FAQs: Help center

FAQs: Help Center


What is Help Center?
Help Center is a customer portal that allows users to learn about the product and understand its processes by accessing knowledge base articles. It provides a platform for self-help and learning, where users can find answers for their queries by going through FAQs and forums, raise a ticket or view other users tickets with similar problems, and more.

This portal helps customers to interact with your business via forums, feedback, tickets, and articles. Customers can interact with each other as well, which helps them to have a deeper understanding of your products and business. The customer can view the status of their tickets in real time, which helps in establishing good rapport with your business. The customer can give suggestions, process improvement ideas, and other valuable feedback, which helps business to evaluate and refine the processes.

Help center is a bridge between your business and your customers, where they can interact with you directly, resulting in good customer experience.

Below is the help center for Go India Travels. Go India Travels is a tour and travels company that offers different tour packages to individuals, such as educational tours, business trips, vacation packages, and so on. The knowledge base (or "KB") there talks about travel guidelines, SOPs, best practices, and FAQs related to tours and travels.

How to access the Help Center portal URL?
A Help Center portal is created when a Desk account is created. The portal URL contains the company name. For example, if the company name is Zylker, the portal URL contains Zylker.

To find the Help Center portal URL:
  1. Navigate to Setup > Support Channels > Help Center.
  2. Click Access Setting on the Help Center page.
  3. Copy the portal URL.
The copied URL can be shared with customers so they can access the Help Center.

Can customers create and view tickets in Help Center?
Yes. Customers can access the Help Center to create and view tickets. However, administrators must enable the required permissions for customers to access tickets.

To manage these permissions:
  1. Navigate to Setup > Channels > Help Center.
  2. Click Access Setting.
  3. Under Permissions, enable or disable the required customer access settings.
Administrators can control whether customers can view tickets from hidden departments and whether they can view tickets submitted by other users in their account.
Can customers view tickets submitted by other contacts in the same account?
Yes. Administrators can allow contacts belonging to the same account to view tickets submitted by other contacts in that account.

This can be useful when employees of the same organization need visibility into each other's support requests. For example, employees can review tickets raised by their colleagues to find possible solutions to similar issues or understand how long a particular issue may take to resolve.

To enable this access:
  1. Navigate to Setup > Channels > Help Center > Access Setting.
  2. Under Permissions, enable Customers can View Tickets of Other Users in their Account.
  3. Go to Customers > Accounts.
  4. Open the required account and select the Contacts subtab.
  5. For each contact who should have access, click the More icon.
  6. Enable Show Tickets from Other Contacts.
The Help Center permission and the contact-level setting work together. Enabling the Help Center permission alone does not automatically give every contact access to other contacts' tickets.

By default, Show Tickets from Other Contacts is disabled. It must be enabled for each contact who should be allowed to view other contacts' tickets.
Can different contacts in the same account have different ticket visibility?
Yes. Ticket visibility can be configured individually for contacts belonging to the same account.

For example, an organization's support manager may need to view tickets raised by all employees, while employees should only be able to view their own tickets. In this case, the administrator can enable Show Tickets from Other Contacts for the support manager while leaving it disabled for the other employees.

Another example is an account that contains both customers and a vendor. The vendor may need to access only the tickets they submitted, while customers should not be able to see the vendor's tickets. The administrator can keep Show Tickets from Other Contacts disabled for those contacts.

To configure individual visibility:
  1. Navigate to the Accounts module.
  2. Open the required account.
  3. Click the Contacts subtab.
  4. Click the More icon for the required contact.
  5. Enable Show Tickets from Other Contacts to allow the contact to view other contacts' tickets.
  6. Disable the option if the contact should only view their own tickets.
The setting can be repeated for each contact based on the required level of visibility.
How can the sender address of Help Center invitation emails be changed?
The sender address used for Help Center invitation emails can be customized. By default, the invitation email is sent from the default support email address.

To change the sender address:
  1. Go to Setup > Channels > Help Center.
  2. Select the required Help Center.
  3. Click Email Templates.
  4. Open the Invitation template.
  5. Select the required address from the From address drop-down.
  6. Click Save.
The same email template settings can also be used to customize the sender address for user activation and deactivation emails.
Can the Add Ticket form be set as the Help Center landing page?
Yes. The Add Ticket Form can be configured as the default landing page of Help Center.

This can be useful when a Help Center is being established and does not yet have a user community or a substantial knowledge base. Customers can then access the ticket submission form immediately instead of being presented with tabs or sections that do not yet contain relevant content.

To set the Add Ticket Form as the default landing page:
  1. Go to Setup > Channels > Help Center.
  2. Select the required Help Center.
  3. Click Help Center Customization.
  4. Click Customize for the current theme.
  5. Select Tabs from the customization screen.
  6. Click Set as Default next to Add Ticket Form.
  7. Click Publish.

After publishing, customers will land on the Add Ticket Form when they access the Help Center.
Notes
This option is not available with the Flat theme.
How can the Help Center header and footer be removed or customized?
The Help Center header and footer can be customized or removed by modifying their HTML.

To modify the header or footer:
  1. Navigate to Setup > Channels > Help Center.
  2. Select the required Help Center.
  3. Click Help Center Customization.
  4. Click Customize for the live Help Center theme.
  5. Select the HTML tab.
  6. Use the Header and Footer sections to access their respective HTML code.
  7. Modify the code or remove it as required.
  8. Click Publish.
The HTML section contains the code for the default header and footer elements. Before publishing, the header and footer can be previewed to check how they appear on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.

The Reset option can be used to restore the HTML content to its previously published state.
How can the Help Center be customized?
Help Center can be customized through its theme settings to create a layout that is suitable for customers.

Administrators can modify the available customization options, add custom sections and widgets, and customize the Help Center's HTML and CSS.

To customize Help Center:
  1. Navigate to Setup > Channels > Help Center.
  2. Select the Help Center to customize.
  3. Click Help Center Customization.
  4. Select Customize for the live Help Center theme.
  5. Make the required changes using the available customization options.
  6. Click Publish.
The changes become available to customers after the theme is published.
Can access to specific knowledge base articles be restricted to selected users or groups?
Yes. Access to knowledge base articles can be restricted to specific agents or groups within the organization.

User Groups can be created and selected agents or customers can be added to them. The visibility settings of the relevant knowledge base category can then be configured so that only the selected group can access the articles in that category.

This can be useful when certain knowledge base content should not be available to everyone. For example, internal documentation for a beta release can be restricted to the employees involved in testing, while sensitive information can be limited to authorized team members.

The access is managed at the knowledge base category level, allowing the relevant articles to be made available only to the selected user groups.

Adding a User Group in the Help Center



Setting visibility criteria for a KB category

Can a department be deleted from a multi-branded Help Center?
Yes. An administrator can delete a department from the Help Center.

To delete a department:
  1. Navigate to Setup > Channels > Help Center.
  2. Hover over the required department.
  3. Click the Delete icon.
  4. Click Delete in the confirmation window.