Although Zendesk Support and Zendesk Guide are separate products within the Zendesk family, they work in tandem to help you set up and manage your customer experience and support workflow.
Zendesk Support is the powerful back-end of your support operations: defining your support workflow and helping you manage your users and ticket queue. Zendesk Guide is the online portal (we refer to this as a Help Center) you provide to your customers and it contains your knowledge base content and gives your customers easy access to request support from your staff.
As you’ll discover in this article, Support and Guide work closely together and some of the key elements of your customer experience, as it’s presented to your customers in Zendesk Guide, are configured and enabled in Zendesk Support.
Perhaps most importantly, the tight alignment of Support and Guide enables agents to easily locate content in your Help Center so that they can add links to articles in their replies to customers, which increases the likelihood of one-touch ticket resolutions.
Understanding access controls for Support and Guide
Configuring end user access for submitting tickets and viewing Help Center
Because your customers are the key element in all that you do with Zendesk, the customer (or end-user) records are shared across all products. When setting up Guide, this means that you need to configure user access and user roles in Support that will affect Guide.
Administrators in Zendesk Support can use the Customers and Security settings pages to define the type of access that you allow your customers. These access settings affect both Support and Guide access.
- Open means that everyone can see your Help Center and submit support requests.
- Closed means your Help Center is visible to everyone but only the users that you add to your Zendesk account can sign in and submit support requests.
- Restricted means that your Help Center is visible to all users but only users with email addresses in domains that you approve are able to successfully submit support requests.
| Zendesk Support | Zendesk Guide |
|---|---|
| Define who can submit tickets, if customers are required to register, Help Center access, authentication methods. | Require users to sign-in to see and use your Help Center (this allows you to create a closed Help Center). |
Granting agents Guide Manager privileges
An agent’s role in Guide is, by default, defined as Guide Viewer. This role allows them to participate in the knowledge base, but they don’t have any management privileges. Their permissions related to content are not role based, but are determined by user segments set in Guide. (There’s another layer of access permission for content that is explained in Restricting view and edit access to specific areas of content in your Help Center.)
Administrators are defined as Guide Managers and are granted all privileges in Guide, including all management privileges and access to all content, regardless of user segment. Administrators can also grant full manager privileges to agents in Support by editing the agent’s profile (Essential, Team, Professional) or custom role (Enterprise) in Support.
| Zendesk Support | Zendesk Guide |
|---|---|
| Grant an agent Guide Manager privileges. | View a comparison of role permissions by role. |
Restricting view and edit access to specific content in your Help Center (Support Team, Professional, or Enterprise with Guide Professional or Enterprise)
After you’ve defined customer access and staff roles and access in Support and Guide, you can further define which parts of the knowledge base in Help Center can been seen and used by both end users and agents. You do this by creating user segments in Guide Professional or Enterprise (custom user segments are not available in Guide Lite).
A user segment is a collection of end-users and/or agents, defined by a specific set of attributes, used to determine access to Help Center content.
Each user segment contains either signed-in customers or agents. Additionally, you can determine which signed-in users or agents are included, based on attributes in their user profiles in Support. For signed-in users you can add the tags contained in their user profiles or the organization they’ve been added to (or both). For agents, it’s based on tags and the agent groups they belong to.
User segments are the building blocks for user permissions. You apply user segments to a knowledge base article to define viewing access. And you use user segments to build management permissions that you apply to knowledge base articles to define editing and publishing permissions. You can apply only one user segment per article for visibility and one for management.
When you apply a user segment for visibility or management, only those users have permission to view or edit those knowledge base articles. User segments do not apply to Guide Managers, who have access to all sections.
| Zendesk Support | Zendesk Guide |
|---|---|
| For customers, add tags to their user profile or add them to an organization and use these as criteria for user segments. For agents, use tags and the groups they belong to.
Grant an agent Guide Manager privileges. |
Create user segments and apply them to articles in the knowledge base. |
Enabling features that work together in Support and Guide
Customizing and creating support request forms
The support request form that’s available to customers in Help Center is defined in Support, not in Guide. This form is displayed to customers in Help Center when they click the Submit a request link, in the upper-right corner of your Help Center. You don’t see this form in Help Center when you’re signed-in as an admin or agent.
The default version of the support request form contains the essential ticket data fields (email address, subject, and description) and enables customers to include an attachment. You can add custom fields and make other changes to this form as needed in Support.
| Zendesk Support | Zendesk Guide |
|---|---|
| Configure and customize the support request form.
In the Professional and Enterprise versions of Zendesk Support, create multiple ticket forms for different types of support requests. See:
|
The support request form is displayed to customers in Guide. |
Setting up multiple branded versions of Help Center (Support Enterprise with Guide Enterprise)
If you have Support Enterprise and Guide Enterprise, you can create as many as five brands in Support, with five branded Help Center versions, for the different brands that you support.
Brands are defined as customer facing identities can include their own visual branding elements, domain name, email support addresses, Help Center, and other customer contact points such as the Web Widget, Zendesk Talk, and Zendesk Chat.
| Zendesk Support | Zendesk Guide |
|---|---|
| Add brands and enable separate Help Centers, as allowed. | Customize the look of and manage the content and users for each branded Help Center. |
Supporting multiple languages (Support Professional or Enterprise with Guide Professional or Enterprise)
Multi-language support is available on Guide Professional or Enterprise with Support Professional or Enterprise. Enabling multiple language support in Support and Guide is an independent process. You enable the languages you want to support for tickets in Support and enable the languages you want to support for Help Center in Guide.
When you enable other supported languages, you’re responsible for providing translations of the content you add. For Support that means any content you add to your business rules and support ticket workflow (macros, automations, and triggers). For Guide that means any customized theme content, your Help Center name, category and section headings, and articles in your knowledge base. Only standard text in your Help Center, such as "Submit a request," is automatically translated for users.
| Zendesk Support | Zendesk Guide |
|---|---|
| Configure your account settings to support multiple languages.
Manage the translations of content contained in your macros, automations, and triggers using a feature called dynamic content. Set and detect a user’s language. Include language as a condition in your business rules. |
Specify a default language for your Help Center and enable any languages you want to support in it.
Localize (translate) words used in your Help Center structure and any other text snippets you want to add to the Help Center user interface. Create language versions of your knowledge base articles and select a provider and a process for translating and publishing your articles. See:
|
Embedding Zendesk Support features into your Help Center using the Web Widget
- Help Center knowledge base search
- Your contact form
- Zendesk Chat (if available)
- Zendesk Talk callback request (if available)
- Contextual help
Although the Web Widget becomes a container for some of the features already provided in the Guide user interface (ticket forms and knowledge base search), the reason you may want to include it in Guide is to provide Chat and also make these components easily accessible from every page in your Help Center.
| Zendesk Support | Zendesk Guide |
|---|---|
| Enable and configure the Web Widget.
Generate the Web Widget code that you can add to any website. |
Enable the Web Widget to be displayed in your Help Center. |
Enabling agents to incorporate self-service in their tickets
Directing customers to the self-service content in your Help Center
To help ensure that the self-service content you provide to your customers using Guide is discovered and used by your customers, it’s important to direct customers to it. You can help drive traffic to content in Guide using the agent interface in Zendesk Support.
You can add links to your Help Center articles in your global macro,s and agents manually add links to articles in their personal macros for replies to customers.
Agents can use the Knowledge Capture app in Support for easy access to Help Center articles. They can quickly search for and insert links to relevant articles in their replies without leaving the ticket.
Another option, if you are on Guide Professional or Enterprise, is to purchase the Answer Bot add-on, which uses machine learning to automatically respond to support requests with a list of potentially relevant knowledge base articles. You can get the Answer Bot trial to try it out.
| Zendesk Support | Zendesk Guide |
|---|---|
| Agents can use the Knowledge Capture app to insert links to Help Center articles in their ticket replies.
Start an Answer Bot trial to automatically respond to support requests with links to relevant Help Center articles. See:
|
Provide the knowledge base content that is used by agents, the Knowledge Capture app, and Answer Bot.
See:
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Providing feedback about and contributing new content to the knowledge base (Guide Professional and Enterprise)
Your knowledge base is an invaluable resource for both your customers and your support staff. Ensuring that your content is accurate, up-to-date, and complete is essential.
Because your agents are constantly interacting with your knowledge base content and have firsthand experience with how effective it is, they should be active participants in its development and maintenance.
When you’re starting out to develop knowledge base content, you can analyze your support data to identify the areas that give your customers the most trouble or confusion and focus your efforts on documenting them.
Using the Knowledge Capture app, agents can easily search for and add links to knowledge base articles in their replies to customers. If you have Guide Professional or Enterprise, agents can also flag articles that need attention (an update for accuracy, for example) and create new articles from within the app.
| Zendesk Support | Zendesk Guide |
|---|---|
| Use the Reporting tools in Support to discover which customer issues need documentation.
Use a ticket tagging process to flag issues that need documentation. Use an About field on your ticket forms to capture and categorize issues that need attention and documentation. Use the Knowledge Capture app to allow agents to contribute to the knowledge base from within the agent interface. (Guide Professional and Enterprise) |
Allow agents to directly manage and contribute content to the knowledge base in Guide.
Enable agents to use the Knowledge Capture app to flag and create articles. (Guide Professional and Enterprise) Allow agents to collaborate on creating and managing articles by setting up collaboration workflows with Team Publishing to review, approve, and publish content. (Guide Enterprise) |
Managing end-user content in Support and Guide
Measuring user activity in your Help Center
If you have Guide Professional or Enterprise, user activity in your Help Center is tracked by Support and is available to in the Reporting dashboard. In the dashboard, you can track knowledge base and search statistics.
For the knowledge base, Support tracks the number of articles created, views, votes, subscriptions, and comments. Search reporting provides insight such as what your customers are searching for, if they find what they’re looking for, and the number of tickets created after a search.
Also with Guide Professional or Enterprise, if you are using the Knowledge Capture app or have the Answer Bot add-on, activity for those are available in Zendesk Explore, which greatly extends the standard reporting tools that are available in Support.
And finally, on all Guide plans, you can optionally use Google Analytics to track website engagement metrics such as number of sessions and users, page views, average session duration, bounce rate and so on. You set up a Google Analytics account and then connect it to Guide.
For more information about measuring Help Center activity and the success of your self-service channel, see Measuring self-service and ticket deflection.
Moderating end-user content in your Help Center (Guide Professional and Enterprise)
End-user participation in your Help Center is vital for building community and also helps you scale your support because many customers are happy to help other customers successfully use your products and services. However, it can also make sense to control the end-user content contributions, especially if you’re trying to manage spam (see Managing spam below).
You can set up Guide to prevent all end-user contributed content or only end-user content that contain specific words from being publish until you allow it to be. When you enable content moderation, content is sent to a queue, based on your moderation settings, to be reviewed and approved by a Guide Manager before being published in your Help Center.
| Zendesk Support | Zendesk Guide |
|---|---|
| Grant agents Guide Manager privileges to agents so that they can moderate content in Guide. | For administrators and agents with Guide Manager privileges, enable content moderation, manage end-user contributed content, and handle spam and spam user accounts.
See:
|
Managing spam
Both Support and Guide provide tools for preventing, managing, and removing spam and the user accounts associated with spam.
Support provides filtering for incoming support requests from the email channel, so that you don’t see and have to deal with it in your ticket queue. However, not all spam is caught in that filter and there are also reasons why some types of incoming support requests and emails may be flagged as suspicious. In these cases, Support suspends them and holds them in the Suspended Tickets view so that you can manually moderate them.
In Guide, spam comes in the form of knowledge base comments. To deal with spam in your Help Center, the spam filter is enabled by default to prevent new and edited end-user posts and comments that appear to be spam from being published to your Help Center.
You can manually flag and remove individual incidents of spam that might get through the filter. As you manage individual spam in Guide, you have the option of not only deleting the spam content but also of suspending the user who created it. When you suspend a user, that user can no longer submit tickets or post or comment in your Help Center.
For more information about all the spam prevention tools in place in the Help Center, see About Help Center spam prevention.
| Zendesk Support | Zendesk Guide |
|---|---|
| Zendesk Support filters and prevents spam from incoming support channels such as email.
Incoming email that is considered suspicious but not clearly spam is suspended and placed in the Suspended Tickets view. Users can be suspended when reviewing a suspended ticket and also in the user’s account profile. |
Manually mark knowledge base comments as spam.
Optionally also suspend an end-user and delete all the content they created in your Help Center. Enable content moderation to control end-user content that appears in your Help Center. |
Creating and managing tickets from Help Center comments
Your Help Center is your self-service channel and its purpose is to enable your customers to help themselves solve their problems without contacting you for support (in other words, prevent tickets from being created). However, you also need to monitor and be an active participant in your Help Center.
Most importantly, don’t let questions asked in your Help Center go unanswered. That’s why it’s a best practice to assign one or more agents to monitor your Help Center and answer their questions when other customers don’t.
| Zendesk Support | Zendesk Guide |
|---|---|
| Manage and resolve tickets created from comments in your Help Center.
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Create tickets from comments to follow up on a user question or take an issue offline. |
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