- Branded customer-facing support site
- Knowledge base, for publishing self-service content
- Customer portal, where customers submit tickets and, on Guide Professional and Enterprise, also manage their tickets
Your end users can use the information in the knowledge base or turn to the community (if enabled) 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.
With Guide you can manage your content and deliver it in multiple languages in Help Center. You can customize the look and feel of your Help Center and decide which features to include.
This article covers the following topics:
- About the knowledge base structure
- Enabling Help Center in setup mode
- Preparing the Help Center for release
- Activating 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 Guide Enterprise, you can add subsections to your knowledge base to create more levels (see Adding 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. On Guide Enterprise, sections can also contain subsections. To add a section, you must have at least one category to act as its parent container. On Guide Lite and Professional, each section must be child of a category. On Guide Enterprise, a section can be a child of a category or a section.
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. If you're on Professional or Enterprise and you want more control over the design, you can use HTML, CSS, JavaScript (see Customizing your Help Center theme).
Enabling Help Center in setup mode
The Help Center is not deployed by default. You must enable it in setup mode, prepare it for release, and then activate it.
When Help Center is in setup mode, it is hidden from end users and is visible to administrators and agents only.
To enable Help Center in setup mode
- Sign in to Zendesk Support as an administrator.
- Click the Zendesk Products icon (
) in the top bar, then select Guide.
- In the page that appears, click Build your knowledge base.
If you (or any other Guide Manager at your company) have already clicked Build your knowledge base once before, then it no longer appears in your interface. Instead, click Guide admin, where you can prepare your Help Center for release and then activate it.
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, see Preparing your Help Center for release.
Preparing the 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 Help Center for release
- Do some planning for how your will build and launch your Help Center (see Lisa Painter's Fine tuning: "Blueprinting" your Help Center).
Be sure to check out Pinterest page of beautiful Help Centers for 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 (see Branding your Help Center).
-
(Guide Professional and Enterprise) Customize your Help Center. If you're a web designer or a web-savvy administrator, you can make more extensive customizations by editing the page code (see Customizing your Help Center theme). Also, check out the Help 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 or anonymous users, see Previewing your Help Center.
Be sure to test in different browsers. See the list of browsers 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 language before you 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 (see Configuring 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 (see Migrating existing content to Help Center).
-
Create knowledge base categories and sections (see Organizing 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 (see Working with articles in the knowledge base).
If you're starting from scratch, check out Best practices: Finding issues to populate your knowledge base. If you need an easy way to back up your knowledge base articles, check out the kBackups app in our community.
-
(Guide Professional and Enterprise) Create user segments to restrict access to content as you'd like (see Creating user segments to restrict Help Center access).
-
- (Support Professional or Enterprise and Guide Professional or Enterprise) Set up your Help Center to support multiple languages.
- Decide what content you want to translate and how (see Creating and managing translated content for your knowledge base).
-
Enable languages for your Help Center (see Configuring your Help Center to support multiple languages).
-
Create localized versions of your Help Center content (see Localizing the Help Center).
Note: Multiple languages are available if you have Support Professional or Enterprise and Guide Professional or Enterprise, either during the Guide trial or as a purchased plan type. - Add any Guide Managers (see Understanding Guide roles and setting permissions).
When you are ready to go live, you can activate your Help Center.
Activating 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 enable Help Center. Guide Managers who are not Support administrators cannot enable Help Center.
To activate Help Center
- In Guide, click the Settings (
) icon in the sidebar.
- In Guide settings, click the Activate button.
- Click Activate again to confirm that you want to activate your Help Center.
- Click Enable spam filter (see Using the spam filter to prevent Help Center spam).
- Read the agreement, then click Enable spam filter again to agree to the terms.
Next steps: Be sure to check out our Help Center guide for end users and also our complete list of Guide resources.
51 Comments
I want to have a big button on the landing page of help center that says submit request. How do i accomplish this?
Hey David!
I'm not able to walk you through exactly how to do this, but hopefully one of the CSS gurus that hangs out here can help you out!
In the meantime, feel free to check out our documentation on how to customize your Help Center with CSS: Help Center CSS Cookbook.
@David - Were you able to find a solution for your question
Our support tickets are integrated into our application. When a user selects support, the ticket includes the URL for the exact place in the application. Support is enabled to select the link in the ticket and see exactly what the user is seeing.
We want to bring the KB/HC to the foreground in support. We have discussed moving the ticket to the KB/HC yet do not know of a way to link the URL with a ticket launched from the KB/HC instead of from with our application.
Is it possible? Any ideas?
am new please help
Cant get sections to be aviable to anonymous even if section is set to be enabled to everone
I like to know if I need a USB cable to set up the antenna I have a problem with the set up
Hi Marion!
It looks like you've reached the wrong company! Zendesk makes software for other companies to organize their customer support processes. We provide the software to them, but we don't support the products or services they provide to you.
I'm afraid I don't know who you're trying to reach, but I hope you're able to get in touch with them soon!
Hi Charles,
For when some sub-sections? There's a few asking for this functionality...
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/203506356-Sub-section-in-Knowledge-Base
Thanks,
Pedro
too complicated to follow!!!!!!
I have applies zendesk help center in android but it show only contact us screen but in ios it show whole data how it is possible ? thanks in advance
I'm going in circles trying to understand why I'm seeing different categories when previewing as manager role than I do when I preview as end-user. I want the same categories to appear in both cases. Can anybody kindly help?
Hi @Brian Scott Peterson,
Categories, with no sections or articles, are not visible to end-users and anonymous users whereas managers and agent can see all the categories with or without sections or articles.
Team Diziana
Thanks @Trapta.
I realize that is the way it is supposed to work but I have articles within all sections and those sections all within categories. While previewing the home page, end-user seems only to be able to see a random selection of sections whereas managers seem to see only the categories and no sections. Any suggestions?
@Brian, Make sure that your categories and articles are published and are not in draft mode in order to make them visible to end users.
Team Diziana
We do not want a help center, but need to have one so users can see their Zendesk Support tickets. Quite a strange setup. The guide theme is not suitable for that, we need to modify the theme to direct people to the tickets, but thats only using a paid plan for Guide. so its a very strange and not very good setup you have here, forcing people to have Guide so end-users can see their Support tickets whether we need Guide or not.
Why can't I go full screen when adding an article on Zendesk Guide? When writing a new article, there is such little space for the editor on the screen with the side bar and top bar. There must be a way to get more space on the screen to write without so much clutter. What am I missing?
@Arpit Choudhury I'm afraid there isn't a way to remove the toolbar located at the top of the page and sidebar when editing/creating an article within Guide. While full-screen mode is not an existing feature, I do think this is a fantastic idea worth mentioning in our Product Feedback Forum for our Product Managers to take a look at!
Hi! I'm trying to learn how to use Guide and what happens when we activate it. I want to know more in detail how our end users get access to our Help Center. You write in your article about Activating Help Center: "our Help Center is activated and is now visible to end-users". But WHERE do they see it? Do we publish an URL to our Help Center at our website or what? At the moment we are not using customer sign-in. Just Support and Talk.
Hi @Anna,
You are right. You need put the URL of your HelpCenter somewhere on your website so that your end users can see your HelpCenter.
Thanks
We have separate products that we manage support for within our ZenDesk portal, would it be possible to have separate help centers for each product?
@James - In order to have multi brand support then you would need to be on the Enterprise plan or higher. This would allow you to have separate Help Centers for each of your products.
Thanks for jumping in Wes!
James you can find more information in our Creating a Help Center for one of your brands article.
Hope this helps!
We created our Help Center with Categories, Sections, and Articles. If we put the URL of the Help Center somewhere on our website, does that mean that everyone will be able to see the content and organization (Categories, Sections, Articles) even if they're not signed in?
Hey Sy,
That would depend on how you've set up your articles when creating your content. When creating your articles you should have seen a Visible to drop-down where you can select signed-in users. If these articles are restricted then when the users selects the Help Center URL from your website they will not see this information until after they've signed in. More information in our Creating and editing articles in the knowledge base article which I've linked for you.
Let me know if you have any other questions :)
The lede for this article states that it will tell me how to set up Guide as a "Customer portal, where customers submit tickets and, on Guide Professional and Enterprise, also manage their tickets."
This is exactly what I need. But this setup guide is entirely focused on a knowledge base, which I care nothing about for my clients.
How can I set up Guide to show my clients their own tickets?
Hi John,
To show clients their own tickets they would need to do so through the Help Center which comes with the knowledge base. After your client logs into the Help Center they can select their profile picture towards the top right and choose My Activities. This will take them to a separate page where they can see a list of any tickets they submitted.
More information in the following article: Submitting and tracking requests in the Help Center Customer Portal (Guide Professional and Enterprise).
I was also able to track down a Support tip that goes over Setting up a requests-only (tickets-only) Help Center (Guide Professional and Enterprise) which I believe you'll find useful.
Hope this helps!
@Brett--The "Setting up a requests-only Help Center" article was exactly what I needed. Thanks for the pointer!
-John
I am finding Zendesk a nightmare to set up. Very little of the documentation matches what I see on the screen. Right from the start, in the Enabling Help Center in setup mode section, the directions say this:
To enable Help Center in setup mode
First of all my Zendesk Product icon didn't look like that, but then, I don't have a link that says Build your knowledge base!
Hi Ariel -
Thanks for that feedback. I've shared it with our documentation team so that they can check to see if this article needs updating.
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