A complete guide to Zendesk knowledge management

Let’s be honest, if you’re in customer support, you’re probably tired of typing out the same answers day after day. Your team’s expertise is spread thin across old tickets, random internal docs, and who knows how many other apps. A knowledge management system is supposed to be the fix, but actually making it work is a whole different beast.

Zendesk is a giant in the customer service world, and it has its own tools for wrangling all that information. It’s definitely powerful, but it has its quirks. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about Zendesk knowledge management, what it does, how to set it up, what it costs, and some big limitations to keep in mind. You’ll get a clear picture of whether it’s enough for your team on its own, or if you need something more to really pull ahead.

What is Zendesk knowledge management?

So, what are we actually talking about when we say Zendesk knowledge management? It’s really just how you create, share, and look after your company’s information inside the Zendesk platform. The goal is to help customers find their own answers and give your agents the right info, right when they need it.

It boils down to a few main parts:

• Zendesk Guide: Think of this as the command center for your help content. It’s the tool you’ll use to build your knowledge base, an online community forum, and a customer portal.

• Help Center: This is the public-facing website your customers see. It’s where they can search for articles, browse FAQs, and solve problems without having to create a ticket.

• AI-powered features: Zendesk has been adding its own AI to help draft content, make search better, and automatically suggest articles to agents while they’re working.

The whole idea is to let self-service handle the easy questions, making your support team faster and more focused by keeping everything they need inside Zendesk.

A screenshot of the Zendesk Guide interface, which is central to Zendesk knowledge management.

Core features and capabilities of Zendesk knowledge management

Zendesk gives you a decent set of tools for building out a knowledge base. Let’s dig into what you can actually do with them.

Content creation and organization

When you need to write an article, Zendesk offers a pretty standard text editor where you can format text, add images, and use templates to keep things looking consistent. You can then sort those articles into categories and sections to make them easier to browse. You can also add labels to articles, which helps with filtering.

But here’s the rub: all that content is now stuck inside Zendesk. If your team’s most valuable knowledge also lives in places like Confluence or Google Docs, you’ve just built a new information silo. Your support articles are in one place, and your team’s internal notes are somewhere else entirely.

This is where a different approach, like the one eesel AI takes, comes in handy. Instead of making you migrate everything into a single system, it connects to all your existing sources. Your AI can pull answers from Zendesk, Confluence, and internal docs simultaneously, creating one source of truth without any copy-pasting.

AI and automation

Zendesk is getting more serious about AI. Its generative AI can help you flesh out a few bullet points into a full article, change the tone of some text, or summarize a long document. For customers, its AI-powered search tries to give direct answers instead of just a list of links.

For your agents, Zendesk’s AI can also suggest articles that might help solve a ticket, which can be a real time-saver. The catch is that its AI is mostly trained on your Zendesk data. That’s a good start, but it misses all the useful context hidden in your past support tickets, internal wikis, and other documents. This can lead to answers that are technically correct but kind of generic or incomplete.

An example of an AI copilot drafting a reply within Zendesk, showcasing advanced AI automation for zendesk knowledge management.

On the other hand, eesel AI is built to learn from all your company knowledge from the get-go. It can train on years of your old support tickets, automatically learning your brand’s voice, common troubleshooting steps, and the little workarounds your best agents have figured out over time. The result is AI assistance that feels much more accurate and specific to your business.

Analytics and reporting

Zendesk has built-in dashboards that let you track metrics like article views, what people are searching for, and how customers rate your help content. This data is helpful for spotting your most popular articles and identifying search terms that aren’t returning any results, which shows you where the gaps are in your knowledge base.

Zendesk's analytics dashboard, a key feature of Zendesk knowledge management for tracking content performance.

Building and maintaining your knowledge base

Setting up a knowledge base isn’t a one-time project; it’s something you have to keep working on. Here’s how that usually plays out in Zendesk and where it can get a little painful.

The usual (and slow) workflow

For most teams, building a knowledge base looks like this: you spot common questions, track down the experts who have the answers, write up the articles, get them reviewed, and finally hit publish. Then you have to keep an eye on the analytics and customer feedback to figure out which articles are getting old and need an update.

The problem? The whole process is incredibly manual and time-consuming. Your agents are often too swamped with tickets to write documentation, and information can become outdated the second you release a new feature. It feels like you’re always playing catch-up.

A faster way to create and update content

While Zendesk’s tools help you manage this process, the work itself is still manual. It usually takes a dedicated person or team just to keep everything from falling behind.

This is a big reason why teams are starting to look for tools like eesel AI. It can automatically scan your resolved tickets, find solutions that worked, and then generate draft articles for your knowledge base. This lets you fill knowledge gaps with content that’s already been proven to solve real customer problems, turning a manual chore into a process that gets better over time.

Even better, eesel AI’s powerful simulation mode lets you test your entire AI setup on thousands of your own historical tickets before a customer ever sees it. You can see exactly how it will answer questions, predict your resolution rate, and tweak its behavior, all without the risk of launching an unproven AI on your users. That’s a degree of confidence you just don’t get with the native tools.

The simulation mode in eesel AI, which allows testing the effectiveness of the AI with existing Zendesk knowledge management data.

Zendesk knowledge management pricing: What to expect

Zendesk’s pricing is broken into several tiers. Knowledge management features, like the Help Center, are generally included starting with the "Suite Team" plan. But the really advanced AI features often mean you need to be on a pricier plan or buy them as separate add-ons.

This can make it tough to predict your final costs. Things like advanced AI agents, quality assurance tools, and workforce management are all sold separately. You might sign up thinking you’ll pay one price, but the bill can creep up as you add the features your team actually needs.

Plan	Price (per agent/month, billed annually)	Key Knowledge Management Features
Support Team	$19	Basic ticketing. Help Center is an add-on.
Suite Team	$55	Includes 1 Help Center, Knowledge Base, Generative AI replies (Essential).
Suite Professional	$115	Up to 5 Help Centers, CSAT surveys, customizable reporting.
Suite Enterprise	$169	Up to 300 Help Centers, advanced knowledge workflows, sandbox environment.

On top of these plans, you have to remember the extra costs for add-ons like Advanced AI Agents and Copilot.

This is a pretty different philosophy from eesel AI’s pricing model, which is designed to be straightforward. We don’t charge per resolution, so you won’t get a surprise bill if you have a busy month. All of our core products, including the AI Agent, Copilot, and Triage, are included in every plan. You get more value without the headache of juggling a bunch of different add-ons.

The challenges of relying only on Zendesk knowledge management

Zendesk is a great platform, but if you lean on it as your one and only place for knowledge, you can run into some real headaches as a support team.

The walled garden effect

Zendesk is built to work best with Zendesk data. It wasn’t really made to connect deeply with all the other places your team stores information, like Slack, Notion, or Confluence. This leaves you with two not-so-great options: either spend hours manually copying information between systems, or use clunky integrations that don’t really do much. Either way, your agents and your AI only have a small piece of the puzzle, which leads to half-answers and more escalations.

An infographic explaining how eesel AI breaks the silos of traditional Zendesk knowledge management by integrating various data sources.

Setup complexity and time to value

Sure, you can get a basic help center online pretty quickly. But if you want to set up more advanced workflows, create custom agent permissions, or manage different help centers for multiple brands, you’re looking at a serious investment of time and technical know-how. It can easily take months to get real, tangible value out of it all.

This is a big difference from platforms built for speed. eesel AI is designed to go live in minutes, not months. With one-click helpdesk integration, you can connect your Zendesk account and all your other knowledge sources almost instantly. The whole platform is self-serve, so you can set up, simulate, and launch your AI without ever having to sit through a sales demo.

Rigid automation rules

Zendesk’s automation tools are useful, but they can be a bit stiff. It can be tricky to set up detailed rules for when and how your AI should jump in. You often end up with an all-or-nothing situation, where the AI either tries to handle too much and messes up, or handles too little and doesn’t add much value.

This is an area where eesel AI offers a lot more flexibility. It has a fully customizable workflow engine that gives you fine-grained control. You can decide exactly which types of tickets the AI should touch, give it a unique personality and tone of voice, and even create custom actions that let the AI do things like look up order information or update ticket fields in real-time. You get to decide how the entire support experience should feel.

A view of eesel AI's customization options, a flexible alternative to the more rigid Zendesk knowledge management automation rules.

Moving beyond siloed Zendesk knowledge management

Zendesk offers a solid knowledge management system that’s a huge help for any team already living in their platform. But its biggest strength is also its main weakness: it keeps everything inside the Zendesk ecosystem. This creates disconnected pockets of information, requires a lot of manual work to maintain, and can lead to pricing that’s hard to predict.

For modern teams that work across a dozen different tools, a good knowledge strategy needs to connect all those pieces together.

Instead of ripping out your helpdesk, you can give it a brain. eesel AI integrates smoothly with Zendesk and all your other tools to act as a single, smart layer across your whole support operation. It learns from your past conversations, helps generate content automatically, and gives you a risk-free way to deploy helpful, accurate AI. Ready to see what it’s like to unify your knowledge? Give eesel AI a try.