A practical guide to Zendesk knowledge gap analysis in 2025

Does it ever feel like your support team is stuck on a hamster wheel, answering the same questions day in and day out? It's a common feeling. But it's usually not a sign that your agents are struggling; it's a sign that your knowledge base is. This points to a "knowledge gap", that frustrating space between what your customers are looking for and what your help center actually tells them.

A Zendesk Knowledge Gap Analysis is just a systematic way of finding and plugging those holes. The whole point is to boost your self-service, cut down on repetitive tickets, and free up your team to handle the trickier stuff that actually requires their brainpower.

So, let's walk through how this is typically done in Zendesk, look at what their built-in AI can do, and then explore a more automated way to keep your knowledge base in sync with what your customers actually need.

What exactly is a Zendesk Knowledge Gap Analysis?

Simply put, a knowledge gap is any question a customer has that they can't find a quick answer to in your help center or FAQs. It’s that moment of frustration that leads them to give up and file a support ticket for something they probably could have handled themselves.

A Zendesk Knowledge Gap Analysis is the process of digging into your support data to find these missing pieces of the puzzle. It’s about looking at ticket trends, seeing what people search for and don't find, and listening to agent feedback to figure out what content you need to create or update.

The idea isn't to just write more articles for the sake of it. It's about creating the right articles that solve real customer problems. Get this right, and you'll see happier customers and a much more efficient support team.

How to manually conduct a Zendesk Knowledge Gap Analysis

Before we jump into fancy automation, it's good to understand the old-school methods for finding knowledge gaps right inside Zendesk. They can work, but be warned, they require a fair bit of manual effort.

Sifting through ticket tags and recurring themes

The most direct way is to just roll up your sleeves and review tickets to spot patterns. Support managers often hunt for common tags (like "password-reset" or "shipping-policy") or check which macros are used most often. If your team is firing off the same macro 50 times a day, you've probably found a knowledge gap.

The catch? This method is slow and really depends on your agents being consistent with their tagging. If the data isn't perfectly organized (and let's be honest, it rarely is), it's easy for trends to slip through the cracks.

A screenshot of the Zendesk ticket interface, which is a key part of a manual Zendesk Knowledge Gap Analysis.

Using Zendesk Explore and help center reports

Zendesk Explore is a pretty hefty tool for digging into your support data. You can build reports to find things like "top searches with no results" or see which tickets aren't being linked to any knowledge base articles. These reports can point you directly to what customers are looking for but failing to find.

While useful, Explore isn't exactly plug-and-play. It takes some setup and a bit of know-how to get meaningful information out of it. It can tell you what people searched for, but it often misses the why. A search for "refund" could mean a bunch of different things, and the word itself doesn't tell you what kind of article to write.

Zendesk Explore's reporting dashboard can be used for a detailed Zendesk Knowledge Gap Analysis.

Getting agent feedback with the knowledge capture app

Zendesk's Knowledge Capture app is a neat little tool that lets agents flag articles that are out of date or create new ones right from a ticket. When an agent writes a brilliant, detailed reply to a customer's question, they can use the app to turn that response into a draft article.

It’s a great idea in theory, but it puts the responsibility on busy agents to remember to do it while juggling multiple conversations. It's a reactive process that relies completely on your team having the time and energy to contribute, meaning a lot of great solutions never make it into the knowledge base.

Limitations of Zendesk's built-in tools

Zendesk has been adding more AI features to help with knowledge management, which is a great step. But when you dig in, you start to see some limitations, especially when it comes to proactively finding out what's missing from your help center.

Creating content vs. finding the gaps

Zendesk's generative AI is pretty good at writing articles once you know the topic. You can feed it a few bullet points, and it can flesh them out into a full article or help you tweak the tone.

The issue is that it doesn't automatically figure out what to write about by analyzing your ticket history. A person still has to do the heavy lifting of finding the patterns and then telling the AI what to create. This is where a tool like eesel AI comes in. It plugs into your helpdesk and sifts through past tickets to automatically surface trends and show you what content you're actually missing. It removes the guesswork.

Zendesk's AI can create articles, but a manual Zendesk Knowledge Gap Analysis is still needed to find the topics.

A disconnected knowledge ecosystem

It makes sense that Zendesk's tools are built around Zendesk Guide. But for most companies, important information isn't just in one place. It’s spread across Google Docs, Confluence, Notion, and who knows how many other internal wikis. Zendesk's native tools can't see any of that other information, leaving you with an incomplete picture of your company's knowledge.

The headache of proactive maintenance

Zendesk gives you the tools to manage your content, but figuring out what's outdated or missing is still a very manual, reactive job. You're usually waiting for an agent to flag an article or a customer to complain before you realize something needs to be fixed.

A more modern approach wouldn't just connect to all your knowledge sources; it would use AI to analyze support conversations and proactively suggest new articles based on what's already working. This is exactly what eesel AI does. It turns your team's best resolutions into a knowledge base that gets smarter with every ticket.

A better way: Automated Zendesk Knowledge Gap Analysis

Instead of fighting with manual reports and hoping your agents have a spare moment to write content, you can automate the whole thing. Here’s how a tool like eesel AI can work with your Zendesk setup to build a smarter knowledge base without the extra work.

Unify your knowledge in a few clicks

First off, you need to bring all your information together. eesel AI plugs directly into your Zendesk account in just a couple of clicks. But it doesn't stop there. It also connects to your other knowledge hubs, Confluence, Google Docs, Slack, whatever you use. This creates one unified brain for your support AI, giving it the full context it needs to answer questions accurately.

Turn successful tickets into draft articles

This is where it gets really interesting. The eesel AI platform can analyze your resolved tickets, find the best solutions written by your top agents, and automatically generate draft articles for your knowledge base. It effectively closes the loop, turning your team's hard-earned wisdom into self-service content that everyone can use.

Get reports that actually tell you what to do

The eesel AI reporting dashboard doesn't just give you a bunch of data to sift through; it gives you clear direction. It shows you exactly which topics are causing the most tickets but have little or no coverage in your knowledge base. This gives you a data-backed to-do list for creating content, so you can put your effort where it will actually make a difference.

Pricing for Zendesk's knowledge and AI features

Of course, we have to talk about cost. Zendesk's knowledge and AI tools are bundled into their Suite plans. The platform is powerful, but it's important to understand the pricing, since many of the more advanced AI features are often included only in higher-tier plans or sold as paid add-ons.

It's also worth noting that features like the AI Copilot for agents often come as add-ons. This can lead to unpredictable costs that creep up as your team grows. In contrast, eesel AI offers transparent, all-inclusive pricing plans with no hidden per-resolution fees. This makes it a lot easier to budget and scale your support automation without getting hit with surprise charges.

Stop guessing, start your Zendesk Knowledge Gap Analysis

So, what's the takeaway here? A manual Zendesk Knowledge Gap Analysis is a necessary starting point, but it's a grind. Zendesk's own tools are getting better, but they're mostly confined to the Zendesk ecosystem and still require a lot of hands-on work to be truly effective.

The most practical approach is to automate the analysis. By connecting a tool like eesel AI to your Zendesk account, you can bring all your knowledge together, automatically spot content gaps from real customer conversations, and build a help center that actually helps.

Ready to see what's missing in your knowledge base? You can connect eesel AI to your Zendesk account in a few minutes and get an automated knowledge gap analysis, completely risk-free. Start your free trial today.