Why have a knowledge base? – Gravity CX

Ref: C01 · Track: Knowledge Base Admin · Time to complete: ~3 min

Why this matters

Before you spend weeks structuring categories and themes, be clear about who you're building the help center for and why. The structure follows from that. Skip this step and you'll rebuild it in six months.

The three audiences

Every Zendesk knowledge base serves some mix of three groups:

1. End customers (the public)

Unauthenticated visitors on your website looking for answers without needing to log in. This is the classic "help center" use case. - Goal: ticket deflection — if they find the answer themselves, they don't file a ticket. - Content: how-to guides, FAQ, product documentation, billing help. - Tone: friendly, plain-language, assumes they're not a technical user.

2. Agents (internal)

Your own support team, using the KB inside tickets to find answers fast (via Knowledge Capture — see C18). - Goal: faster, more consistent replies. - Content: playbooks, decision trees, internal-only workarounds, escalation paths, troubleshooting scripts. - Tone: direct, assumes Zendesk fluency and product knowledge.

3. Your wider organisation

Non-agent internal stakeholders — operations, finance, product — who benefit from the same knowledge but aren't using Zendesk every day. - Goal: single source of truth across the business. - Content: process docs, policy references, regulatory explanations. - Tone: professional, assumes business context.

What ticket deflection actually looks like

Most Gravity CX customers measure success of their public KB with one number: deflection rate — the percentage of visitors who landed on the help center, read an article, and didn't file a ticket.

Two levers drive deflection: 1. Content coverage — do articles exist for the top 20 things customers ask? 2. Findability — can customers actually locate those articles via search or navigation?

If your deflection rate is low, one of those is broken.

Picking who to serve first

Trying to serve all three audiences equally from day one is a mistake. Pick the primary audience and build for them. A typical rollout order:

Public end-user content (deflection-first).
Internal agent content (once volumes grow enough that agent speed matters).
Wider organisation content (once the first two are stable).

Some Gravity CX customers flip this — a regulated industry may start with internal content for compliance, then open to the public.

Signals you need a knowledge base

Your agents answer the same question more than 10 times a week.
You can list 20+ FAQ items off the top of your head.
Customers say "I couldn't find anything online".
Your ticket volume is growing faster than your headcount.
Compliance wants an audit trail of official answers.

If any of these ring true, you have a deflection problem a KB can fix.

Quick check — have you got this?

Your agents keep forwarding the same PDF to customers. KB article or leave as-is?
You launch a public help center and see no ticket drop. What are the two most likely causes?
Is the KB just for the public?

Answers

- KB article — turning a forwarded PDF into a searchable article lets customers find it without asking. - Either the content doesn't match real questions, or the articles exist but aren't findable in search. - No. Three audiences: public, agents (via Knowledge Capture), and wider org.

C02 — How the knowledge base is structured
C12 — Controlling access at the article level
C18 — Knowledge Capture inside a ticket