The best way to increase awareness about your community and knowledge base (KB) and drive traffic to them is to link to them anywhere and everywhere you can--especially where your customers are.
You agents can help you do this. As they answer tickets each day, and interact with customers, they can link to content. This will make customers aware that the content exists, and train them to look there first next time before filing a ticket.
Starting with your agents
- Introduce new agents to existing content. When you train new agents make sure they know about your knowledge base and encourage them to get familiar with the content there. They should have a good idea of what's documented and be able to easily point users to it.
- Keep agents informed about new content and updates. Develop a system for letting agents know when new or updated content is available. Then they will be more likely to use it and link to it. One way to do this is to create a private "Agents only" section in the knowledge base where you announce doc updates and ask agents to subscribe.
- Establish a process for linking to content. Train agents to search for content and include links in tickets as part of each support interaction using the Knowledge Capture app. Even when an agent knows the answer, if it's covered in a doc, it's a good idea to include a link along with the answer. This way customers learn that content is available and they might search for answers themselves next time. Agents can also include links to related content, too, when solving tickets as a way of increasing KB awareness.
For information, see Searching and linking articles using the Knowledge Capture app.
Linking to content in your Zendesk
There are many places within your Zendesk where you can link to content.
Where | How | More info |
---|---|---|
Agent signatures (in public ticket comments and outgoing emails) | An administrator can add a common signature for all agents that includes links to your KB or community. Or an agent can add a personalized signature that includes a link. | For information, see Adding an agent signature to ticket email notifications. |
Reusable responses in tickets (macros) | Create or edit macros to include a link to your community, KB, or a specific article. | For information about creating and editing macros, see Using macros to update tickets. |
Ticket comments | Agents can manually link to content in ticket comments to answer a question. They can also include links to related articles when answering tickets. | To insert a link in a ticket comment, copy and paste the link in the comment area. |
Auto-response emails for received requests | Edit the Notify requester of received request trigger to add a link to your community or KB.
For example: "While you're waiting, check out our Help Center! There you will find answers to common questions and issues, FAQs, a community forum, and more!" |
For information about editing triggers, see Creating and managing triggers. |
Auto-response emails for solved requests |
Edit the Notify requester of solved request trigger to add a link to your community or KB. For example: "Your ticket has been solved! To reopen this request, reply to this email or click the link. And for more help, be sure to check out our Help Center for answers to common questions and issues, FAQs, a community topic, and more!" Another option is to clone the trigger for solved requests to create different versions for different major support issues. Then include links to specific, related content for each issue in the trigger. Agents can select the issue in a custom ticket fields to fire the appropriate trigger. For example, "Your ticket about installation has been solved! If you need more help, see the Installation section in our Help Center!" |
For information about editing and cloning triggers, see Editing and cloning triggers. |
Linking to the community and KB outside of your Zendesk
There are opportunities outside of your Zendesk to drive traffic to your community and knowledge base.
Where | What |
---|---|
Company website | Top-level menu option for community or knowledge base |
Dedicated page on website with links to articles | |
Links to articles on company Intranet | |
Blog posts that link to articles | |
Social media | Links to articles and videos in social media, including Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and YouTube channel |
Product | Links to articles in product. For example, include a How do I use this feature? link to context-sensitive KB topics.
Community Tip from Tom Corbett! We have an in app assistance icon, this actually pulls in articles using the API which relates to the page you are on. We have found people prefer this experience. |
Link to top-level of the community or KB or to specific articles in the sign-up and login workflows |
|
Knowledge base search in product (using the Zendesk API) | |
Customer outreach | Link to top-level of the community or KB in the footer of emails to customers |
Link to top-level of the community or to specific articles in email to customers
For example, welcome emails and follow-up emails after events or webinars. |
|
Link to top-level of the community or KB or to specific articles in your regular newsletter | |
Links to KB articles in your training and user guides presented to customers |
8 Comments
Where can I learn more about this "in app assistance icon," how it works, and how it is set up and configured?
(BTW, when I saw the title of this article, my first reaction was (you don't want "traffic" on your user assistance site because you want your product to just work. But we know that's not realistic. That said, I'd assert that getting user assistance from directly within an application is the optimal use case (no one EVER wants to search), and I might recommend putting this section up higher in your article.)
Hello Chuck Martin,
I went ahead and shared the Community tip; this article is referencing, where you can learn more about in app assistance icons. I also included a link to the Pendo app, which we use inhouse for the same purpose for our internal user outreach.
Repurposing knowledge base content
Pendo App
Best regards.
Thanks Devan. That first article is interesting as it tells me what I know I would want to do, but not how, other than "you're going to need your programmers to write some code to use the ZD API." What I'd be really interested in is how to strip out all the chrome to display only an article's contents in such a window. But the line "if you have developers building your own site / application – they can achieve something similar using the Zendesk API" struck me as a lack of awareness of what we as technical writers doing content development face: We almost never have extra developer resources to do this work, unless we're a large enterprise. And large enterprises aren't using ZDG, but CCMSs, for all their content development and management.
If you go look at the myriad of user assistance development tools (a good resource is here: https://www.indoition.com/cloud-based-publishing-solutions.htm), you'll see that they have their own built-in functionality, typically through their own libraries and APIs, to provide context-sensitive functionality. Because this is a function of user assistance, it's typical to expect the content development tool to provide that, not require a company that wants it to build it themselves. (Here, I've already been planning to work on getting that built ourselves, but I wish we didn't have to.)
I've used Pendo before. I'd never recommend it. If you wanted an example of how not to design an application for the development of content, Pendo would be one of my top choices. (To be fair, what it does is beautiful. Getting it to do that is one reason why I have much less hair than I used to.)
Hello - the same question from me. How do I get the app assistance icon working?
Hey Victoria,
The in app assistance icon was set up by another Zendesk user and is not officially supported by Zendesk. This would require custom code to set this sort of functionality up on your website so I'd recommend getting your developers involved to assist further. If you're using dotmailer as mentioned in the user tip, you may want to reach out to their team for help.
Apologies for not being able to provide more guidance here.
Hi,
Please fix the broken link indicated:

LF
Hey Leister,
It looks like this article is no longer available since the Feedback Tab has been deprecated and replaced with the Web Widget. I'll let our documentation team know so they can update this article.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention!
Hi Leister and Brett, thanks for pointing this out. As the functionality is no longer there, I've removed the item from the table. Thanks!
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