The help center is a public website with your articles, where customers browse and search on their own; you build it under Admin > Help center. It is separate from the knowledge base, but the bot can also answer from any published help center article where you allow it.
Help center and knowledge base
The knowledge base is what the bot reads; the help center is what your customers read. They are two separate stores:
- files and pages you import into the knowledge base never appear in the help center;
- help center articles are not listed on the Knowledge base page;
- the bot does not need a help center at all, but it can use the help center articles you allow (see below).
You can run more than one help center, each with its own articles, languages, look and address.
Create a help center
- Open Admin > Help center and press New.
- Fill in Name. Slug fills in from the name; it becomes part of the address and may contain lowercase Latin letters, digits, hyphens and underscores.
- Fill in Page title, the title of the home page in browser tabs and search results.
- Choose a Template:
- Classic opens with a large banner and search field, followed by a card for each collection;
- Docs looks like product documentation: a bar along the top, the list of collections at the side, and a search box that opens with Ctrl+K.
- Press Create. The help center's settings open, and the template can be changed there later.
A new help center starts with English as its only language. If you write in another language, add it first, see "Languages" below.
Addresses
A help center lives on your site address:
| Page | Address |
|---|---|
| Home | https://<site address>/hc/<slug>/<language> |
| Collection | https://<site address>/hc/<slug>/<language>/collections/<collection> |
| Article | https://<site address>/hc/<slug>/<language>/articles/<article> |
For example: https://support.example.com/hc/help/en/articles/returns. Visit site in the help center's menu opens it. If your whole site already runs on your own domain, set in the cabinet (see Your account and your site), these addresses are on that domain with nothing more to do.
Your own domain
A help center can also sit at the root of a domain of its own, such as https://help.example.com. Its addresses then lose the /hc/<slug> part: https://help.example.com/en/articles/returns. Two help centers cannot use the same domain.
On EPAV Desk the domain is attached to your site on our side:
- Write to support@epavdesk.com with the domain you want. We attach it to your site and send you the DNS records to add: a CNAME and a TXT record for verification.
- Add both records where you manage the domain's DNS. They take from a few minutes to a day to spread. Wait until the address opens without a certificate warning.
- In the help center's Settings, on the General tab, enter the root address in Custom domain (optional):
https://help.example.com, with no path and no slash at the end. Press Update.
Enter the domain only once it opens: from that moment the old /hc/<slug> addresses redirect to it. The hint under the field says the same thing in short: the domain has to be connected through support@epavdesk.com first. The server side is ours, so the steps above are all you do.
Collections and articles
Open a help center (click its name in the list, or choose Articles in its menu) to see its content tree.
- New collection creates a collection with Name, Description, Icon, Language, Parent collection and a Published switch, which is on for a new collection. Collections can sit inside each other up to three levels deep.
- New article in a collection's menu opens the editor: the title and text, and next to them Status (Draft or Published; a new article starts as a draft), Collection, Written by, Language, Excerpt and SEO & metadata. Once the article is saved, and the help center has more than one language, the editor also shows a Translations section.
- Reorder collections and articles by dragging a row by its handle, or with Move up and Move down in the row menu. Visitors see the same order. Dragging an article into another collection moves it there.
- Publish and Unpublish in the row menu work for both collections and articles.
The public site shows only published articles inside published collections, and a collection inside an unpublished one stays hidden as well. Drafts have no preview: View article in the editor opens the public page once the article is published. Deleting a collection also deletes the collections and articles inside it.
Languages
The General tab of Settings holds the languages:
- Supported languages lists the languages you write in; Add adds one, with more than sixty to choose from. A new help center starts with English only, so add your language before you write in it.
- Default language is the one visitors land on unless they pick another.
A collection and an article each belong to one language, and an article must sit in a collection of its own language. Nothing is translated automatically: every language has its own articles. To join the versions of one article, use Add translation or Link an existing article in its Translations section; a reader who switches language then lands on the same article in the other language instead of the home page.
Once there is more than one language, visitors get a language picker in the navigation bar. A language that still has collections or articles cannot be removed, and a language with nothing published shows visitors only a note that nothing has been published yet.
Let the bot answer from an article
In the article editor, turn on Allow AI assistants to use this article. The option is off for new articles. The bot then uses the article together with the knowledge base, as long as:
- the article is published;
- its collection, and every collection above it, is published;
- the help center is not paused.
Turn the option on in one language only, not in every translation. Edits to the article reach the bot by themselves, and when you unpublish the article, turn the option off or pause the help center, the bot stops using it. On EPAV Desk the assistant is set up from the start, so nothing else needs configuring.
When a customer asks for a link, the bot gives the article's public address, on your own domain if the help center has one. On the assistant's Test tab, help center articles appear under Knowledge used marked Article. How the bot searches is described in Knowledge base basics.
Appearance
The look is set on the Appearance tab of Settings. A live preview stands next to the form and shows your changes before you save them. Above the preview you switch between the landing page and an article page, between light and dark, and between desktop, tablet and mobile sizes. The settings come in groups:
| Group | What it sets |
|---|---|
| Brand | Favicon URL, Theme (Light, Dark or Match system, which follows the visitor's device and gives them a light and dark switch), Logo URL and Primary color, each with its own value for the dark look |
| Header & hero | Header text and Tagline; with the Classic template also Background (default, solid color, gradient or image) and Text color |
| Announcement | A bar above the header on every page that visitors can close; leave Message empty to hide it |
| Landing page | How collections are laid out, cards per row, icon position, popular articles and what each card shows |
| Article page | Show table of contents, Show related articles, Show author |
| Footer | Colors, tagline, links and social links |
The links in the top navigation bar are set on the General tab under Navigation links.
Chat on help center pages
On the General tab, Live chat inbox puts the chat of the chosen inbox on every page of the help center. Choose the web chat inbox your assistant answers in, and readers can ask the bot without leaving the help center. While that inbox is switched off, the pages show no chat. More about the chat: Live chat widget.
Custom code
When the settings are not enough, use the Custom code group on the Appearance tab: whatever you put in Custom CSS and Custom JS is added to every page of the help center.
SEO and sitemaps
- On the General tab, Page title and Meta description describe the home page to search engines and in link previews. An empty Meta description falls back to the header text.
- In each article, SEO & metadata holds Meta title (empty means the article title followed by the help center name), Meta description (empty means the excerpt) and Social image URL (empty means the help center logo). The Excerpt is the one-line summary under the article title and in search results.
- Your site answers at
/robots.txtand has a sitemap index at/sitemap.xml, which points to one sitemap per language at/hc/<slug>/<language>/sitemap.xml(on your own domain,/<language>/sitemap.xml). Each address lists only the help centers it serves, so a custom domain lists only its own. robots.txtkeeps search engines away from the panel's sign-in and other non-public pages and from search result pages, and each page tells search engines about its versions in other languages.
These files are for search engines only: the bot reads the articles directly.
Search insights
In the content tree, Search insights shows two lists for the last 90 days, up to 20 terms each: Top searches and Searches with no results, each term with the number of searches. The second list shows what readers looked for and did not find, which is a ready list of articles to write.
At the end of each article readers are asked "Was this article helpful?". The article editor shows the votes under Feedback, next to the number of Views.
Pause or delete
- Pause site in the help center's menu takes the public pages offline and stops the bot from using its articles; the help center is then marked Paused. Resume site brings both back.
- Delete removes the help center together with all its collections and articles.
Who can manage it
To create and edit help centers, their collections and articles, an agent's role needs the Manage help centers permission. Roles are set under Admin > Teammates > Roles, see Roles and permissions.