5 strategies for building up your help center content for AI

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<p class="p">Over time, the best strategy for building a solid foundation for effective self-service
is to create and maintain a quality knowledge base using our <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408821200538" target="_blank">recommended best practices</a>. However, if you want to quickly
ramp up your knowledge base and enhance the quality of your AI responses, the strategies
listed below will help you get started.</p>
<div class="p">This article contains the following sections:<ul class="ul" id="topic_jf5_cqm_lcc__ul_iyp_hbn_lcc">
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_ixv_zbn_lcc">Strategy 1: Analyze ticket
data</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_xlh_bcn_lcc">Strategy 2: Identify common
customer issues</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#id_y4h_j34_lcc">Strategy 3: Review existing
content</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_gjf_ccn_lcc">Strategy 4: Listen to your
community</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_amk_dcn_lcc">Strategy 5: Optimize your
content</a></li>
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<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title2" class="topic nested1" id="topic_ixv_zbn_lcc">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title2">Strategy 1: Analyze ticket data</h2>
<div class="body">
<div class="p">Analyzing your ticket data is the best way to search for the topics that will help
the most customers. Once you know which topics are necessary to proactively help
your customers, you can develop or enhance knowledge base articles to provide the
missing information. For example, you can analyze your tickets to find:<ul class="ul" id="topic_ixv_zbn_lcc__ul_en2_dgn_lcc">
<li class="li">Common issues or pain points that users struggle with</li>
<li class="li">Frequently asked questions</li>
<li class="li">Known technical issues and workarounds that impact customers</li>
<li class="li">Time-consuming issues</li>
</ul>
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<div class="p">Analyzing tickets can be a manual process, and may be overwhelming at first. Having a
good strategy helps. Here's one process you can use to analyze your tickets and
identify required content: <ul class="ul" id="topic_ixv_zbn_lcc__ul_snd_xjn_lcc">
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Categorize your tickets</strong>: How you categorize your tickets depends on
the information you're collecting in tickets. Ideally, you'll want to
categorize by issue, using a custom "about" field. Then, you can build an
Explore report to see what your major ticket categories and issues are. See
<a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408828230554-Best-practices-for-finding-customer-issues-to-start-your-knowledge-base#topic_gk5_2hk_lj" target="_blank">Categorizing your tickets</a>.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Drill-down into ticket groupings to find common issues</strong>: After you
organize your tickets into categories, you'll want to create a view to dig
into the categories with the most tickets and find the common, high
frequency issues. See <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408828230554-Best-practices-for-finding-customer-issues-to-start-your-knowledge-base#topic_j1d_ghk_lj" target="_blank">Drill-down into ticket groupings to find
common issues</a>.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Create articles from tickets</strong>: Agents can use the Knowledge section of
the context panel to create or request new help center articles directly
from a ticket within Agent Workspace. See <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408835161114" target="_blank">Creating and requesting articles in
Knowledge</a>.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Expand article content with generative AI</strong>: If you have the Copilot
add-on, you can use the text expansion tool within the article editor to
quickly create expanded content for articles. You can write short notes or
bullet points, then use the tool to turn them into complete paragraphs. This
can help you quickly ramp up your help center content. See <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/6267360002714" target="_blank">Using generative AI to expand and enhance
help center content</a>.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Determine what to document</strong>: Keep a tracking document where you can
record issues you find, then determine what you want to document and set
priorities for creating the content. Start by identifying 5% of your most
common issues, and focus acting on those first. Taking small steps toward
developing knowledge base content to address ticket issues will yield huge
benefits. See <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408828230554-Best-practices-for-finding-customer-issues-to-start-your-knowledge-base#topic_nyy_ghk_lj" target="_blank">Determine what to document</a>.</li>
</ul>
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<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title3" class="topic nested1" id="topic_xlh_bcn_lcc">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title3">Strategy 2: Identify common customer issues</h2>
<div class="body">
<div class="p">Once you've looked through your tickets for common customer issues, you can turn to
other resources to further investigate your customer pain points. For example, you
can analyze the following:<ul class="ul" id="topic_xlh_bcn_lcc__ul_gnt_krn_lcc">
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Macros</strong>: If you use macros for common responses to tickets, you can
look at your most used macros to find clues about your common customer pain
points. You can then document the topics covered in those macros in your
knowledge base. Macros that cover known issues and workarounds are a great
resource for creating help articles. </li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Tags</strong>: You can use the tags on tickets to help pinpoint common issues.
Examine your tag cloud to see the 100 tags that have been most applied to
tickets in the last 30 days. This will help you understand issues that may
require knowledge base articles.</li>
</ul>
To review macros and tags for common issues, see <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408828230554-Best-practices-for-finding-customer-issues-to-start-your-knowledge-base#topic_d13_lyd_jj" target="_blank">Looking at other sources to determine customer
issues</a>.</div>
</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title4" class="topic nested1" id="id_y4h_j34_lcc">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title4">Strategy 3: Review existing content</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">Existing content can be another source for determining issues and starting your
knowledge base. In most cases, it's ready-made content that can go directly in the
knowledge base with little or no editing. </p>
<p class="p">For example, some agents might have informal documentation, or "cheat sheets," that
help them remember common issues and workarounds. Other agents may share information
with their team via a wiki, internal help center, or other informal process that you
could leverage. </p>
<p class="p">To review strategies for leveraging your existing content, see <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408828230554-Best-practices-for-finding-customer-issues-to-start-your-knowledge-base#topic_d13_lyd_jj" target="_blank">Looking at other sources to determine customer
issues</a>. </p>
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</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title5" class="topic nested1" id="topic_gjf_ccn_lcc">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title5">Strategy 4: Listen to your community</h2>
<div class="body">
<div class="p">To learn about common issues and pain points in your community, you can: <ul class="ul" id="topic_gjf_ccn_lcc__ul_ung_3g4_lcc">
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Talk to your agents</strong>: Agents can not only tell you what the common
issues are, but often they can articulate exactly what documentation is
required. Meet with agents regularly and encourage them to suggest new
content and participate in content creation or review, where possible.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Listen to your community</strong>: Check the most active threads for possible
points of confusion. If customers are commenting a lot, it might be a source
of frustration that needs documentation. You can monitor your own help
center community forum, if you have one. If not, you can check third-party
community forums where your customers might be talking about your products
and asking questions (for example, Reddit).</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Check social media</strong>: Go everywhere your customers are and find out
what they are saying. You might hear about some common issues.</li>
</ul>
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</div>
</div>
<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title6" class="topic nested1" id="topic_amk_dcn_lcc">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title6">Strategy 5: Optimize your content for AI</h2>
<div class="body">
<div class="p">Once you identify the issues you need to document, you can either write articles from
scratch, <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408835161114" target="_blank">create articles from tickets</a>, or use <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/6267360002714" target="_blank">generative AI to expand articles</a> based on minimal bullet
lists or notes. No matter how you create articles, you can use these simple
strategies to optimize the content and create AI-ready articles in your help
center. <ul class="ul" id="topic_amk_dcn_lcc__ul_ptw_x34_lcc">
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Use consistent and structured formatting for article titles and
content</strong>: Write simple, descriptive titles and subheadings for
articles. Incorporate bullet points and numbered lists when presenting steps
or key points within articles.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Use multimedia sparingly</strong>: While it's a good idea to enhance articles
with images, diagrams, or screenshots to clarify concepts and improve
comprehension for users reading articles in your help center, keep in mind
that images and videos are not used by AI. When using images, always use an
ALT tag and try not to use multimedia as a substitute for text.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Focus on one idea</strong>: Concentrate on a single idea and use a concise
article title to create clear and focused content, facilitating user
comprehension.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Keep it simple</strong>: Keep articles simple, concise, and to the point. Use
clear and straightforward language, avoiding jargon, to ensure easy
comprehension by users of all levels of expertise. </li>
</ul>
</div>
<p class="p">To optimize your articles to improve the quality and accuracy of automated responses,
see<a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408845739162" target="_blank"> Optimizing your help center content</a>.</p>
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