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Especially for mechanical and software products, technical support is a huge cost for many manufacturers and their resellers. Customers not only want answers to questions you haven't already covered in your catalog, but their appetite only gets bigger after they've made a purchase and now need technical support, tutorials, documentation, FAQs and so-on. If that kind of information is not easier to find than your phone number, then chances are you'll be spending a lot of time, and a lot of your payroll, on voice customer support. The objective of a Product Knowledge-base is to minimize those costs while keeping (or even raising) customer satisfaction. A pleasant side-effect is that it can also play a role in sales. Knowledge-bases are usually divided into two sections:  

1. Product

documentation (manuals)

Trouble tickets and their solutions

You should always have product manuals available online, because customers are going to lose them. The second section, the trouble-ticket database, is actually already a feature at many companies who use it for their internal techs to refer to when answering customer phone calls. Sometimes it simply doesn't occur to them to make it available for their customers to read as well, or are worried that the knowledge could do anything from dissuade potential customers to give competitors an inside look. However, there's probably no greater silent advocate of opening up internal trouble-ticket databases than the companies who already have. Rather than scare away customers by presenting them with a large database of prior woes, it actually demonstrates that there are solutions to your products' problems, and that you're actively monitoring customer feedback and improving the product. A good knowledge-base can also impress would-be customers with the number of other people like them who are using your product. Setting up an online knowledge base can be one of the simplest, cheapest web applications with the biggest bang for the buck. If you already have an internal database on computer then it can be exported to static HTML pages, or an off-the-shelf web database manager. It'll provide viewing capabilities to your customers, and editing capabilities to your staff. If your customer support department uses the same system for addressing customer calls, then it'll "keep itself maintained".

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