- Branded customer-facing support site
- Knowledge base, for publishing self-service content
- Community, for customer collaboration (available on Suite Professional and above; not available for Support + Guide customers)
- Customer portal, where customers submit tickets and also manage their tickets (ticket management is not available on Suite Team)
Your end users can use the information in the knowledge base or turn to the community (if available) for answers. If they can't find an answer, they can submit a request to an agent. Agents can use the knowledge base to help solve tickets faster.
This article covers the following topics:
- About the knowledge base structure
- Enabling help center in setup mode
- Preparing your help center for release
- Activating your help center
About the knowledge base structure
Use the knowledge base for the official content provided by your company or organization. The help center consists of categories, sections, and articles.
On Enterprise plans, you can add subsections to your knowledge base to create more levels, seeAdding subsections to create more levels in your help center.
Category
Categories are the top-level organizing containers of the help center. Categories contain sections. The help center must have at least one category. If you have only one category in your help center, then the category itself is hidden to end users, and they see only the sections in your help center.
Section
Sections contain related articles. To add a section, you must have at least one category to act as its parent container, except on Enterprise plans. On Enterprise plans, sections can also contain subsections, so a section can be a child of a category or a section, whereas on other plans, each section must be a child of a category.
Articles
Articles are content items such as tech notes or help topics.
You can quickly change the look and feel of the help center using simple WYSIWYG tools. You can easily change the way your content is organized too. You can also use HTML, CSS, JavaScript (seeCustomizing your help center theme). Code editing is not available for Suite Team.
Enabling help center in setup mode
You can enable your help center to begin building your knowledge base. While your help center is in setup mode, end users can’t see it. This gives you a chance to make it look just how you want before you activate it.
To enable help center in setup mode
- Sign in to Zendesk Support as the account owner.Note:你必须帐户所有者能够帮助center.
- Click theZendesk Productsicon (
) in the top bar, then selectGuide. - In the page that appears, clickGet started.
If you don’t see this option, but instead your help center opens, it means your help center has already been enabled.
Your help center is created using the default theme. You can customize the theme and add content while it's in setup mode. For next steps, seePreparing your help center for release.
Preparing your help center for release
While your help center is in setup mode, you can prepare it for release. During this time, end users cannot view your help center.
These are some of the steps you can take to prepare your help center.
To prepare your help center for release
- Do some planning for how you will build and launch your help center. See Lisa Painter'sFine tuning: "Blueprinting" your help center.
Be sure to check out thePinterest page of beautiful help centersfor inspiration.
- Adjust the look and feel of the help center in setup mode.
Brand your help center by adding your product logo and your brand's colors and web fonts. SeeBranding your help center.
Customize your help center (not available on Suite Team). If you're a web designer or a web-savvy administrator, you can make more extensive customizations by editing the page code (seeCustomizing your help center theme). Also, check out theHelp center tips from our community.
- Test your help center.
Only agents and administrators can access the help center while it's in setup mode. To see what your help center looks like to end users, seePreviewing your help center.
Be sure to test in different browsers. See the list ofbrowsers supported by help center.
- Set the display name for your help center.
The display name can be the same as your subdomain or different. The name appears in the footer of the standard Copenhagen theme (see Changing the name of your help center).
- Ensure that your default language is properly set for your help center.
It is important to set your default languagebeforeyou add any articles to your help center, as the source locale for your articles defaults to your default help center language. A mismatch between the default language and the language you select for your articles could cause your content to not appear.
Your help center default language is initially determined by the default language setting for your account in the Support admin (seeConfiguring the default language for your help center).
- Add your content to the help center.
Migrate content from an existing knowledge base or community, if you want (seeMigrating existing content to help center).
Create knowledge base categories and sections (seeOrganizing your help center knowledge base content in categories and sections).
If you migrated content from another system, you won't need to create categories and sections, unless you want to add any.
Add articles (seeWorking with articles in the knowledge base).
If you're starting from scratch, check outBest practices: Finding issues to populate your knowledge base. If you need an easy way to back up your knowledge base articles, check out thekBackups appin our community.
Create user segments to restrict access to content as you'd like (seeCreating user segments to restrict help center access). This feature is not available on Suite Team.
- Set up your help center to support multiple languages (this requires Suite Growth or aboveorSupport Professional or Enterprise with Guide).
Decide what content you want to translate and how (seeCreating and managing translated content for your knowledge base).
Enable languages for your help center (seeConfiguring your help center to support multiple languages).
Create localized versions of your help center content (seeLocalizing the help center).
- Add any Guide Admins (seeUnderstanding Guide roles and setting permissions).
When you are ready to go live, you can activate your help center.
Activating your help center
When you're ready, you can activate your help center and make it live for end users. You must be a Zendesk Support administrator to activate the help center. Guide Admins who are not Support administrators cannot enable the help center.
To activate your help center
- InGuide, click theSettings(
) icon in the sidebar. - InGuide settings, clickActivate.
- ClickActivateagain to confirm that you want to activate your help center.
Next steps: Be sure to check out ourHelp center guide for end usersand also our complete list ofGuide resources.
18 Comments
Every time I go to widgets and setup help center, and try to enable it i get the below error:
When i go to Guide i get this:
I so new to all of this and I'm just trying to get an interface for all of our end users to be able to submit tickets.
Hi@...
Are you the account owner? The Help Center has to be enabled by the account owner, so you might have to ask that person to do it, if it's not you. See if that works!
♂️ that makes sense , im an admin , not the owner. I will get with the owner . Thank you !
I do not see where to click on Settings in my guide.
You must be a Guide Agent in order to access settings in Guide (seeUnderstanding Guide roles and privileges).
如果你是一个指导代理,当你在的时候Guide help center or Gather community, you'll either see a top bar with a link to add articles etc. to your help center, and a "Guide admin" link on the right that will take you to the Guide settings. This bar shrinks up, and when that happens there a small down-arrow in the middile-top of the screen that will allow you to expand the bar so you can see the links. But if that arrow isn't there and you don't see the Guide admin link, it's likely that you're not a Guide Admin in the help center you're looking at. In that case, you'll want to talk to one of your admins and ask if they will grant you Guide admin permissions.
Hey :-)
I'm about to activate a help center of ours and we want to make sure the articles are not searchable in Google. Currently the settings are so that only end users in a certain segment can view the content and only via logging in, will this ensure these article aren't searchable on google?
Thanks!
Yes, any articles that require users to sign-in are not indexed by Google. If you wish, you can restrict Google from indexing all the content of your Help Center, by following the steps described in this article:How can I restrict Google from indexing my Help Center?
I hope this helps! Thank you!
Can this article please be edited to clarify thatonly Account Ownerscan enable the Help Center, as mentioned by Jennifer in the comment above?
This is misleading:
"When you're ready, you can activate your help center and make it live for end users. You must be a Zendesk Support administrator to enable the help center. Guide Admins who are not Support administrators cannot enable the help center."
I am a Support Administrator but not an Account Owner, so based on this article I would assume that I can enable the Help Center, which I cannot do as I am not the Account Owner.
To (hopefully) clarify:
First, an Account Owner enables the help center, which makes it possible to populate and activate a help center, without actually activating it. It's basically creating the help center without making it available to end users.
Then, a Guide Admin who is also a Support Admin activates the help center. Activating the help center makes it available to end users.
I believe this is indicated correctly in the article. In the paragraph you quoted, I did change "enable the help center" to "activate the help center" which might be what's causing confusion.
Thanks!
This is probably a really simple question - but I cannot work out how to change the assigned group on incoming tickets from my helpcentre
I have multiple groups - but not matter what is selected in the web form upon submission it is always assigning to one group.
I think it must be trigger - but I just can't work out what
I created a ticket on your behalf and will send you an email to further troubleshoot your inquiry.
Hi,
I cannot activate the Help Center. I am account owner and have admin rights on everything.
In the "Guide" there is no "Settings" button.
There is a "Get started" button, but it does nothing.
Any ideas?
Thanks for your question. It should be there
Could you visithttps://. zendesk.com/hc/admin/general_settings?
Hope it helps
Hello,
We have an active help center for our brand, which functions fine on desktop. Unfortunately, the menu feature isn't responsive on mobile web and doesn't expand when tapped/clicked. Our contact information links would be included on this menu.
This article is not verified, if you follow the process you will that after clicking on the gear of settings you always redirect on page that indicate a new admin Panel is availabe and the options presented into this process not appear.
Here again the process
To activate your help center
HiDominique Frossard,
Thanks for including the screen shots, that's really helpful.
You are clicking the settings icon in Support. The instructions say "In Guide, click the Settings icon..."
To get to Guide, click the Zendesk Products icon in the top right corner, then select Guide. You should be able to follow the instructions from there.
Hi,
Is there a category limit ?
I have 43 categories created, with sections and articles, but I can't manage to display more than 30.
In "arrange content", when I reach the bottom, after 30 categories, I reach the "show more" button, that's the limit.
All the categories after "show more" can't be displayed
I just realized that when I moved a bottom article above the "show more" limit.
This category is now displayed but the last one which moved below "show more" is now hidden...
Thanks
Best,
Joris
有限制每个帮助Cente 30元素r page type, but can use the pagination helper to allow you to show the next 30 sections within the section page. (it will only render when there are more than 30 elements).
There is a bit more information here:Can I add pagination to my Help Center?
I hope that helps!
Pleasesign into leave a comment.