Knowledge gaps

Every knowledge base has questions its documents do not answer. Without a report, you find out when someone complains. The Gaps page collects the questions your agents could not answer, groups them by topic, ranks the topics by how often they come up, and drafts what a document covering each one should say. It is a to-do list for whoever owns the content: what to write or upload next.

Open it from Knowledge → Gaps, or from the Gaps tab of a collection you can edit. Both need the editor role. The tab shows the same report, limited to questions that searched that collection.

What counts as an unanswered question

A question counts when the knowledge base as a whole failed it. That is decided for the whole answer, not for each collection it searched:

• none of the collections the agent searched returned a result it was confident in, or
• the answer did not cite any document, or
• the person voted the answer down.

An agent that searches two collections and finds a good answer in one is not a gap, even if the other had nothing. An answer where the agent searched nothing is never a gap, and neither is an empty question. Only answers given after the feature was switched on are counted.

How topics form

Questions about the same thing are placed in one topic, across all collections. A new question joins the closest existing topic, pairs with a similar lone question to start a new one, or waits on its own. Topics are never reshuffled, so a topic you marked or are tracking stays the same topic as it grows, and two topics that drift together are merged. Questions that belong to no topic yet are listed under Other questions, below the topics, with their date and why they counted; on the workspace-wide page, also the collections they searched.

The list shows each topic’s label, an example question, how many questions it has in the period you picked (7, 30, 90 or 365 days), a small trend line that counts weeks without questions as zero, when it was last asked, its status (Open, Out of scope or Resolved) and, on the workspace-wide page, the collections involved. You can filter by status and sort by volume or recency.

The draft

Once a topic has three questions, it gets a short label and a draft: a markdown outline of what a document covering these questions would need to say, written in the language most of the questions use. The draft is a starting point for a person to check and rewrite. It is not part of any collection and is never added to one automatically. It is rewritten when the topic has grown by half, or when a document it was written from has been removed, and you can ask for a new one with Redraft. Drafts are limited per workspace per day, and a topic that cannot be drafted today waits for tomorrow.

Open a topic to see its questions, the passages the agent found closest to an answer (each opens the page of the document it comes from), the draft and the actions.

What you can do with a topic

• Create FAQ document. Opens a dialog with a title, a collection to put the document in, and the draft in an editor. Nothing is created until you press Create; it then goes through the same upload as any document, so every upload rule and limit applies.
• Upload from the Documents tab. Opens the Documents tab of the first collection the topic’s questions searched, where you upload as usual.
• Mark out of scope. For questions your agents should not answer. The topic leaves the ranking until you Reopen it.
• Check now. Searches the topic’s questions again and shows the result, for example “12 of 15 now answered”, or says nothing could be measured right now. A topic checked in the last five minutes is not checked again.
• Redraft. Writes a new label and draft. It stays available when the topic’s label is hidden from you, since the draft may have been written from a document that is gone.

Automatic re-check

When a document finishes processing in a collection the questions searched, the topic’s questions are searched again, at most every six hours per topic. If at least three were re-checked and at least 80% are now answered, the topic is marked resolved. If a new unanswered question later lands in a resolved topic, it reopens. A topic you marked out of scope stays that way. Re-checks are ordinary searches and count as such in your usage.

Owners and the weekly email

Owners. Open a topic and choose Assign… to give it an owner: the person who will write or upload what is missing. You can pick only people who can actually act on the topic: members with the editor role or above who can edit every collection the topic’s questions searched and can see all of its questions and the documents its draft drew on. The list is checked again when you pick, so someone whose access changed in the meantime is refused. Unassign takes the owner off. The list shows each topic’s owner, and Assigned to me narrows it to the topics you own. Assigning and unassigning are recorded in the audit log.

The weekly email. Switch on Weekly email at the top of the page to get a short summary once a week. It is off until you turn it on, each person manages their own, and it needs a verified email address. By default it covers every collection you can edit; Choose collections limits it to the ones you name.

The email lists, at most ten lines, the open topics assigned to you first and then the week’s largest open topics. Each line is the topic’s name, how many questions it has and a link to it. It never contains a question or a draft, so nothing in your inbox says more than the page itself would show you. It lists only topics you could open, and a week with nothing to list sends nothing.

The email stops when you switch it off, or when you are no longer a member of the workspace, no longer have the editor role, or have no verified email address. If a send fails, it is tried again an hour later.

Who sees what

A question appears only to people who can edit a collection it searched and who can read every document its answer cited. A topic appears only when it has at least one question you can see, and its counts cover those questions only.

A topic’s label and draft are written from all of its questions and from the documents the draft drew on, so they are shown only when you can see every question and read every one of those documents. If you cannot, the topic reads “A topic that also involves collections you can’t edit”, with the questions you may see. A topic that has no label yet reads “Not named yet”. Changing a status, checking and redrafting need edit access to every collection the topic’s questions searched.

Export

Export CSV downloads one row per question you can see: topic id, label (blank when hidden), status, the question, when it was asked, why it counted and the collections searched. Cells that start like a spreadsheet formula are escaped. An export holds at most the newest 10,000 questions; when it was cut short, a message says so.

Retention

Questions are kept as long as the answers they belong to: 365 days by default, set by whoever runs your workspace’s platform.