Managing and sharing internal content is easy when you have a few employees, but as soon a company grows they need to consider a knowledge strategy and a method to keep ahead of the shared knowledge that they have.

Internal knowledge can include HR and legal processes and policies, IT instructions, company presentations, sales presentations, marketing collateral, design templates and images, and documents that your Support team can use to help with customer needs, for example, assisting them to port a phone number.

It's important to define your audience, as this will influence what content you want to include. For example, at Zendesk, even though many teams use the internal knowledge base, it's primary audience is the customer advocates.

If you already have an external knowledge base, you need to think about whether you are going to publish your internal knowledge base alongside your external content or you can publish your internal content as a new brand (not available on Suite Team), which allows you to publish the content to its own help center.

Some companies focus on search alone, and don't worry about the categories and sections, however this relies on having content with good keywords and tags that are likely to be used by your employees.

There is nothing to stop you from starting with some sections and a small number of articles, and expanding and editing them later as your knowledge base grows. Alternatively, on Enterprise plans, you could add a few broad sections andadd subsectionsas you create more content.

When you are happy with your plan, you are ready to set up the internal knowledge base.

Choosing your help center setup

There are two help center options to consider when setting up your internal knowledge base, depending on your existing structure, Guide and Support plans, and segmentation. In most cases, you'll set up a single help center.

You can choose to set up a multibrand help center (not available on Suite Team).

Considerations when deciding on your help center setup

Here's a comparison of the single shared help center versus the multibrand help center setup.

At Zendesk, we moved our internal and external Documentation from a multibrand setup to a single shared help center, because the advantages of staff being able to search across all articles, whether they were internal or external, and the ability to haveshared Community forums, outweighed the effort required to apply article viewing and management permissions.

Deciding on access and ownership

It's likely that you'll want all staff to be able to access your internal knowledge base. For Zendesk, this is anyone who is an agent, (because everyone in Zendesk is an agent). This is probably not the case for your organization, so you can create one or moreuser segmentsfor your organization to ensure the right people can access your internal knowledge base.

You also need to define who will publish and own your content. Then you can setan article owner for any knowledge base articleandset reminders to verify and review articles(Enterprise plans only).

Some organizations allocate one or more people who manage all the content in your internal knowledge base, however it's more likely that you'll split the ownership between various teams (for example, HR, Finance, Training), so that the subject matter experts for each area owns and updates content. An individual team can nominally own a section or a subsection of an internal knowledge base (you'll need an Enterprise plan touse subsections), although remember that youapply management permissions at an article level, not a section level.

You can also define different levels of permissions, for example, some staff can publish, others edit, and some are Guide admins (seeCreating management permissions to define editing and publishing rights).

Providing training

Make sure you prepare some training for your end users and your agents for your internal knowledge base. Your staff might already be familiar with using your external Zendesk knowledge base, however your operating model will be different for your internal content.

对example, it's important that agents are aware of the importance of setting visibility and access permissions for the articles they create and edit. This approach also gives you a mechanism to publicize the new internal knowledge base and get buy-in.

For an internal knowledge base, it's likely that you'll already have some content that you can use to seed the knowledge base. This might be policy information or annual reports, for example. You can also consideradding contentas questions arise.

对example, an agent couldcreate an articledescribing how to troubleshoot computer problems and install a software patch, and add labels liketroubleshootandpatchto the article to boost it in search results, then employees could search and find this information and might not need to raise a ticket.

For other ideas on how to maintain your content (seeKnowledge Manager Roundtable: What is your process for maintaining knowledge base content).

Analyzing activity data

You can monitor the most popular articles in your knowledge base to see what areas you staff are most interested in, and then take action based on that information. This includes viewing votes, subscriptions and comments on articles. For example, if an article has a large number of comments, it might be because the subject matter is contentious (for example, the article is a company announcement that there will be no bonus this year), or is inaccurate, (for example, the article gives instructions on how to install a software update, but does not tell the user where to get the update from). Alternatively, the content is really great (for example, a very simple explanation of a complex process), and is popular for that reason.

You'll often need to drill down into the article, and possibly use other sources of information, to understand why it is so popular.

You can use the Reporting dashboard in Support to see the number of articles created, article views, and the total number of votes, subscriptions, and comments for articles in a knowledge base. For all plans, you can use Google Analytics to see similar information.

You can use content cues to view statistics on article usage data to help improve your existing content, or write new articles where there is missing content (Enterprise plans only). Information is taken from keywords that are commonly-mentioned in Support tickets to suggest new articles and statistics are also presented for articles that are most viewed (and might need to be updated) and least viewed (and might need to be archived). SeeUnderstanding Content Cues.

For more information on analyzing activity data,Google Analytics: Tracking customer actions. To review statistics in Support, seeAnalyzing knowledge base activity(not available on Suite Team).

Analyzing search activity

You might want to see which internal articles have the top views from search results. If it's the start of a new vacation year, you might expect this to be HR articles about how to book vacation, and how many vacation days are available.

If the HR vacation articles are not appearing in the top hits, you might need to add labels (not available on Suite Team), to the articles, update your content titles to make them more easily found by search, or remove old content that might be cluttering up your search results.

For more information on measuring search behavior, seeGoogle Analytics: Measuring the effectiveness of search. To see search results in Support, seeAnalyzing help center search results(not available on Suite Team).

Analyzing Knowledge Capture activity

You can analyze your Knowledge Capture events and ticket activity. For example, you might want to see which articles are linked to the most, or which Support agents are creating the most internal articles, or are using the KC app the most (seeAnalyzing your KC activity). This feature is not available on Suite Team.

Analyzing Team Publishing activity

您可以分析你的团队发布事件。对example, you might want to see which team members are most active in Guide or view your top editors, content creators or publishers (seeAnalyzing Team Publishing activity). This feature is not available on Suite Team.