Evaluating the help center in your Zendesk Suite trial account


This part of theZendesk Suite trial evaluation guidehelps you evaluate knowledge management features in the Zendesk Suite to see how they'll work for you.


What's my plan?







All Suites

Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus










Support with

Knowledge Professional or Enterprise









This part of the Zendesk Suite trial evaluation guide helps you evaluate
knowledge management features in the Zendesk Suite to see how they'll work for you.
You can provide end users with a complete self-service help center that helps
your agents help your customers. You can create a help center that includes:

A branded customer-facing support site
A knowledge base, for publishing self-service content
Community, for customer collaboration
A customer portal, where customers submit and manage tickets

Follow the steps in this guide to try out the help center. Each task typically
takes less than 10 minutes to complete.
This article contains the following sections:

Step 1: Enable your help center
Step 2: Add agent roles and article access
Step 3: Create and publish sections and articles
Step 4: Use Knowledge in the context panel
Step 5: Customize your help center with branding
What's next?



Step 1: Enable your help center

Before you can start creating articles for your new help center, you’ll
need to set up a few things.
When you start building your knowledge base. your help center is in setup
mode and end users can’t see it. This gives you a chance to make it look just how
you want before you activate it.


Try it out

If you completed the task in the trial onboarding wizard,
you’ve already enabled your help center. Otherwise, enable it now.
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
Knowledge.
In the page that appears, click Start from scratch.
If you don’t
see this option, but instead your help center opens, it means you have
already enabled your help center.





Learn more


Getting started with your help center





Step 2: Add agent roles and article access

Roles for users map to roles in Support by default. That is, any admins in your
account automatically have Knowledge admin privileges and likewise for agents and end
users. You can easily change an agent's role to admin if an agent needs more
management privileges.
Roles, however, do not determine article access in the help center. You can control
editing, publishing, and viewing access to articles by creating user segments. You
can then use user segments to build user permissions that are applied to articles to
control access.



Plan it

Think about whether any of your agents will need to be Knowledge admins.
Knowledge admins have full access to the theme, all settings, and all content. You
might have some agents who will also be responsible for help center management
and need full access.
Next, think about your content and consider which agents will need to
edit or publish which content. You might have a group of agents who are
responsible for all articles about shipping information, for example.
Finally, think about which content will need view restrictions. You can
create an internal knowledge base, for example, by restricting access to a
section of articles to internal staff only. The help center you created with
your trial comes with an "Agents only" internal section that you can check
out.



Try it out

For this trial, try creating one or two user segments that might make sense for
your organization. Consider the groups you created in Support. One of your agent
groups might also need to be a user segment that can be applied to content.
To create a user segment


In Knowledge admin, click User permissions
( ) in the sidebar.
On the User Segments page, click Add new.
On the Create user segment page, define and create your user segment.
See Creating user segments for user
permissions.





Learn more


Understanding Knowledge roles and
privileges
Adding an individual user to a user
segment
Setting view permissions on articles with
user segments





Step 3: Create and publish sections and articles

Now that your help center is up and running, you'll want to start building your
knowledge base.


Plan it

Before you start, take some time to think about the structure for your
help center. A help center typically consists of:


Categories: Top-level organizing containers (example:
Cars)

Sections: A container for articles (example: Ford
Fiesta)

Articles: Content items like help topics or tech notes
(example: Changing a headlight bulb on the Ford Fiesta)



Tip: You’re looking at a great example of a help center right now.
You can explore the Zendesk Help Center articles and
sections to give you ideas about how to structure your own help
center.




Try it out

For this trial, your help center comes with some pre-built categories and
sections. Try adding an article to one of the existing sections. When you’re
ready, you can start replacing the sample categories and sections with the ones
you’ll need for your business.
To add an article

In help center or Knowledge admin, click Add
in the top menu bar, then select Article.

Enter your article content. Use the article editor's toolbar for
formatting options or to add links, images, or tables.


Tip: You don’t have to type everything in. Feel free to copy
things over from other documentation you might have before
formatting it in the article.


In the Article settings panel, configure management and viewing
permissions, and the section where you want to publish the article.

When you're finished working on your article, click Save to save as
a draft.

To preview your article, click Preview.

When you're ready to publish your article, click the drop-down arrow on the
Save button, then select Publish. To see how your
published article looks in the help center, click
View.



Remember that your help center is still in setup mode and only you can see it.
Once you've written a few articles, see Activating Help Center for help making
your help center visible to everyone.



Learn more


Creating and editing articles in the
knowledge base
Organizing knowledge base content in
categories and sections
Creating and editing articles in the
knowledge base
Activating Help Center





Step 4: Use Knowledge in the context panel

Agents can use the Knowledge section of the context panel to create or
request new help center articles directly from the Agent Workspace. While working on
tickets, agents can:

Search the help center without leaving the ticket
Insert links to relevant help center articles in ticket comments
Quote the most relevant section of an article or post in a ticket
Add inline feedback to existing articles that need updates
Create new articles while answering tickets, using a predefined
template



Plan it

Think about your knowledge management workflow. Having agents search and link to
articles in tickets is rather straightforward and an easy win. You’ll want to do
some planning, though, about the process for agents to flag and create articles.
See Creating and requesting articles in
Knowledge.



Try it out

In this example, try using the Knowledge section of the context panel
to search for and link to an article without leaving Zendesk Support.
To search for and link to an article from the Knowledge
section

In a new or existing ticket, click the Knowledge icon ( ) in the sidebar to open the knowledge
section. The knowledge section opens with automatic suggestions
matching the topic of the ticket, if there are any.


Click the Search icon ( ).
Type the term or terms you want to search for, then press Enter.
The search results appear. The icon beside each item indicates
whether it is an article, a post, or restricted, internal
content.


Hover over the content, then click Copy link to conversation.The
content link appears in the ticket.







Learn more


Searching, linking, and quoting content
in tickets





Step 5: Customize your help center with branding

Knowledge provides tools to change the look and feel of your help center with no
coding. For example, you can change the logo, colors, and fonts to match your
company's branding.


Tip: By default, the address of your help center is a Zendesk subdomain, such as
mycompany in mycompany.zendesk.com. However, you can map a
subdomain of your own domain (such as support.mycompany.com), to your default
Zendesk address. This is called host mapping. For help setting this up, see
Host mapping - Changing the URL of your Help
Center.



Plan it

Take a look at the standard theme named Copenhagen. This is a best practices
theme that works great on both computers and mobile devices. You can use this
theme as a base to create your own theme.

Think about the elements you want to change to best match your own company
branding. If you want to go beyond the basic settings for more advanced
customization, you can customize the code in your theme later.
Be sure to check out this Pinterest page of beautiful Help
Centers for inspiration.
Additionally, you can find free and paid themes in the Zendesk Marketplace.



Brand your help center - Try it out

Customize your help center by changing some of the theme branding, such as the
logo or header image.
To change branding settings

In Knowledge admin, click Customize design
( ) in the sidebar.
On the Themes page, choose the theme you want to change, then click
Customize.
In the Settings panel, click any of the sections to update those
settings.
When you are finished, click Save.




Learn more


Branding your Help Center
Hiding and showing elements in your
Copenhagen standard theme
Customizing your Help Center
theme





What's next?

Congratulations! You've completed the trial evaluation tasks. Here are some other
things to consider:
Add an AI agent to provide support to your customers. Embedding Web Widget
lets you offer Zendesk’s messaging capabilities through your help center.
See Evaluating messaging in your Zendesk
Suite trial account.
Set up other channels for your trial account. For instructions, see Evaluating your Zendesk trial
account and the Launch guide for Zendesk Support Suite
products.




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