Dealing with customer support can sometimes feel like you’re just wading through an endless stream of questions, right? As ticket volumes keep climbing, keeping up the pace while still giving fast, accurate answers gets tougher and tougher. This is exactly why an AI knowledge base is so helpful, especially when you’re already using a platform like Zendesk. It’s not just about having a bunch of articles sitting there; it’s about using artificial intelligence to make that information smart, easy to find, and actually useful in the moment.
An AI knowledge base hooked up with Zendesk can really change the game for your support operations. It helps automate common, repetitive questions, makes it super easy for customers to find answers themselves instantly, and basically gives your support team superpowers by putting the right information right in front of them exactly when they need it. But how do you actually build one that works smoothly with your existing setup?
In this guide, you’ll learn the steps to create an AI knowledge base that uses your Zendesk content and pulls from other places too. We’ll also chat about how external tools can seriously boost what Zendesk can do, and we’ll mention eesel AI as a powerful integration that can help you get there faster and more effectively.
Here’s a look at how AI can change the flow of a support interaction compared to the old way:
What is a Zendesk AI knowledge base?
Think of an AI knowledge base as a central spot for all your company’s information, but with a brain. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand questions, process information, and give you the right answers right when you need them. It’s like a super-smart version of a regular knowledge base, which usually just relies on you typing in keywords and hoping for the best.
When you connect an AI knowledge base with Zendesk, you’re basically plugging this intelligent system into your existing support world. It can use content from your Zendesk Guide help center, look at past support tickets, and pull in information from other places to power AI responses and actions directly within your Zendesk workspace. Instead of just showing you a list of articles based on words, the AI can actually understand what you mean, put together information from different spots, and give you a direct, easy-to-understand answer or even take a specific action. This ability to understand and fetch information automatically is how AI really makes a traditional, manually managed knowledge base so much better.
Why create an AI knowledge base for Zendesk?
Setting up an AI knowledge base for your Zendesk isn’t just about getting the latest tech gadget; it’s about fixing real problems that support teams deal with every single day. It helps tackle big challenges like too many tickets, answering the same questions over and over, and needing to handle more and more customers without your team getting swamped.
Here are some key benefits:
- It helps customers help themselves: An AI knowledge base can power chatbots on your website or right inside your help center, giving instant answers to common questions 24/7. This makes it easy for customers to find solutions quickly on their own, without having to wait for a person. It really makes their experience much better. In fact, according to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2024, more than half of customers already prefer talking to bots for quick help.
- It makes your support team more productive: Your support agents probably spend a lot of time digging for information or answering the same questions again and again. An AI knowledge base can cut way back on this. AI can handle simple Tier 1 tickets automatically, suggest helpful articles or shortcuts to agents, and even act like an AI Assistant or Copilot to help agents write replies or find information faster. This lets your team spend their time on the trickier, more important issues.
- It can lower operational costs: By letting customers solve common issues themselves and making agents’ jobs easier, an AI knowledge base reduces the need to hire lots more support staff just to keep up as ticket volume grows. This can save you a good bit of money while still keeping service quality high, or even making it better.
- You get consistency and accuracy: When AI gets its information from sources you trust and keep updated, it makes sure that both customers and agents get the same, correct answers every time. This means fewer mistakes and helps build trust.
Getting the most out of these benefits often comes down to how capable the AI tool you choose is, especially its ability to access and understand different kinds of information and fit smoothly into how you already work.
What you’ll need
Ready to jump in? Here’s a quick list of things you’ll typically need to get an AI knowledge base working with Zendesk:
- A Zendesk account, of course!
- Existing knowledge content. This is super important. It includes things like your Zendesk Guide articles, past support tickets, internal stuff like Google Docs or Confluence pages, and any other company info that’s relevant.
- An AI platform that can connect with Zendesk and learn from your specific knowledge sources.
Step-by-step: Creating your Zendesk AI knowledge base
Setting up an AI knowledge base that connects with Zendesk involves a few key steps. While Zendesk does have some built-in AI features, external platforms often offer more advanced stuff and are more flexible. Let’s walk through the general process, pointing out how tools like eesel AI can help at each stage.
Step 1: Figure out your goals and where your knowledge lives
Before you start building, take a minute to think about exactly what you want your AI knowledge base to do. Are you hoping to automate answers to frequently asked questions, make it easier for your team to find internal info, or maybe speed up how tickets get sorted? Knowing clearly what you want to achieve will help guide everything else you do.
Next, find all the places where useful company knowledge is stored. This isn’t just your Zendesk help center. Think about old support tickets, internal wikis like Confluence or Notion, shared drives with Google Docs or SharePoint files, PDFs, or even public pages on your website. The more good quality data you can teach your AI with, the smarter and more accurate its answers will be.
Pro Tip: AI can actually help you spot gaps in your knowledge by looking at common questions that your current knowledge base doesn’t answer very well.
How well your AI knowledge base works really depends on the quality and variety of the data it learns from. Not all AI tools can easily get to different sources like past tickets or external documents.
Step 2: Pick your AI platform
While Zendesk has some AI features built-in that can help you start with things like generating replies based on your help center, external platforms often give you more powerful features, more flexibility, and can sometimes be better value as you grow.
When you’re choosing an AI tool, here are some things to think about:
- Does it connect easily with Zendesk and all those other knowledge sources you found in Step 1?
- How flexible is its training? Can it learn from past tickets, internal documents, and external wikis, or is it limited to just your help center articles?
- What kind of options do you have for customizing how the AI sounds, what actions it can take, and how it fits into your workflows?
- How is the pricing set up? Is it based on potentially costly things like how many agents you have or how many issues the AI solves, or is it a more predictable cost based on how many times people interact with it?
- Does it have good ways to test and fine-tune things so you feel confident before you make it available to everyone?
This is where a platform like eesel AI comes in. It was built specifically to handle these kinds of questions, offering strong features and flexible pricing that works well with your existing Zendesk setup.
Here’s a quick comparison of platform types:
| Feature | Traditional KB | Native Zendesk AI | External AI (like eesel AI) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Knowledge Sources | Limited (Help Center) | Limited (Help Center, some tickets) | Diverse (Help Center, Tickets, Docs, Wikis, etc.) |
| Customization | Manual/Basic | Limited | Granular, Prompt-based |
| Testing/Refinement | Manual | Can be tricky | Robust Simulation/Analysis |
| Integration Depth | Basic Search | Basic Automation | Seamless, Workflow-integrated |
| Pricing Model | N/A | Often per-agent | Often per-interaction |
Step 3: Connect your knowledge sources to the AI
Once you’ve picked your AI platform, the next step is linking it up to all the places where your knowledge lives. This is where the AI will learn everything it needs to know to answer questions and get things done.
It’s really valuable to connect more than just your Zendesk help center for an AI that’s truly helpful. Training on past tickets, for example, gives the AI insights into the real problems customers have faced and how they were successfully solved, which might not be written down formally anywhere else.
Look for a platform that can automatically sync with your sources. This is key to making sure your AI always has the most up-to-date information. Having to manually update things can quickly lead to the AI giving old, wrong answers. Think about the effort of manually updating knowledge in some systems compared to how easy automatic syncing is with platforms like eesel AI, which can pull from Zendesk, Google Docs, Confluence, and over 100 other integrations.
Step 4: Set up how the AI acts and sounds
Giving your AI data is just the first part; you also need to tell it how to talk to people. Setting up the AI’s behavior and tone is important for making sure the experience is helpful and fits your brand.
Think about customizing the AI’s tone to match your brand’s voice. Do you want it to sound friendly and casual, or more formal and professional? The right tone helps customers feel like they’re interacting with a part of your team.
Besides how it sounds, you’ll want to tell the AI about specific things it can do. These could be simple actions like adding tags to tickets or escalating conversations based on what’s being said, or more complex tasks like getting order details using a system connection or starting a refund process.
Consider the difference between basic, pre-set tones some tools offer and the detailed, instruction-based customization you can get with platforms like eesel AI. eesel AI lets you give specific instructions for unique questions and actions, giving you really precise control over how your AI behaves.
Step 5: Get the AI working within your Zendesk
Now it’s time to actually use the AI inside your Zendesk setup. How will the AI actually work day-to-day? Will it power a chat widget on your website for customers, help your human agents directly within the ticket view (like an AI Assistant or Copilot), or maybe automatically sort and send tickets as an AI Agent?
You’ll need to connect your chosen AI platform directly to your Zendesk instance to make this happen. This usually means setting up an integration or using an app from the Zendesk Marketplace.
Tools like eesel AI are made to fit right into your existing Zendesk setup without causing problems. You can easily add eesel AI to your Zendesk instance.
Step 6: Test, refine, and check how it’s doing
Putting your AI knowledge base out there without really testing it first is a bit like launching a rocket without double-checking the math – it’s risky! It’s super important to test the AI thoroughly before you roll it out fully. This helps you avoid giving wrong answers, messing up workflows, or frustrating users.
Think about testing methods like:
- Having practice conversations within the AI platform.
- Trying it out with a small, controlled group of agents.
- Watching closely how initial interactions go in a live but limited setting.
This lets you see how the AI handles real questions before all your customers or agents start using it.
Remember, refining is an ongoing process. You’ll need to adjust the data the AI learned from, tweak its instructions, and change its actions based on your test results and how it performs early on. AI gets smarter over time, but it needs your help.
Once it’s live, keep an eye on key numbers like:
- How many tickets the AI resolves on its own (deflection rate).
- How accurate its answers are.
- How much your agents are using it (if it’s an assistant tool).
- What kind of feedback you’re getting from customers.
Some tools have limited testing options (like Zendesk’s native AI, which can be a bit hard to test completely before using it everywhere). Compare that to platforms like eesel AI that offer strong simulation features and ways to roll it out gradually. eesel AI also has a feature that analyzes knowledge gaps, using AI insights to point out areas where your training data might be missing information. This helps you make your knowledge base better effectively.
Tips for a successful Zendesk AI knowledge base
Getting your AI knowledge base set up is a fantastic start, but a few ongoing things can help make sure it’s successful for the long haul and really makes a difference in your Zendesk support.
Keep your knowledge sources up to date
AI is only as good as the information it learns from. Outdated or incomplete content leads to bad answers. Prioritize updating your Zendesk Guide articles, internal docs, and training materials.
AI can also flag content gaps, like common questions that aren’t answered well, helping you focus updates where they matter most. Platforms like eesel AI offer automatic syncing, so your AI always has the latest info without manual work.
Don’t forget about internal knowledge
While having knowledge for customers is super important, having a good internal knowledge base is just as key for your support agents and other employees. Giving them quick, easy access to company rules, procedures, HR info, and IT help guides can really improve how efficiently things run internally.
AI can power internal knowledge bases too, making it much easier for employees to find what they need fast, whether they’re new to the company, trying to fix an internal tool issue, or looking up a company policy.
You might want to check out eesel AI’s Teammate AI product. It brings AI-powered knowledge retrieval right into tools your team already uses like Slack or Teams, putting company knowledge at their fingertips without them having to leave their workflow. You can learn more about internal knowledge bases in this Zendesk guide or see how AI can help with internal knowledge sharing with eesel AI’s Teammate AI.
Have a clear escalation path
Let’s be realistic: AI isn’t going to solve absolutely every single issue. Tricky, sensitive, or very specific situations will still need the understanding and skill of a human agent.
It’s important to have a clear, smooth way for things to get escalated. When the AI can’t figure out a question, it should be able to easily hand the conversation over to a human agent. Ideally, it should pass along the whole chat history so the agent doesn’t have to start from scratch.
Tools like eesel AI are built with smart ways to manage escalations. This helps make sure transitions are smooth, giving agents all the necessary details to pick up right where the AI left off.
Keep an eye on performance
Your AI knowledge base isn’t something you can just set up and forget about. It’s important to keep tracking how it’s doing using analytics and reporting features.
Metrics like:
- How many issues the AI resolves on its own (deflection rate).
- How accurate its answers are.
- How much agents are using it (if that applies).
- What feedback users are giving.
These are really important for seeing what’s working well and where you could make things better. Are there common questions the AI isn’t answering correctly? Are agents getting the most out of the AI assistant?
Platforms like eesel AI offer detailed reports and knowledge gap analysis. This helps you keep making your AI more effective, improve the information it’s learning from, and show the value you’re getting from your AI investment.
Ready to make your Zendesk support even better with AI?
If you’re looking for an AI platform that gives you more flexibility, connects more deeply with your tools, and has predictable costs compared to just using native Zendesk AI, eesel AI was designed with you in mind. It connects seamlessly with your current Zendesk setup, letting you train AI on all sorts of sources like your help center, past tickets, Google Docs, Confluence, and tons more.
With eesel AI, you get strong testing features to make sure everything is accurate before you go live, detailed control over how your AI sounds and what it does, and pricing that’s based on interactions, which scales affordably as your business grows, not based on how many agents you have.
Ready to see how AI can really change your Zendesk support? Take the next step.
