Zendesk Internal Articles Explained
Video
A help desk needs answers customers can read and procedures only agents should see. How an internal article in Zendesk appears in the knowledge panel on a ticket, and the one setting that makes an article internal.
Chapters
Two kinds of knowledge
A help desk runs on two kinds of knowledge. Public articles in the help center let people solve issues on their own, while internal procedures often sit in scattered documents and Slack threads. Zendesk keeps both in one knowledge base and hides the internal articles from end users.
An internal article on a live ticket
In this walkthrough, an employee in an HR help desk reports overtime missing from an August payslip. The agent opens the knowledge panel on the ticket, and Zendesk suggests related articles, with a lock icon on the internal one. That article holds the payroll team's procedure for discrepancies, from confirming the claim to checking the overtime, along with the wording to send back to the employee. When the agent copies that wording into the conversation, Zendesk warns that the requester does not have access to the article.
Making an article internal
One setting makes an article internal. In the article settings, Visible to is set to Agents and admins. Two habits help. The first is to keep internal articles together in one section, so one place shows that none of them are public. The second is to start every internal title with a keyword such as [Internal], which tells agents what they are looking at before they copy anything into a reply.
