Using Zendesk Support and the Admin Center together with Zendesk Guide

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 the Admin Center that will affect Guide.

Administrators in the Admin Center 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.

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 admins 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 Guide admin privileges to agents.

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 determine which signed-in users or agents are included, based on attributes in their user profiles in the Admin Center. 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 admins, who have access to all sections.

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 macros 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 is to use Answer Bot, which uses machine learning to automatically respond to support requests with a list of potentially relevant knowledge base articles. Answer Bot is available on all Suite plans or can be purchased as an add-on to Guide.

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. Agents can also flag articles that need attention (an update for accuracy, for example), and create new articles from within the app.

The support request form that’s available to customers in the help center is defined in the Admin Center, not in Guide. This form is displayed to customers in the 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 the 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 the Admin Center.

On most plans, you can set up multiple help center versions for the different brands that you support (see Creating a help center for one of your brands).

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 messaging Web Widget, Zendesk Talk, and Zendesk Chat.

When you enable other supported languages, you’re responsible for providing translations of the content you add. In the Admin Center 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.

To embed elements of your Zendesk Suite support solution into your help center, you first enable Zendesk messaging and then configure the Web Widget. Both of these steps are done in Admin Center. With the Web Widget embedded into your help center, end users can interact with Answer Bot via predefined conversation flows that help them find the answers they need for common support issues.

The Web Widget embeds automated messaging conversations, links to your knowledge base articles, and the option to transfer to a live agent or request follow up support during off hours.

For agents, live chats happen in the Agent Workspace in Support.

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.

If you are using the Knowledge Capture app or Answer Bot, activity for those are available in prebuilt reporting dashboards, which greatly extends the standard reporting tools that are available in the Admin Center.

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 Getting started with self-service - Part 7: Tracking essential self-service metrics.

You can set up Guide to prevent all end-user contributed content or only end-user content that contain specific words from being published 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 admin before being published in your help center.

Both the Admin Center and Guide provide tools for preventing, managing, and removing spam and the user accounts associated with spam.

the Admin Center 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, the Admin Center 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.

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.