Getting started with your help center


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.


What's my plan?







All Suites

Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus










Support with

Knowledge Professional or Enterprise










You can create a help center to provide end users with a complete self-service support option and
empower agents to better help customers. A help center includes:
Branded customer-facing support site
Knowledge base, for publishing self-service content
Community, for customer collaboration (available on Suite Professional)
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.


Note: You must be the account owner to enable the help center.


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


Tip: Check out the Self-service learning path to gain the knowledge you
need to successfully set up 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.


Note: A category must have at least one section visible. A section will not be visible until
an article is added.

Section

Sections contain related articles. To add a section, you must have at least one
category to act as its parent container. 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 (see Customizing 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

Click the Zendesk Products icon ( ) in the top bar, then select
Knowledge.
Note: You must be the account owner to enable the help
center.

In the page that appears, click Get 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, 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.


Tip: Developers can use a REST API to insert, update, and manage content in help
center. See the Help center API documentation. For help on getting started, see
our Developer resources for 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's
Fine tuning: "Blueprinting" your help center. Be sure to
check out the 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 users, see Previewing your help center.
Be sure to test in
different browsers. See the system requirements for a list of supported browsers.

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 Knowledge).


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 Knowledge admins (see Understanding Knowledge 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. Knowledge admins who are
not Support admins cannot enable the help center.

Tip: Check out Fine tuning: Best practices for ticket deflection for tips on how to best promote self-service during your help center launch.
To activate your help center

In Knowledge admin, click Settings ( ) in the sidebar.
In Help center settings, click Activate.
Click Activate again to confirm that you want to activate your help center.

Your help center is activated and is now visible to end users. If you need to disable your help
center, see Deactivating your help
center.
Note: If you are using the community, make sure that is also
activated. See Getting started with
Community.

Next steps: Be sure to check out our Help center guide for end users and also our complete
list of Knowledge resources.


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