Building a Knowledge Management System using Zendesk

Building a best-in-class customer self-service experience
About Techcelerate Ventures

Tech Investment and Growth Advisory for Series A in the UK, operating in £150k to £5m investment market, working with #SaaS #FinTech #HealthTech #MarketPlaces and #PropTech companies.
knowledge content knowledge base agent customer article knowledge manager improve
Building a best-in-class customer self-service experience
About Techcelerate Ventures

Tech Investment and Growth Advisory for Series A in the UK, operating in £150k to £5m investment market, working with #SaaS #FinTech #HealthTech #MarketPlaces and #PropTech companies.
knowledge content knowledge base agent customer article knowledge manager improve
Building a best-in-class 
customer self-service 
experience
Building a best-in-class customer self-service experience
2
Although that title doesn't come with a fancy trophy or ring
though that would be niceyou take pride in driving your 
company's efforts to give customers what they increasingly 
prefer: self-service.
Why do you do that? Because the benefits are clear: customers 
don't want to wait, and providing them with great self-service 
content shows them that you value their time as much as they 
do. And since self-service lowers support costs, drives better 
customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, and improves agent 
efficiency, it's just good business sense.
Yet while your knowledge management efforts have begun to 
bear fruit, there's a nagging sense that your organization could 
do better. Just how exactly will you take your knowledge-
management program to the next level?
If there's a universal truth in knowledge management, it's that 
building a successful program requires a long-term, cross-
organizational effort. In this guide, we'll show you the path 
forward, from building a solid foundation to becoming a truly 
knowledge-centered company.
You're a knowledge 
management 
champion.
Building a best-in-class customer self-service experience
3
Building a solid foundation
Your first step to laying the groundwork for a constantly 
improving self-service experience will be to commit the 
necessary resources: people and technology.
The backbone of your program will be team members with 
extensive expertise, technical skills, and a commitment to 
quality, so be prepared to do everything you can to set up your 
agents for success. That need for expertise stems from the 
changing role of the support agentwith artificial intelligence 
tools becoming increasingly powerful, the traditional tier 1 
position (which handles basic tickets) has begun to disappear. 
For example, Zendesk's Answer Bot can answer the simple 
questions traditionally handled by entry-level employees thus 
freeing up agents to work on tougher problems and build better 
relationships with customers.
While Answer Bot's powerful machine learning abilities mean it 
continuously improves as it works, you'll need skilled agents and 
knowledge base curators to help it perform even better. 
Because Answer Bot surfaces content from your knowledge 
base, your agents can help improve the logic further by training 
it with better concept matching to ensure the correct information 
gets to customers, as well as continue to populate the 
knowledge base with high-quality content that Answer Bot 
can use.  
Hundreds of companies already use Answer Bot, and the data is 
clear: support organizations report increased agent productivity, 
thousands of hours of customer wait time eliminated, and some 
are seeing it resolve up to 22 percent of issues without a live 
agent ever getting involved. And as bots continue to evolve over 
the upcoming years, they'll be able to handle even more 
complex issues, further reducing overhead and enabling live 
agents to focus on more complex problems, customer loyalty, 
retention, and keeping your knowledge base accurate and the 
best it can be. 
Get agents involved in 
content creation
Some agents might be resistant to contributing content for the 
knowledge base, so in the beginning be sure to help them 
recognize the value of having good knowledge by surfacing it to 
them when answering support tickets. This will enable agents to 
understand the value and improved productivity that comes from 
having good knowledge base content that covers common 
customer questions, and documents more advanced knowledge 
or newer information that only some agents know.
Organizations that focus on building and maintaining a solid 
knowledge base and continuously improving it over time see 23 
percent lower resolution times, 20 percent fewer tickets 
reopened, and 2 percent better CSAT scores on average. These 
organizations of "agile improvers" distribute the creation of 
knowledge base articles amongst their teams as they know agents, 
and other knowledge workers, are most responsible for the success 
from good content. So make sure to leverage your team to ensure 
your knowledge base is getting better and better.
Given these statistics, it is crucial that your agents understand the 
importance of capturing institutional knowledge, as doing so makes 
it possible for your self-service options to answer increasing 
numbers of issues. One important way to do this is to make it easy 
for agents to take the content they write for individual tickets and 
convert it into knowledge base articles. But another key component 
of a top performing help center is the constant updating and 
improvement of current article. So in addition to adding new content, 
you should make flagging and improving suboptimal content an 
essential part of their job. Also, as agents get the hang of content 
creationand start to add information more frequentlyshift your 
focus to quality. Agents with editing skills and areas of expertise will 
begin to stand out, which will help you fine-tune your knowledge 
management process.
The Knowledge Capture App
An excellent tool for encouraging agents to get involved in adding 
and improving content is the Knowledge Capture App, which allows 
agents to access knowledge from within the Zendesk environment, 
link to it, and create both internal and customer-facing content. The 
Knowledge Capture App recommends relevant articles to agents, 
helping them quickly and accurately answer tickets, so they'll 
already recognize the value of having good content available. If they 
see something out of date or incorrect, they can flag that content for 
review, which will kick off a workflow for a content manager. Those 
content managers will be able to use the knowledge management 
dashboard to see which agents are flagging and adding the most 
content, as well as how effective that content is.
Building a best-in-class customer self-service experience
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Now that your agents are invested in content creation and are 
taking advantage of Answer Bot, the Knowledge Capture app, 
and Team Publishing, it's time to think about how to finish the 
transformation into a knowledge-centered company, one that 
constantly iterates and improves content. You'll want to:
 Continue to create and maintain relevant knowledge
 Design a framework for knowledge management
 Drive organizational change and sustain engagement
articulate the benefits, promote teamwork, and 
recognize and reward those who contribute
Once content has been flagged for improvement, Team 
Publishing comes into play by enabling your content managers 
to set up clear workflows for authors, approvers, and publishers 
who will finalize the articles. These stageswork in progress, 
ready to review, ready for publishing, and publishedhelp keep 
your content creation process on track and ensure quality 
control. Content managers can also assign article updates 
directly to team members, ensuring that agents with relevant 
expertise will be prompted to help improve content and capture 
their institutional knowledge.
You can also take your knowledge management practices a step 
further through analytics and AI-powered tools like Content 
Cues, which will help ensure you have the right knowledge base 
content. Content Cues identifies common questions customers 
are asking and searches for relevant content, and if none exists 
or current content needs updating, it will surface those insights. 
By identifying these knowledge gaps, Content Cues helps 
content managers understand opportunities to improve help 
center content so they can then leverage tools like Team 
Publishing to assign out content improvements or new articles 
that are needed.
Become a knowledge-
centered organization
As previously mentioned, Team Publishing provides clear 
workflows for content creation, editing, and publishingbut as a 
knowledge-centered organization, you'll also want to consider 
creating certain roles to ensure knowledge is maintained and 
vetted properly:
Establishing these roles can help your 
team collaborate more effectively and 
get your customers and agents the 
content they need.
Authors:
Sometimes referred to as knowledge workers or 
these can just be your agents, authors write 
knowledge base articles and choose which 
section of the knowledge base to house the 
article, before sending the article for review. 
Oftentimes category owners are designated for 
authors with particular areas of expertise.
Publishers:
Once approved, the publisher publishes the 
article. In addition to deployment, this role is 
often responsible for maintenance of the 
knowledge base. A subset of publishers 
are knowledge base owners, who handle 
the tactical execution of the knowledge 
management program.
Approvers:
Once written, articles are sent to approvers who 
review, revise, and ensure quality before 
approving articles for publication. It's also the 
approvers responsibility to add the correct labels 
to each article. 
Building a best-in-class customer self-service experience
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The benefits of self-service, for your customers, your team, and your 
company, are significant. But fully realizing those benefits will take 
some work and preparation. While it can feel overwhelming at times, 
focusing on the fundamentals will help simplify everything:
Never stop improving
Start off with a solid foundation
Success begins with the right talent
knowledgeable, committed agents who 
provide quality supportand tools
technology that enables great self-service 
support for your customers. And with 
Answer Bot, it's possible to enable more 
customers to self-serve, freeing agents 
to focus on more complex issues and 
building better customer relationships. 
Create high-quality content
Self-service support requires great content 
that enables customers to solve their own 
issues. Use the Knowledge Capture App 
to empower your agents to consistently 
write and update knowledge base articles 
that do just that.
Become a knowledge-centered 
organization
Build a framework for the constant 
creation and improvement of your 
knowledge base. Use Team Publishing 
to collaborate on content and establish 
specific rolesauthors, approvers, and 
publishersto have responsibility for 
content, as well as use Content Cues to 
understand where you have knowledge 
gaps that can be improved.
Creating or editing an article 
with Team Publishing
Work in Progress
Ready for Review
Ready for Publishing
Published
If more updates are needed, 
agent receives email notification
ROLE
ARTICLE STATE
Adds 
labels
Approves
article
Waiting for 
Publishing
Publishes 
article
Reviews 
article
Creates or 
edits article
Chooses a 
section to 
house article
Submits
for review
Author 
(Agent)
Approver 
(Content Manager)
Publisher 
(Content Manager)
Building a best-in-class customer self-service experience
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Conclusion
We hope this guide will help you take your knowledge 
management practices to the next level, but it's not 
meant to be the final word on the subject. Please visit 
Zendesk to learn how you can continue to adapt self-
service to meet the needs of your customers.