- Branded customer-facing support site
- Knowledge base, for publishing self-service content
- 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 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 the 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 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, 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. 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 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 (see Customizing your help center theme). Code editing is not available Suite Team.
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 your 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 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 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.
-
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 (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 user, 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.
-
Create user segments to restrict access to content as you'd like (see Creating 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 above or Support Professional or Enterprise with Guide).
-
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).
-
- 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 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 enable the Help Center. Guide Managers who are not Support administrators cannot enable the Help Center.
To activate your 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
Thanks for sharing Ariel!
Our documentation team has updated the article to hopefully make things more clear :)
When I click on "Build your knowledge base" blue button it gives me below error
"Oops, looks like something went wrong! We were unable to create your Help Center. Please try again or contact Customer Support if the error persists."
What can be the reason?
Hey Jack,
I see you created a ticket with our Customer Advocacy team already. We will continue working with you in this ticket as we will have to dig into your account further to determine the cause.
Cheers!
Is there any way to create an article that doesn't show in an article list, but will pull up in a search result?
Hey Corey,
This would require some custom code in your theme. I'd recommend taking a look at the following Support Tip.
Hope this helps!
Hello! Could you help me with how to add user profile fields, so that customers can input their department name & their title?
Hi,
There aren't any additional fields provided by Zendesk for your end users to enter additional information for themselves. Would definitely be nice to have but not something they have available right now.
Thanks!
Maggie
Hi
Is there an option to or a feature being considered to allow an Article to have multiple paragraphs/text areas, each one associated with a different "Visible To" value; Everyone, Signed-In Users, Agents and Managers and any self-defined User Permission Group, such as Agent Tier1, Agent Tier 2, Engineering, Sales, etc?
This is so we can create an Article that offers different information depending upon the reader and their role and experience, so end-users see least, Agents additional information and Senior Agents/Engineers more still, from the same Article.
thanks, Mark
Hey Mark,
There isn't a way to accomplish this out of the box and this isn't currently on our Guide roadmap at this time. It may be possible to set this up but would require a great deal of custom code from your developers.
It may be worth taking a look at the following Guide theme resources:
Customizing your Help Center theme (Guide Professional and Enterprise)
Help Center CSS Cookbook
Help Center Templates Introduction
Help Center Javascript Cookbook
Tips for using HTML to customize your Help Center
Zendesk Themes Directory
Let me know if you have any other questions!
hi Brett,
Thanks for the quick response and for confirming this for me. I'd appreciate any 3rd party Zendesk Developers who have done this to contact me or Brett if you know of any.
I have one more question. Can Zendesk Guide be used without Zendesk Support? I have a situation where a prospect has a preferred ticketing system and we've been asked to provide/develop a KM system, our agents would need access Guide to search, capture, author, review and publish knowledge content, but not use tickets.
thanks, Mark
Hey Mark,
I'd recommend taking a look at our Partner Directory which I've linked for you below :)
As for your second question, Guide cannot be used with our Zendesk Support. You'd at least need to be on Support Essential to purchase a Guide plan.
Hope this helps!
Hey,
it seems that https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203691356-Zendesk-developer-docs-and-resources is not working anymore. Could you acutalize the link in the article? We need to create our own header for the Zendesk guide ( Our Header from the Webside need to be visible in guide) and need some dev documentation and ressources for our DEV´s.
It would be great to hear from you!
Best Regards
Dennis
Hi Dennis,
I updated the link. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. You can get started with the Guide developer resources at https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002101028.
The link to 'Fine tuning your help centre' - blueprinting, is not working.
Thanks Chris Taylor, I've fixed the link!
Hi,
Is it possible for me to make an announcement in my help centre and it will trigger an email notification to all my contacts?
Thank you in advance.
Hi Edzi,
If you post an article to a section, any users who have chosen to follow that section will receive an email notification but there isn't a way to post something that will automatically send to all your Guide users.
Thanks!
Maggie
Hi, we published an article that looks fine in Guide (and still does) but once it's live, it looks like this: https://share.getcloudapp.com/GGuo4leE with text from the end of the line moving down beside the screenshot. How can I fix that??
Hello Kevin Cradden
That is very strange! I expect something got messed up in the source code of the article. I would recommend taking a look at the source code and finding the part where the image is in the article, to see if there's any strange code causing trouble there. You can see how to check the source code here: How can I format the text of the article with the source code?
This is an example from my test account of what it should look like:
Worst case, you can do some troubleshooting: remove and re-add the image, or create a new article (that will have no strange source code) and copy all the text over and add the images to that article.
I hope that helps!
When I activate the help center, how do I integrate it into my website?
Hey Václav,
You'll want to take a look at this article for embedding the Help Center widget into your website :) Using Web Widget to embed customer service in your website
I hope this helps!
Please sign in to leave a comment.