Fill knowledge gaps with the Knowledge Capture app

A comprehensive knowledge base is an essential piece of any 21st-century support operation. But implementing it is just the first step – maintenance comes next.

The best way to maintain your knowledge base is by harvesting support agents’ collective knowledge – but they’re often swamped and enabling their contributions can be a huge operational hurdle. Fortunately, you can easily capture content using the Zendesk Knowledge Capture app, which helps agents in three key ways:

• Providing helpful article recommendations to agents in the middle of a support interaction.

• Allowing agents to flag content from the knowledge base that needs to be updated.

• Enabling agents to contribute to new content seamlessly from the agent interface.

By automatically searching and suggesting articles based on the brand and language of the ticket, the Knowledge Capture app surfaces relevant content that agents can link to with just one click. Agents can also search for new knowledge in the app and then link to recommendations within tickets.

Once agents start leveraging these knowledge recommendations, they’ll recognise the value of having this information at their fingertips. And when they spot missing or out-of-date content, they’ll be more inclined to take proactive steps toward making the help centre the best it can be – for example, by flagging content that needs to be updated and adding individual feedback. With this feature, agents can leave notes on what changes are needed and those recommendations are automatically put into a review queue for the team’s content managers. This ensures content is out the door and in front of customers as quickly as possible.

By making it easy for the team to contribute new content from the agent interface, support leaders can rest assured that all collective institutional knowledge is captured and that agents are continuously filling knowledge gaps in the help centre.

In the long run, leveraging the Knowledge Capture app in these different ways helps companies to be agile improvers, which means they are consistently iterating and improving their knowledge base over time. By starting with a few articles and continuously expanding and iterating content over time, companies can create the best performing knowledge base. The Knowledge Capture app supports this help centre strategy, ensuring the best knowledge management processes are built into the day-to-day agent workflow without distracting them from their other tasks.

The result is a better experience for customers on the front end with much more thorough and high-quality content, which also helps agents be more productive on the back end, as they also benefit from all of that collected knowledge. Here’s the Knowledge Capture app in action:

Industry leaders, including those from Electronic Arts, Fossil, Clever and FINALCAD, have all reported improved knowledge management capabilities after they installed the Knowledge Capture app, specifically in developing and maintaining high-quality articles while boosting agent productivity.

“The Knowledge Capture app allowed agents to directly contribute to our knowledge base from within the ticket, whether that meant revising an article or creating a new one,” said Zac Garcia, Customer Care Operations at Fossil. “When they identify a gap in our knowledge centre content, they can actually request an article. Without knowing the answer themselves, they can help us take the first step towards populating the knowledge base with that information.”

The Knowledge Capture app is available for all tiers of Guide plans: Lite, Professional and Enterprise. Guide Lite users can search, preview and insert links to articles within tickets they’re managing within Support. Professional users have the additional capabilities of flagging out-of-date articles that need attention as well as the ability to create brand-new articles. Enterprise users receive the full gamut of features, which includes all of the above. Plus, in this tier, any new articles created are automatically turned into drafts, ensuring they are integrated into the team’s publishing workflow.

If you signed up for Zendesk Guide before 20 April 2018, go to this link to install the app for free. If you started with us after 20 April 2018, you should already have the app installed in the Editor bar where agents work on solving tickets. Notify your team so they can start leveraging this great tool.