Why to Personalize Your Knowledge Base Experience for Your Audience?

How do you ensure your knowledge base is a must-go resource that your audience would like? Making it personal is a good place to begin. Personalizing content provides your users with numerous benefits. Not only do they spend less time searching for content, but they also feel appreciated by your organization. 

But here’s the thing—you can’t just wing it.

Developing a custom source of knowledge starts with planning and vision based on actual data about the customers, their roles, and their behavior. The good news? Getting started is very simple and easier than it may seem to many people. 

This article will outline why personalization is a game changer for your knowledge base and how you can do it step by step. 

Ready to get into it? Let’s dive in!

Why Personalize your Knowledge base experience?

Why is building a personalized knowledge base important? Let’s unpack some of the benefits below:

Personalization as a Competitive Advantage

Why is personalization a very effective tool? It transforms the KB from one of the many sources used to an exceptional source that is well-received by the audience. Such a level of care and Personalization differentiates such organizations in the market and makes them thought leaders in their respective industries.

Here’s how it works: Personalization enables firms to deliver messages relevant to user role preferences and how they use products and services. HealthVerity exemplifies this with Document360, which uses reader groups for role-based access. Licensed users get extensive training, while general users merely scrawl through content.

‘Document360 allowed us to segment what we could share with which of our clients,’ stated Alex Mycio, Product Owner at the company.

Also, their customized, branded support site enhanced usability.

“The homepage builder assisted HealthVerity in making the support site appear like a real site and made adjustments to match with the appearance of the HealthVerity site.”

The result? Shorter time to solve problems, decreased levels of frustration, and increased customer satisfaction.

But it is not just a good-feel activity—it is a real business initiative. According to McKinsey, 71% of customers expect customization and businesses that can provide it deliver 40% more revenue than average businesses. Here’s why: when your users know that you understand them and appreciate them, they are more likely to spend their money on your product/service.

Personalizing your knowledge base ensures you meet user expectations while businesses position themselves as forward-thinking, customer-centric organizations. The payoff? The payoff? Happy users = more loyalty = business advantage. 

“Document360 makes editing our knowledge base and customizing our homepage enjoyable.”

Cognitive Load of Information Overload

Users get overwhelmed when using large knowledge repositories to find answers to questions. Personalization makes the experience easy by delivering the right content at the right time.

A personalized knowledge base (KB) minimizes information overload and directs user attention to materials relevant to their work. For instance, a retailer can display onboarding guidelines to first-time customers and loyalty offers to repeat customers to guarantee users view appropriate content for visits.

A study shows that employees use 2.5 hours daily to look for information. Making content more personalized to each user’s needs can cut this by as much as a third, thus enabling productivity gains.

With conversational AI bots to deliver accurate responses, predictive navigation also minimizes the mental load. For example, if customers browse a banking site for ‘overdraft fees, ’ the KB can present them with specific fees associated with their geographical location and account type without pointless generalizations. A personalized KB reduces complexity by helping users search for information easily. It removes noise, thus increasing the confidence, satisfaction, and trust of the users in your organization.

Contextual Search Capabilities for Content Discovery

The quickest way to frustrate users? A confusing knowledge base. When users search for something:

• Can’t find what they need
• Get irrelevant results, or
• Spend hours sifting through unrelated articles

…chances are, they’ll leave unsatisfied.

This is where contextual search capabilities come in handy to perform advanced searches. While simple keyword searches lack the understanding of what the user is searching for, contextual search does and offers results that are better suited and much more relevant. It’s like giving your knowledge base a brain—it doesn’t just search for words; it understands what users mean.

And the benefits are hard to ignore. According to Gartner, companies using AI-enhanced search see a 50% drop in support queries because users feel empowered to find answers on their own. Mayo Clinic, a health-tech company, nailed this by using contextual search to help patients find information tailored to their age, condition, and preferred language. This level of personalization doesn’t just improve the experience—it shows users you get them.

Bottom line? Contextual search transforms your knowledge base into more than just a help tool. It becomes an intuitive assistant that boosts satisfaction, reduces frustration, and keeps users coming back.

Interested in Document360 Personalized Knowledge Base? Schedule a demo with one of our experts

Book A Demo

How to Personalize Knowledge Base Experience for Readers?

Personalizing a knowledge base allows readers to find the content they need and ensures a seamless experience. Here’s how:

Conversational AI Assistant

With Conversational AI Assistant, you can enhance your knowledge repository to become an interactive knowledge base quickly.

How to Do it:

• Embed AI-powered Assistants: Train an online chatbot to help clients in real time by using your share of knowledge with the content knowledge base.
• Guide Users to Relevant Content: AI can decipher user input and recommend articles or possible solutions.
• Continuous Improvement: Update the assistant with new information over time to increase delivery efficiency and accuracy.

Example: When a user types ‘How do I reset my password?’ he gets an instant guide on the process through the chatbot rather than searching for it on his/her own.

Why it Matters:

• Reduces the amount of time spent in search and optimizes user satisfaction.
• It makes the knowledge base feel more intuitive and human-centered.
• Promotes self-service by providing users with fast solutions to their problems.

Language Localization for Global Users

Make content available to users worldwide in their languages of choice.

How to Do it:

• Identify Key Languages: Categorize your users and try to identify which languages you should translate your content into.
• Leverage Translation Tools: For an accurate localization, use Document360 for multiple languages.
• Enable Automatic Language Detection: Set the user interface of your knowledge base to recognize the browser language the user employs while making his/her queries.

Consequently, when a reader in France opens his or her chosen platform, he or she receives a French version of the guide, and when a user in Germany does the same, he or she is presented with the German version.

Why it Matters:

• Enhances the availability to a worldwide population.
• Creates credibility by providing articles in the reader’s local languages.
• Boosts the company’s brand awareness in different markets.

Conditional Content for a Personalized Reader Experience

Deliver content tailored to readers’ roles, preferences, or geographic locations using conditional logic.

How to Do it:

• Segment Your Audience: Organize group users by their functions, roles, customers, or internal departments.
• Apply Conditional Tags: With Document360 you can either display or hide content by specific attributes of a user.
• Customize Navigation Paths: Guide the end users to the most suitable information, thus trying to simplify their search process.

If the customer opens the troubleshooting articles, they can only see basic user-level information, and if the internal staff logs in, they can view advanced technical documentation.

Why it Matters:

• Eliminates information overload by presenting only useful information to the users.
• Tailor’s content is relevant to a person’s interest, improving the user experience.
• Ensures content confidentiality since access to certain information is restricted.

How to Personalize Knowledge Base Experience for Editors?

Personalization in the knowledge base is not only for readers, but an editor needs to manage relevance, consistency, and productivity. Here’s how to leverage these tools: 

Change the Tone of Documentation with AI 

Use AI to make sure your knowledge base software uses language that appeals to readers in the same way as your brand and customers expect.

How to Do it:

• Apply AI to change the tone of articles depending on the target audience (formal for the business-to-business readers or informal for the end-consumers).
• Nevertheless, complex terms should be broken down to ease understanding by the technically less inclined readers.
• Use AI to maintain grammatical and tone similarity between all the articles.

An enterprise software company might repurpose an originally technical document, such as an “API setup guide,” by translating the text between technical language and language more palatable for non-technical experts.

Why it Matters:

• Keeps a certain theme or tone, which is crucial in the building of a brand image.
• Helps in minimizing the amount of effort of tone adjustment required manually.
• Use to make content appealing for more than one targeted group.

Content View Permissions by Role

Share the correct information with the right users by restricting certain types of content to only those with certain roles or access levels.

How to Do it:

• Provide user access to each group (e.g., customers, internal teams).
• Role-based access control allows you to make articles or a particular category visible or invisible.
• Permissions must be revised often to keep the content secure and updated as much as possible.

Therefore, the troubleshooting for IT teams is set as internal, and the Frequently Asked Questions about general troubleshooting are set as Public.

Why it Matters:

• Enhances security to information that requires the access of a few individuals
• Helps users to sift through materials relevant to their rank.
• Improves the quality of information that website users receive by eliminating all irrelevant information.

Customizable Knowledge Base Themes and Layouts

Editors can have their own uniquely designed customized knowledge base in sync with the brands. Ensure that your knowledge base looks consistent with your brand and reflects the users’ preferences.

How to Do it:

• Using Document360, you can adjust background color, text & alignment to fit your company’s image.
• Organize information into categories that interface with the user’s requests, e.g., frequently asked questions, issues, or instructions).
• Also, display links in a widget/banner to the new content or content topic of the day.

Why it Matters:

• Enhances the ease of use of websites and site design.
• Improves the awareness of the brand.
• This allows for a visually attractive environment for particular types of users.

Personalization Analytics and Insights

Treat data as a tool that helps to enhance your expertise and share helpful information with the target audience.

How to Do it:

• Monitor users’ usage of websites (how often they visit the articles, what search terms they use, and which searches were unsuccessful).
• Analytics would tell if some topics were never covered or if some particular article is no longer relevant.
• Revise materials that the users spend most of their time on and create new material that matches user engagement patterns.

If common issues like ‘how to fix broken links in the knowledge base’ or ‘an error occurred while uploading large files’ but no article is found, then work with creating effective self-service training guides.

Why it Matters:

• Assists in keeping the site’s content in context with the specific user.
• Helps meet customer requirements and improve customer and user satisfaction.
• Contributes to the decision-making of the editors.
• Users are happier, and they engage in other activities.

Automatic Content Tagging and Categorization

Easy categorization of content is made possible through automatic tagging and categorizing options.

How to Do it:

• Enable auto-tagging to tag articles in compliance with the keywords automatically.
• Cluster information according to the users or according to your business requirements.
• The tags and categories should be updated on occasion.

When the article “Configuring API Rate Limits” gets crawled by a specific search engine, the system will likely tag it as “API,” ‘rate limits,” and ‘configuration.” It can be found under Developer Resources and linked to other articles, including “Authentication Setup” and “API Error Codes,” among others. This way, every time a developer looks for anything in the API documentation, they get all the required resources within the shortest time possible.

Why it Matters:

• It is even easier for the editors; they save time and spend less effort.
• Enhances the results for users when doing their search.
• Keeps a transparent structure of knowledge base and all the information included is easy to comprehend.

Conclusion

And that’s a wrap—applying richer layers of personalization to your knowledge base system transforms the static source of knowledge into a dynamic, customer-focused platform. This way, user satisfaction is reached, engagement is enhanced, costs are reduced, and loyalty is obtained. Document360 has features that would deliver a unique experience to the editorial and reading audiences. If you want to start building a knowledge base with the features that suit you and become unique, try Document360 now!

An intuitive AI-powered knowledge base software to easily add your content and integrate it with any application. Give Document360 a try!

GET STARTED