Do you feel like your customer support team keeps answering the same common questions repeatedly? Frustrated by a disorganized knowledge base that's more of a burden than a help?
If you're managing customer support, you already know the value of accurate, easily accessible organizational knowledge. But without a proper knowledge management system, you're likely wasting time and feeling frustrated.
This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about Zendesk knowledge management—from understanding the basics to implementing best practices and knowledge management strategies.
You'll learn how to organize your knowledge base content effectively, streamline your customer interactions, and improve overall operational efficiency and agent productivity.
What Is Knowledge Management?
Knowledge management is the process of gathering, organizing, sharing, and maintaining information within an organization.
In customer support, it’s about ensuring that accurate and relevant information is easily accessible to both support agents and customers. This can include FAQs, troubleshooting guides, training materials, and internal processes.
Effective knowledge management practices help to reduce repetitive questions, speed up issue resolution, and improve overall customer satisfaction.
It also empowers support teams to work more efficiently by giving them quick access to the information they need.
The Three Key Types of Knowledge Management
There are three main types of knowledge management.
Understanding these types of knowledge management helps you better organize your knowledge base, ensuring that the right information is accessible to the right people.
With each type of knowledge management, there are different approaches that you can take to improve the process around them, and make sure you are successful at meeting each of those needs.
It's best to find what works uniquely for you to be able to make these tips work within your teams.
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Explicit knowledge
This is easily documented information such as FAQs, user guides, standard operating procedures, and training materials.
It's structured, organized, and can be easily communicated. For example, a step-by-step troubleshooting guide or a policy document falls under explicit knowledge.
Pro tip: Explicit knowledge is more structured, standard, and stable. Scheduling regular content quality reviews and updates is a great idea for this type of knowledge, ensuring that users always access accurate information.
Implicit knowledge
This involves practical know-how gained through experience. It includes best practices, tips, or techniques shared among internal teams.
Although not always documented, implicit knowledge is crucial for efficiency. For example, a team member knowing the quickest way to resolve a recurring issue is implicit knowledge.
Implicit knowledge should be accessible, evolving, and encouraged. Encourage knowledge sharing through team meetings or internal channels to capture implicit knowledge that might otherwise remain unspoken.
Tacit knowledge
Tacit knowledge refers to personal insights, intuition, or expertise that are hard to express but crucial for problem-solving and decision-making.
For example, an experienced support agent's instinctive ability to handle difficult customer interactions is tacit knowledge.
Tacit knowledge is more situational, specific, and nuanced. Approach this type of knowledge by encouraging coaching, shadowing programs, and reviews of situational cases.
What Is a Knowledge Management System?
A knowledge management system (KMS) is designed to capture, organize, and distribute information within an organization.
In customer support, a KMS helps teams create a centralized knowledge base, ensuring that accurate and relevant articles are readily available to agents and customers.
Zendesk's knowledge management system includes features like content management, semantic search, and analytics, enabling teams to efficiently manage and optimize their knowledge base.
This improves support efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Knowledge Management Strategies
These knowledge management strategies can help you structure your approach to knowledge management.
Codification - This is the formal process of gathering, and documenting knowledge in various ways. Those ways could include analytics, interviews, writing product documentation, etc. This is making sure that the knowledge is gathered and formalized.
Dissemination - This is the process of making sure that the information is distributed in the best way possible to get the right information at the right time. This can be through shared channels, inclusion in the product UI, or usage in agent responses..
Personalization - This is making sure that the knowledge and information is tailored to your audience in a way that best suits their needs. That could be in the form of documentation, short-format FAQs, content, etc.
In the next section, we'll be using all three strategies to create a knowledge management process that works for you!
How to Create a Zendesk Knowledge Management Process?
Creating a structured knowledge management process in Zendesk involves the following steps:
1. Identify information needs
The first step in creating a knowledge management process is understanding what information your customers and agents frequently look for.
This involves identifying common questions, issues, and pain points that arise during customer interactions. You need to be able to understand where there are knowledge gaps, and to be able to put monitors in place in case needs change.
Here are ways to identify those needs:
Review past support tickets to spot recurring issues. Look for patterns in customer inquiries, complaints, and feedback.
Monitor customer feedback on self-service articles to identify knowledge gaps or areas needing improvement.
Use Help Center Analytics to analyze behavior trends such as, customer journeys while in Support experience, helpfulness across articles, and views. This helps you understand what customers are looking for and whether they’re finding the right answers.
Regularly check agent quality against specific areas to see if there are gaps where better supporting knowledge could help. Having regular check-ins with the team goes a long way.
One activity that has been successful in my teams is to try to implement this in practice is a task-dump review.
The team comes together, and writes out all of the things that they work on. Types of cases, processes – pretty much everything. They then rank those things on a scale of how confident they are with them:
“I feel really confident” - tasks that they are comfortable with.
“I would like to learn more” - tasks where there are opportunities to develop further.
“I feel like I know nothing” - activities where there is a clear knowledge gap.
You can identify what specific areas of those tasks make them feel that way, and begin to create a plan to better enable them through these knowledge processes.
Being able to keep up with the evolving needs of your team is an important first step to being able to address knowledge gaps early.
This way, you can ensure that knowledge gaps don't get too out-of-hand, your teams feel prepared, and customers have information, when and where they need it.
Once you've identified information needs, the next step is to gather the right content. This involves sourcing knowledge from subject matter experts, existing documentation, and support agents' experiences.
After gathering the information, organize it into a structured knowledge base that is easy to navigate.
Some ways to implement this could look like this:
Have cadences to regularly collect content from product teams, support agents, and technical experts to ensure accuracy and completeness.
Define a structure for your content that is easy to browse for new users, and easy to search for existing users. Have clear categories and grouping of content.
Use consistent formatting, including titles, summaries, step-by-step instructions, images, and videos where applicable.
Ensure each article is tagged with relevant keywords for easy searching and indexing.
Regularly review and update content to keep it accurate and relevant.
Having regular and consistent cadences for gathering new information will make it much easier to avoid gaps, and keep the information as clear as possible.
At the same time, knowledge management tools such as the Help Center Manager can help to ensure that the information is as easy to manage as possible.
For example: when new information comes in from your product teams, you can find and replace across your whole knowledge base, update broken links, and perform bulk actions with the Help Center Manager.
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3. Create and review articles
Having the information itself is at the core of knowledge management practices. Knowledge base articles should be clear, concise, and comprehensive, with step-by-step instructions to guide users. It’s also essential to review and update content regularly to maintain accuracy.
You can do it by:
Writing articles using simple language, avoiding technical jargon where possible. Break down complex processes into clear steps.
Including relevant keywords naturally within the article to improve searchability.
Determining the most relevant format for your users needs. Is that a guide, a step-by-step walkthrough, FAQs, or a more practical resource.
Collaborating with agents who have firsthand experience with known issues. Their insights can help create more relevant and effective articles.
Establishing a review cycle to check for outdated content, broken links, or changes in product features.
One practical example is using the Knowledge Centered Service (KCS) methodology.
With this KCS, agents verify, and update the content with each usage to ensure that content is up-to-date with the latest information in their workflow.
Making sure that you can keep the information regularly updated, and evolving with product changes can be quite the task for one person.
Consider involving a content review team consisting of subject matter experts and experienced support agents, and the content manager or knowledge base owner.
This ensures accuracy and comprehensiveness while maintaining a consistent tone of voice across all articles. Additionally, it ensures consistent communication across the board for product updates and changes.
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4. Distribute and share knowledge
After creating content, it needs to be easily accessible to both customers and agents.
Efficient knowledge distribution improves self-service options and keeps agents moving effectively to resolve issues.
You can:
Publish articles in the Zendesk Guide, ensuring they are organized under relevant categories and tagged with keywords to make them findable.
Share new or updated articles with the support team through internal communication channels to raise awareness.
Use different methods of delivering the information such as a review in team meetings of what is new.
Promote self-service portals by featuring popular or newly added articles on your help center’s homepage.
Embed relevant help articles within support ticket responses for quick issue resolution.
Keep in mind that self-service materials don’t only need to exist within your help center. Incorporate contextual help by linking relevant knowledge base articles directly within the product’s interface.
This proactive approach helps customers get the answers they need exactly when and where they’re needed.
Ultimately, people will always have questions, and won’t always catch the information as it comes out.
5. Analyze and improve
Knowledge management is an ongoing process. Continuously analyzing your knowledge base’s performance allows you to identify gaps, measure effectiveness, and make data-driven improvements.
This is a critical step to keeping your information working for you.
Use Help Center Analytics for Zendesk Guide to track key metrics, including article views, search effectiveness, and feedback scores.
Monitor search queries that result in no relevant articles. This highlights topics needing coverage.
Collect user feedback on article helpfulness and clarity. Use this input to refine content.
Review support tickets linked to help articles to understand whether the content resolves issues effectively.
Continuously update articles based on user feedback, product updates, or new customer questions.
Schedule regular content audits to ensure your knowledge base content remains accurate and relevant. Involve stakeholders from customer support, product teams, and content creators for a comprehensive review.
Additionally, use A/B testing to experiment with article formats and layouts to optimize user engagement. These processes don’t need to be heavy lift, but they do need to be in place.
Make Zendesk Knowledge Management Work for You
Effective knowledge management is about more than just organizing information. It's about empowering your support team and enhancing the customer experience.
By leveraging Zendesk's powerful knowledge management tools, you can create a knowledge base that evolves with your customers' and agents’ needs. But to truly maximize Zendesk’s potential, the right tools and strategies are essential.
Swifteq offers a suite of knowledge base solutions designed to enhance your Zendesk knowledge management experience.
The Zendesk Help Center Manager streamlines content organization with bulk operations and broken link fixes, saving your team valuable time.
With Zendesk Help Center Analytics, you can track article performance, customer feedback, and search effectiveness, allowing you to make data-driven improvements.
And for global support, Zendesk Guide Translation ensures consistent and accurate content in multiple languages, enhancing customer satisfaction worldwide.
With Swifteq’s tools and the right knowledge management strategies, you can transform your support operations—reducing ticket volumes, speeding up resolution times, and building a more efficient team.
Ready to optimize your knowledge base? Start implementing these best practices with Swifteq today and make knowledge management work for you. As for a demo today!
Written by Neal Travis
Neal Curious learner and builder of customer experiences in scale-ups. He is the Head of Customer Experience at the Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) and Host of Growth Support.