • Live customizer and setting-based approach to make it easy to set up and customize.
  • ChatGPT AI integration to create AI chatbot based on your content
  • Search engine optimized base/structure
  • Categorization, tagging, breadcrumbs, related posts, table of contents, and structuring features to make it easy to navigate between content.
  • Integration with other tools like forms, translation, and SEO plugins.

If WordPress isn’t the solution you’re looking for, don’t worry. Here are some other recommendations:

  • MediaWiki: To create a Wikipedia-style knowledge base, which is customizable but requires technical and coding skills.
  • MkDocs: Free static documentation website generator that also requires technical and coding skills

Furthermore, explore the following guides to choose the best knowledge base software for your call center:

Step 3: Create a Call Center Knowledge Base Website

Here are the steps you need to take to create a knowledge base website. We are going to use the Heroic Knowledge Base software solution for this tutorial.

Things will be a little bit different if you choose any other solution.

3.1. Purchase a Domain Name and Hosting

For any website, you will need a hosting server, where your data will be hosted and a domain name through which you can easily access your data.

I strongly recommend you to choose a trusted hosting platform. Bad hosting often results in hacked websites, downtime, performance issues and unnecessary maintenance.

If you are unsure about which hosting service to choose, try Kinsta.

Kinsta hosting homepage

It’s fast, reliable, and most importantly — secure.

For a domain name, you can use services like Namecheap.

Namecheap domain name provider

3.2. Setup WordPress Website

Once you have a domain name and a hosting server ready, it’s time to install WordPress on it.

To create a WordPress website with Kinsta, go to MyKinsta (Kinsta dashboard) > WordPress sites > Add site > Create new site.

Adding WordPress site with Kinsta

Follow the setup instructions and you should have a WordPress site ready to go.

Your website at this movement will be hosted on a Kinsta subdomain (or a temporary URL). To connect your domain name with a Kinsta hosting follow below instructions.

Go to MyKinsta (Kinsta dashboard), click on DNS in the left sidebar > Add your first domain.

Kinsta's DNS management

Now add your domain name and view and copy the Nameservers, which will look like this in most cases.

  • ns-332.awsdns-41.com
  • ns-1255.awsdns-28.org
  • ns-618.awsdns-13.net
  • ns-1650.awsdns-14.co.uk

Log in to your domain registrar and access your account/dashboard.

If you have chosen Namecheap, click on the Manage button next to your domain name.

Managing domain name with Namecheap

And update your Nameservers with the ones provided by Kinsta.

Updating Nameservers in Namecheap

Now link your DNS zone with a created WordPress site in Kinsta settings and update your website address from the WordPress general settings.

Updating WordPress site address

At this point your WordPress website is complete. This is a little technical stuff, but it’s a one-time setup.

If you find this difficult, you can always ask your hosting provider to do this for you.

3.3. Install Knowledge Base Plugin

Things from here will be as easy as they can be. With the WordPress setup you have basically created a fully functional website.

To manage your pages, posts and other settings, access your website dashboard by adding /wp-admin/ after your domain name (for example, mysite.com/wp-admin/).

Newly created WordPress website dashboard

Now we will need to install a Heroic KB plugin, which will provide all the necessary features needed for a knowledge base website.

Purchase a copy of Heroic KB from here and download the plugin file.

To install the Heroic Knowledge Base:

  1. Access website dashboard
  2. Click or hover on Plugins > Add New Plugin
  3. Click on Upload Plugin
  4. Browse and select the downloaded Heroic KB zip file > Install Now
  5. Activate the plugin
Installing Heroic Knowledge Base plugin

You will be presented with a welcome screen, follow the instructions to import demo content and necessary settings.

Heroic KB welcome wizard

🎊 Congratulations, you have successfully set up a knowledge base portal on your website.

Knowledge base portal created with Heroic KB software

3.4. Knowledge Base Portal Settings

You can configure and customize your call center knowledge base however you like by from the Website Dashboard > Heroic KB > Settings.

Call center knowledge base portal settings

Most of the options are self-explanatory.

For example:

1. Change Sidebar Position

To change the sidebar position of article pages from left to right, simply update the sidebar settings from the Heroic KB General Settings.

Updating sidebar layout with Heroic KB
2. Password Protect Knowledge Base Portal

To restrict public access or create an internal knowledge base, change the Restrict Access settings.

Restricting public access to the call center knowledge base portal
3. Optimize the Knowledge Base for Usability

Here are some tips and adjustments you can make to improve the usability of your knowledge base.

  • Categorize Articles: Group content based on their type, such as FAQs, general information, starting guides, or technical guides.

Heroic KB comes with an option to categorize content, which will be further reflected on the home page of knowledge base portal.

Content categorization example
  • Frontload Important Articles: Place important articles (such as starting guides) or categories at the top, so users can easily access them.
Article ordering feature in Heroic KB
  • Use AI Chatbot: Heroic KB has an option to create a ChatGPT based Help Assistant that users can use to easily get help based on your knowledge base guides and tutorials.
AI chatbot created with Heroic KB and ChatGPT

Step 4: Write High-Quality Articles

Your call center knowledge base success will largely depend on its articles.

Poor quality guides and tutorials will create more questions than solve existing issues. So, make sure to invest into quality writers, and video creators to create these articles.

4.1. How To Write Call Center Knowledge Base Articles

Here are some tips that have helped us improve our knowledge base over time to answer repeated customer queries, onboard new users, reduce tickets, and speed up existing customer service processes.

  • Understand the audience. For example, customers, business owners, technical users, or customer service agents.
  • Keep it concise, clear, and structured.
  • Add visuals content such as screenshots, statistics, graphs, infographics, and videos.
  • Make content easy to consume by breaking content into smaller sections, short sentences, headings, lists, tables, and visual elements such as alert and code block.
  • Start with an outline.
  • Keep the language simple and direct.
  • Optimize it for search engines (SEO).
  • Maintain consistency across similar articles, use templates if necessary.
  • Encourage users to leave feedback.

Here’s the template that we use to create the knowledge base articles.

Infographic of Knowledge Base Article Template

4.2. What To Add to Your Call Center Knowledge Base

Based on the scope and objectives of your knowledge base (as discussed in step 1) things may be a little bit different.

But, here are some ideas on what you can cover:

  1. Learning how to navigate systems and technologies (such as learning to use operating system and helpdesk software)
  2. How to execute highly complex processes
  3. Learning company/product information/ industry jargon and acronyms
  4. Customer service and soft skills

As seen from the list above, the majority of the training is rooted in hard skills like learning systems, processes and facts.

And as is commonly achieved online in so many technical niches, the long form tutorial format could be the presentation of choice to communicate such items.

With the addition of video tutorials, infographics, podcast audio and other media formats to compliment written text – it is possible to produce quite a rich online training environment. The type that scores highly in engagement and gets results.

As for practically training the soft skills, like customer service manners, hosting a call library is a popular delivery method.

The idea is simple, call recordings are broken down into snippets and suitably tagged within a knowledge base.

As trainee agents seek to bolster their skills in handling a particular scenario of call – they simply search the knowledge base for a solution.

With the right topical tagging with analysis to monitor end-user behavior for improvement, a multi-media knowledge base can be a very effective method of training both hard and soft skills.

4.3. How To Publish Knowledge Base Articles

Now that you know what makes knowledge base articles good and what to write, it’s time to create some guides and publish them to your knowledge base portal.

To publish your article:

  1. Access your website dashboard
  2. Heroic KB > Add New Article
WrodPress visual builder

Here you can build your article however you want with a visual page builder.

I will highly recommend completing the whole article with document creators like Google Docs, or Microsoft Word, and importing them with WordPress plugins such as Mammoth .docx converter to speed up your workflow.

When you are finished, publish your article to make it available to all users.

Step 5: Maintain and Update Regularly

All that is left is to maintain and update content regularly.

Here are a few things you can do to make sure your knowledge base is running smoothly and working as intended:

  • Do periodic reviews, or review content after major software updates or process changes.
  • Track search queries to identify popular and missing content (nulled searches).
  • Use analytics and feedback to measure engagement and effectiveness.

Heroic KB provides the necessary analytics, reporting and feedback collection functionalities that will allow you to find what is working and what is not with your call center knowledge base.

Heroic KB search queries tracking feature

Final Thoughts

There you have it, everything you need to know about creating a call center knowledge base.

It sure is a daunting task, but with a solution like Heroic Knowledge Base — there’s nothing holding you back.

The best part about this is that even small call centers can utilize knowledge base power to reduce some workload and streamline processes.

Have you built your call center knowledge base yet? Let me know how you did it, or if you had any problems following this tutorial by commenting below.

Resources Mentioned in This Guide

  1. Reddit’s discussion on call-center jobs high turnover rate ↩︎
  2. WordPress about page and usage stats ↩︎

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