# Updating the knowledge base after a questionnaire

Every questionnaire you finish contains answers worth keeping. Once a
questionnaire is approved, ResponseHub offers the answers that are new — the ones
your knowledge base could not already provide — so you can add them to it.

Doing this after each questionnaire is what makes the next one faster. It is the
single most valuable habit in ResponseHub, and it takes a couple of minutes.

## Add the suggested items

1. [Mark the questionnaire as approved](/questionnaires/completing-a-questionnaire/).

2. Open **Preview Knowledge Base Items** from the questionnaire.

3. Review the list, removing anything you don't want to keep.

4. Select **Add _n_ items to knowledge base**.

The items are created in the background.

## What gets suggested

ResponseHub only offers items that meet all three of these:

- **They have approved answers.** Anything still in Needs Input or Auto Answered
  is left out, which is why approving the questionnaire comes first.
- **They haven't been added to the knowledge base yet.** Nothing is offered twice.
- **They weren't answered using existing knowledge base content.** If your
  knowledge base already covered a question, adding the answer again would only
  create a duplicate.

What is left is the genuinely new material: questions this customer asked that
you had to answer from your sources or write yourself.

## How the items are processed

Two things happen automatically as the items are created:

**Customer information is removed.** References to the customer's name and to
anything specific to them are stripped out, so the answer reads as a general one
and can be reused for the next customer.

**Items are categorised.** Each one is filed into the standard taxonomy — see
[how items are categorised](/knowledge-base/categorisation/).

**Review before you approve:** New items arrive in your knowledge base ready to be reviewed rather than
finished. Check the wording of anything important, since these answers were
written for one customer and will now be reused for others. See
[writing and updating](/knowledge-base/writing-and-updating/).

## Next steps

- [What is the knowledge base?](/knowledge-base/what-is-the-knowledge-base/)
- [Finding duplicates](/knowledge-base/duplicates/)