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AI connectors: use cases, benefits, and features

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Knowledge base integration: examples, tips, and benefits

Jon Gitlin

Senior Content Marketing Manager

@Merge

A knowledge base system offers a wealth of valuable information, from an individual team’s goals to the company’s expense policies.

Given the breadth and depth of information stored in these applications, the ability to integrate them with your internal applications or your product can be extremely valuable.

We’ll break down the value these integrations provide by highlighting several examples. We’ll also share some best practices for implementing any knowledge base integration.

But first, let’s align on the basics of knowledge base integrations.

Knowledge base integration overview

A knowledge base integration is either an integration that’s built between your product and a customer’s knowledge base system or your knowledge base system and any of your other applications.

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Knowledge base integrations typically involve syncing the following types of data:

Containers: This refers to a specific section of a knowledge base application, such as a folder or a space, that has certain content and sub-pages grouped under a common theme. For example, a container can be “marketing resources”, and its subpages can include content calendars, design assets, and brand guidelines

Confluence, for instance, defines containers as spaces, and they let you perform a wide range of actions on them via their API, from getting information on a space to creating one to setting the roles in a given one.

Articles: This lets other apps or your product create, read, update, or delete specific articles. You can also retrieve the entire collection of articles or fetch a specific set of them

Attachments: You can define the specific attachments you want to perform actions on, whether they live in a certain article, span an entire space, or anything in between

Children: This refers to the relationship of pages within a container. For example, the content calendar page could be a child of the marketing resources page—and the marketing resources page would be the parent. And the child of the content calendar could be a page with drafts of Linkedin posts

Children endpoints let you access specific child pages more easily. For example, through Confluence’s Children API endpoints, you can access the child pages in a specific whiteboard, database, folder, and more

A snapshot of Confluence's Children API endpoints

Examples of knowledge base integrations

To help you better understand how you can use knowledge base integrations, let’s cover a few internal and customer-facing use cases.

Enterprise AI search

Say you offer an enterprise AI search platform that can answer your customers’ employees’ questions.

To help your platform have all of the context needed to answer questions correctly, you can integrate with the customers’ knowledge base systems and then use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with the information in these systems to produce accurate and helpful outputs.

For example, Guru, which offers an enterprise AI search platform, uses integrated knowledge base data alongside other data sources (like customers’ CRM and file storage data) to produce helpful answers to questions like “What’s the status of the Acme deal?”

A screenshot of Guru's enterprise AI search platform

Internal help desk AI agent

Say you power an AI agent that helps employees get any IT issues resolved.

To help the AI agent do this effectively, it can ingest all of the articles in the customer’s knowledge base system and, based on the employees’ inputs, determine the appropriate articles to share.

For instance, if an employee is having trouble connecting to the VPN network, the AI agent can share the knowledge base article that can help them troubleshoot and resolve the issue.

A screenshot of Siit's IT AI agent — *Siit, a modern ITSM platform, offers an AI agent that can answer employees’ IT-related questions*

Onboarding new hires

To help your new hires get up to speed on the company and their roles faster, you can integrate your knowledge base system with your business communications platform (e.g., Slack) and build a custom application in the latter that lets new hires ask questions and receive links to relevant documents.

For example, you can build the custom application “Helpdesk bot” that answers any number of questions based on the information in your knowledge base, and it can provide links to the knowledge base articles that provide more context.

Benefits of knowledge base integrations

The benefits vary depending on whether you’re building internal or customer-facing integrations.

Benefits of internal knowledge base integrations

Employee time savings: By helping employees find information from a knowledge base faster and more easily, they can save a significant amount of time

Improved employee experience: The process of combing through pages to find specific information can be unpleasant and tedious. Knowledge base integrations help prevent employees from doing this, letting them focus instead on the more interesting and enjoyable parts of their jobs

Elevated productivity: By enabling employees to self-serve information, IT teams, people managers, and other groups can spend less time fielding repetitive questions and focus on more strategic, impactful work

Benefits of customer-facing knowledge base integrations

Higher close rate: The integrations allow you to deliver a more valuable and differentiated product experience. This, in turn, should help you win more competitive deals

Improved retention rate: Once customers adopt one of your customer-facing knowledge base integrations, they’re likely to further benefit from your product. This should make them more likely to stay on as a customer over time

Increased total addressable market: If you manage to build several popular knowledge base integrations, including Confluence, Notion, Salesforce Learning, and Zendesk, you’ll be able to effectively target all—if not most—of your prospects

Best practices for integrating with knowledge base systems

If you’re looking to build customer-facing knowledge base integrations, here are some best practices to keep in mind.

Use market research to inform your integration roadmap

There are dozens of knowledge base systems you can integrate with, and each build would take your engineers hundreds of hours initially and countless more time afterwards.

The G2 Grid® for Knowledge Base — *The* *G2 Grid® for Knowledge Base* *highlights how crowded the software category has become*

To help you maximize the returns from your knowledge base integrations, you should collect data from your customer base and prospects on the specific knowledge base integrations they care about most. It may also be worth evaluating the knowledge base integrations your competitors offer, if any, as they likely performed similar market research.

You can source this information from sales intelligence tools like Gong (you can use keyword trackers to flag when specific applications get mentioned), market research surveys on your target audience, simple surveys on your existing customer base, and more.

Once you have ample feedback, you can begin to prioritize your requests accordingly.

Implement access control lists

Access control lists, or ACLs, ensure that information from a customer’s knowledge base is only shared with the employees who have permission to receive it. This allows you to follow the principle of least privilege—as your customers’ employees could only access the information they need.

Overview on access control lists — *Once a customer’s admin authenticates a knowledge base integration, the information that gets synced with your product will only be accessible to authorized employees*

For example, a page on the results from an employee sentiment survey may be restricted to the executive team, people managers, and HR. Any employee who tries to access these results in your product and is outside of those permissioned roles should be unable to do so.

Leverage a unified API platform

Through a unified API platform, you can build to a single, aggregated API to add hundreds of cross-category integrations to your product.

Overview on unified API platforms — *In addition to knowledge base integrations, you can add HRIS, file storage, ticketing, accounting integrations, among others*

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This helps you scale your knowledge base integrations, quickly, along with the other customer-facing integrations you need to support your customers and close prospects.

Add knowledge base and hundreds of other integrations via Merge

Merge, the leading unified API solution, now offers an enterprise-grade integration with Confluence and is releasing additional knowledge base integrations over the coming months.

*A look at Merge’s normalized data models for its knowledge base integrations and their relationships*

Our knowledge base integrations allow you to:

Sync data as often as every 5 minutes
Support access control lists to keep sensitive information secure
Provide granular control of the spaces, folders, and pages you can sync through our Article Picker

Learn more about our integration with Confluence and the hundreds of other integrations we support by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.

Jon Gitlin

Senior Content Marketing Manager

@Merge

Jon Gitlin is the Managing Editor of Merge's blog. He has several years of experience in the integration and automation space; before Merge, he worked at Workato, an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution, where he also managed the company's blog. In his free time he loves to watch soccer matches, go on long runs in parks, and explore local restaurants.