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Your knowledge base is the information the help desk agent draws on to answer requests. When a user asks a question, the agent searches every knowledge source on the team, answers from the best matches, and cites its sources with links. It’s also a browsable home for your team’s documentation inside Serval.
Knowledge is information — policies, facts, and reference material. If you’re telling the agent how to behave, that’s a Skill.

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When to use knowledge base

Knowledge base works best for information that already exists (or belongs) in written form:

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Three ways to get knowledge into Serval

Connect to external sources

Sync content from Notion, Confluence, Google Drive, Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, Zendesk, or Freshservice.

Build custom ingestion workflows

Pull content from any API or internal system with a knowledge ingestion workflow.

Author knowledge in Serval

Write knowledge directly in Serval with a block editor, drafts and publishing, version history, and access controls.
You can combine all three — multiple sources feed the same knowledge base, and the agent searches across everything.

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How the agent uses knowledge

Whatever the path, content flows through the same pipeline: Serval chunks each document, indexes it for semantic search, and searches it on every relevant request. Answers cite their sources — synced documents link back to the original app, pages authored in Serval deep-link straight to the page. The agent retrieves knowledge in the requester’s own language. When an article already exists in that language, Serval uses that version directly; when it doesn’t, Serval falls back to machine translation so the requester still gets an answer. This lets multilingual teams author articles in several languages and serve each requester the closest-language version, with no configuration required. If internal sources can’t answer, the agent may search the web as a last resort when Help Desk Agent Web Search is enabled in Team settings.

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Ranking rules

Ranking rules are being rolled out gradually and may not be available in your account yet.
Open the Ranking tab in the Manage knowledge sources dialog to nudge certain articles higher for the person asking. Two rule types are available:
  • For an audience: boost articles restricted to an audience for the people inside it.
  • When properties match: boost articles whose property equals a matching property on the reader.
Each rule has a strength of Slight, Normal, or Strong. Ranking rules only reorder results, so a rule never hides or reveals an article that search would otherwise return.

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Permission-respecting answers

The agent only surfaces content a user is allowed to see:
  • Connected sources — Serval respects document permissions from the source app when the integration supports propagating access controls; see Document permissions.
  • Knowledge authored in Serval — each page has a help-desk audience you control with access profiles; see Access control.

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Best practices

Write clear titles

Help the agent match documents to questions. Use “Remote Work Policy 2025” not “Policy.”

Structure for search

Use headings that match how users ask. Put key info in the first paragraph of each section.

Include term variations

Add synonyms users might search: “PTO,” “paid time off,” and “vacation days” in the same doc.

One topic per doc

Focused documents perform better than 50-page handbooks. Split by policy or topic.

Keep content current

Review quarterly and after policy changes. Outdated answers erode trust.

Know what belongs elsewhere

Use workflows for automated actions, skills for troubleshooting, access requests for provisioning.