Zendesk Guide provides a comprehensive self-service solution to offer improved customer support. It makes it easy to develop a complete help center that offers:
- Support portal that is customer-oriented and consistent with your branding.
- Easier posting of insightful self-service content organized in a knowledge base.
- User-friendly customer portal for ticket management.
With Zendesk Gather, you can incorporate a knowledgeable forum for even more self-service support. Here, customers can share experiences, solutions, and ideas, potentially resolving issues before a ticket needs to be submitted.
Agents, too, can draw from the knowledge base for easy access to support information, contributing to faster ticket resolution and fewer unresolved tickets.
Zendesk Guide supports content delivery and management in several languages. Your help center is entirely customizable, you can easily create a customer support experience that matches your brand.
How to set up Zendesk Guide from setup mode
Zendesk help center must first be enabled in setup mode before it can be activated. Take these steps to do this:
1. From your Zendesk Support portal, log in as an administrator
2. Find the Zendesk Products icon near the top of the screen and click on Guide.
3. Once the page has loaded, click on Build your knowledge base.
If the option “Build your knowledge base” has been clicked before, it will not be visible. You will need to click on Guide Admin. From here, you can customize your help center to your liking and release it.
At first, your help center will be assigned a default theme. While in setup mode, you can add content, change the theme, and customize it to suit your brand.
Getting the help center ready for full release
4. Take some time to brainstorm how you will develop and roll out your help center. To get some ideas, browse among various help centers that are already available.
5. Create a completely unique help center according to your aesthetic taste.
- Ensure consistency across your help center by including fonts, colors, and logos that align with your brand.
- (Zendesk Guide Professional and Enterprise) For those with experience in coding, more elaborate customizations can be made by applying edits to the page code directly.
- For even more customization options, Lotus Themes – an authorized Zendesk partner for Guide – provides ready-made themes and valuable advice about the best customizations for your help center.
- Setup mode in Zendesk Guide can only be accessed by approved admins and agents. If you’d like to see how your help center appears to customers, click on the preview option. For best results, test the look and feel of your help center from multiple browsers and on mobile devices.
- Select the display name you want customers to see. In the default theme, this name will appear in the footer at the bottom of the page.
8. Choose which help center language will be displayed by default.
9. Start populating your help center with content.
- Quickly migrate content from a pre-existing system (knowledge base or community) that’s already organized into categories and sections.
- If you build your help center from scratch, organize your content into categories and sections for improved accessibility.
- Start adding articles to your knowledge base. If you need to create new content entirely, refer to best practices for guidance.
- (Zendesk Guide Professional and Enterprise) Restrict access to your staff or signed-in customers with user segments, depending on what you need.
- Enable the languages you want inside the help center.
- Choose the content you need to be translated and into what languages.
- Curate help center articles that are localized.
11. Assign Guide Managers
12. When you’re finally ready to proceed, activate your help center to get started.
Zendesk Guide gives you the tools to offer self-service resources for your customers. Free up valuable time and labor with a knowledge base for frequently asked questions, community forums, and live chat support. Build a better, longer-lasting relationship with customers and garner a stronger reputation for superior service with the help of Zendesk. With an estimated 81% of customers preferring to resolve problems on their own, Zendesk Help Center makes it easy to give your client-base the resources they need to address issues on their own, allowing you to focus on the business.
