Practical Zendesk Administration, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9. Help Center

In a way, Zendesk is really two products in one. The first product is the ticketing system, which includes most of the features that we’ve described up until this point in the book. The other product is the Help Center, a self-service portal where your customers can find answers to their questions without engaging with your support team directly.

In his book High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service, Micah Solomon describes the growth of self-service portals (similar to Zendesk’s Help Center) with the observation, “self-service[…] is a powerful trend in customer service, and companies that ignore it, pursue it reluctantly, or violate the basic laws of its implementation will be left in the dust.” To companies who are not observing this trend, “customer service” is delivered through a person-to-person interaction, and anything else seems impersonal or robotic. But really, customers are becoming more satisfied when companies are able to anticipate their needs, and provide the answers to their questions immediately, without human intervention.

Within the Help Center there are two distinct but closely tied features—the knowledge base and community. Only administrators and agents can manage the knowledge base and contribute articles to it. Your end users are the consumers of the content in your knowledge base. This is where you’ll publish FAQs, user manuals, and any other content that will help customers find their own answers to any number of questions and support ...