Working a ticket
Every support team has a knowledge base nobody writes and nobody trusts.
Nobody writes it because writing it is a separate task after the work is done. Nobody trusts it because the articles that exist were written once, about a version that has since changed, and nothing removes them when they stop being true.
Both problems have the same fix.
Written by resolving it
The document is composed from what is already on the ticket.
The problem as the customer described it. The fix that worked. The root cause and what prevents it recurring. And every attempt in order, including the ones that did not work — which is the part that makes it worth reading rather than worth skimming.
Nobody writes it. It exists because somebody resolved the ticket properly.
- The problem, as the customer described it
- The fix that worked
- The root cause, and what prevents it recurring
- Every attempt, in order — including the ones that did not work
- It re-indexes on five real events —
Resolved, reopened, edited, a fix confirmed, a root cause written.
- Edits are debounced —
So a burst of triage edits does not re-index five times — but a genuine state change always does.
- A curator can promote it —
And promotion is a term in the same ranking every search uses, so a verified fix outranks raw material immediately rather than after a re-index.
- Promotion survives re-indexing —
Along with the categories a curator assigned, which is what makes promoting once safe.
Retraction
The part almost nobody builds.
A ticket that stops being resolved withdraws its document from search. Not flagged, not marked stale — removed from the thing that recommends it.
Which matters because the failure mode of a self-writing knowledge base is not that it is empty. It is that it fills with fixes that stopped working, and the next person tries them anyway.
- One corpus, six sources —
Resolved tickets sit alongside the help centre, policies, the settings catalogue, shared reports and articles people wrote — all ranked against each other in one search.
- And a workspace only sees what it has —
Documents carry the module they belong to, so a sales-only workspace never turns up an HR policy — while material that belongs to nobody in particular stays visible to everyone.