Write an answer once and it works three ways: customers find it on your help centre, your team links to it in replies, and IntelliDesk's AI uses it to answer chats and draft replies.
Writing an article
- Go to Settings → Knowledge Base.
- Articles are grouped in categories (e.g. Tracking & Delivery, Billing). Add one at the bottom of the category list if you need it.
- Click Write an article, choose the category, give it a title, and write the content. The editor supports headings, lists, bold, links and so on.
- Click Publish to put it live straight away, or Save as draft to finish it later.
To change an article later, click Edit next to it; Unpublish takes it off the help centre without deleting it.
Tips for good articles:
- Title it the way a customer would ask: Collecting a parcel from a depot, not Depot collection policy v2. The title is what search matches first.
- Put the answer in the first paragraph, then the details.
- Keep one topic per article. The AI works best with short, focused articles.
Your help centre
Every workspace has a public help centre at intellidesk.co/kb/your-workspace (the View help centre button in Settings → Knowledge Base opens yours). Customers can browse by category or search, without signing in. Only published articles appear.
The same articles appear in your customer portal, where customers can search them before raising a ticket.
How the AI uses your articles
- Live chat: the AI assistant answers visitors from your published articles, and hands over to a person when it can't.
- AI acknowledgements: if Write the acknowledgement with AI is switched on for a desk, the acknowledgement for a new email ticket is written from your articles. When they don't answer the question confidently, your normal auto-reply template is sent instead. See Automatic acknowledgement emails (auto-reply).
- Draft with AI: when you draft a reply, IntelliDesk finds the articles that match the ticket and uses them as the source of truth, so the draft has your real opening hours, prices and steps rather than guesses. Always read a draft before sending.
How the AI finds the right article
First, the AI rewrites the question: it fixes spelling, splits or expands words (such as helpdesk → help desk), and adds the words an article would likely use. In a live chat, a follow-up such as "and is it free from my house?" is first rewritten as the full question it asks, using the conversation so far, and the articles behind the AI's previous answer stay in the running. It then searches article titles and text for each version, plus a meaning-based search over article sections, and merges the results. So typos, different wording and short follow-ups no longer stop it finding the right article, though clear titles and plain wording still help.
After you add or edit an article, it's picked up by the meaning-based search within about 10 minutes.
Keep articles accurate
The AI repeats what your articles say. A wrong or out-of-date article gives a confidently wrong answer, so review articles when prices, hours or steps change, and unpublish ones that no longer apply.
Desk notes for the AI
For short standing facts and wording that don't need a whole article, each desk has Notes for the AI assistant (under Settings → Help Desks → your desk, in the Live chat section, visible when live chat is on; up to 2,000 characters). For example: "A desk is the same as a help desk. Each desk can have its own mailbox." The AI treats the notes as trusted material alongside your articles, for live chat answers and AI acknowledgements. Only the desk's managers can edit them. See Why didn't the AI answer my visitor's chat?
Learn from past tickets: article ideas from what your team already answers
If you've been answering customers for a while, the answers to your most common questions are already sitting in your closed tickets. Settings → Knowledge Base → Learn from past tickets turns them into help articles:
- Pick a help desk and a period (last 3, 6 or 12 months), then click Find article ideas. A manager can run it; it carries on in the background if you leave the page.
- The AI reads each closed ticket and writes it down as a general question and the answer your team gave, leaving out names, contact details and account or order numbers. Tickets that only concern one customer's own parcel, order or account, or that never got a real answer, are skipped.
- Questions that mean the same thing are grouped. A topic needs at least 3 tickets to count.
- For each topic, IntelliDesk checks three things before suggesting anything:
- Does your team agree? If agents gave different answers (for example "3 days" and "5 days"), you'll see Team answers differ with the answers side by side instead of a draft. Agree on the answer first.
- Is it already covered? If one of your articles already answers it, it's skipped. If an article only partly answers it, you get a suggestion to update that article.
- Is every fact backed by your team's answers? The draft is written only from what your agents actually said. Anything missing is marked [TEAM TO CONFIRM: …].
- Each suggestion shows how confident IntelliDesk is (it weighs how much the answers agree, whether every fact is sourced, how often the answer settled the ticket without it being reopened, and how many tickets asked). Only suggestions of 60% or more are shown.
Open a suggestion to see the questions customers asked, links to the tickets it came from, and the draft, which you can edit. Then:
- Publish puts it live (the AI starts using it within about 10 minutes). It stays disabled while any [TEAM TO CONFIRM] placeholder is left, so the AI never repeats one to a customer.
- Save as draft adds it to your article list to finish later.
- Update the article (for update suggestions) replaces the existing article's text with the extended version.
- Dismiss removes it; the same topic won't be suggested again.
Nothing is published without someone approving it. Running it again later only reads tickets closed since the last run, plus everything already read, so new topics appear as your team keeps answering. It uses your workspace's AI key (Settings → AI).
Help centre gaps: what customers ask that your articles don't cover
Every time the AI tries to answer a chat or write an acknowledgement, IntelliDesk notes whether it could. Once a day, the questions it couldn't answer from your articles over the last 30 days are grouped by meaning, so "Do you ship live chickens?" and "Can I send livestock?" count as one topic.
You'll find them in Settings → Knowledge Base → Help centre gaps, busiest topic first, with how many times it was asked and a few of the actual questions.
- Draft an article writes a draft for that topic from the customers' questions, your team's replies on those tickets, and related articles you already have. Anything it can't find there is marked [TEAM TO CONFIRM: …] rather than guessed. The draft is never published automatically: find it in the article list, fill in the gaps, then publish.
- Dismiss hides a topic you don't want an article for (for example, something you don't offer and prefer to handle personally). It won't come back.
- Check now runs the check straight away instead of waiting for the daily run.
Questions about topics you've set to always go to a person (in the workspace AI profile), and requests that simply need a person, aren't counted as gaps.
Article health
Also daily, Settings → Knowledge Base → Article health flags articles that need a look:
- May contradict another article: two articles give customers different answers on the same point, such as different opening hours, time limits, fees or payout amounts. Read both and make them agree; the AI can otherwise repeat either one.
- Often behind failed AI answers: the AI keeps using this article, but the answers it writes from it fail IntelliDesk's accuracy check. The article is often vague, incomplete or out of date.
- Not used: the AI hasn't used the article in 60 days (only shown once there's enough AI activity for that to mean something). It may be titled in a way nobody asks, or no longer needed.
Dismiss hides an issue you've reviewed and are happy with.
Only managers can draft, dismiss or run a check; everyone can see the cards.
Articles written by AI tools
Articles can also be created through IntelliDesk's API or MCP server (for example by an AI assistant like Claude). They can be written in Markdown, and they're displayed nicely formatted on the help centre and in the portal, just like articles written in the editor.
Who can edit
Agents and managers of your workspace can write, edit, publish and delete articles.
Related: The customer portal: what your customers see · Live chat: setting it up and answering chats · Drafting replies with the AI assistant · Setting up AI: your own key, the platform AI and what each feature needs