Write articles and run your help center

Knowledge is where your team writes down what it knows: how-tos, known problems, policies and what to say. Articles help your agents on every case, and the shareable ones can go public in a help center for each of your products.

Write an article

• Open Knowledge and press Write an article.
• Choose its Kind: How-to, Known problem, Policy or What to say. A known problem has four fields: Issue, Environment, Resolution and Cause.
• Choose Who it is for. Internal is for the team only. Shareable may go into a reply to a customer. A new article starts internal.
• Give it a Title, tick the products it is About (none ticked means every product), and write the article.
• Press Save. It is saved as a Draft.

Articles are plain text. A line starting with # is a heading, a line starting with - is a list item, and a link is written as words. Add a picture from the media library puts one of your own pictures on a line of its own.

Ready, validated, archived

When the article is ready, press Mark it ready and it becomes Not validated. A member who may validate articles presses Validate version and the number, and it becomes Validated: the version readers are served. Every save is a new version. An edit to a validated article waits for validation, and readers keep the validated version until then. Archive takes an article out of use, and Restore brings it back for validating again.

Owners, Administrators, Supervisors, Agents and Knowledge editors write articles. Owners, Administrators and Knowledge editors validate and archive them.

Keep articles right

Anyone who writes articles can press This is wrong or out of date on an article, say what is wrong in one line, and press Flag it. Whoever looks after the article gets a task about it, and the article shows Flagged wherever it is offered until the flag is cleared.

Each article also comes due for review on a clock: six months by default, or the interval set under How often each kind is reviewed or on the article itself. On the due date, whoever looks after it gets a task. Still right sets the next review date.

How the articles are doing, on the Knowledge page, shows how many closed cases had an article, the most used articles, and the searches that found nothing, so you know what to write next.

Articles on a case

On a case, press Knowledge beside Saved replies. The panel suggests articles from the case's own words, and you can search. Each article offers:

• Link to this case, for the team's reference.
• Insert into the reply, for a shareable article: its words go into your reply to edit before you send.
• Send as a link, for an article published in a public help center.

Write an article from this case starts a draft from the case, with the case's subject as its title and the last reply as its text.

Set up a help center

Owners and Administrators set up help centers at Settings, then Help center. Every member can read the page. For each product:

• Switch its help center on or off.
• Copy its address. The address stays the same, so links you send keep working.
• Choose which articles show: every article that may be public, or only the ones you choose. A help center shows validated, shareable articles about that product or about every product.
• Switch the brand kit on to show your colors, logo and tagline.
• See where its questions go and how many arrived in the last 30 days.

On the Free plan, a help center carries one line, "Made with ContactRoll CRM", linking to contactroll.com.

Visitors can search your articles and, under Didn’t find it? Ask us, send a question. As they type, matching articles appear first. A question sent becomes a case in your queue, marked as asked through the product's help center, and your team is told as for an email. The form takes questions once its check that a visitor is a person is set up; the help center says so until then.

The help widget

While a help center is public, the Help center settings page shows The help widget, for your own site: one line of code to copy into your site's pages. It adds a Help button in the corner of your site that opens the help center's search, articles and form in a small panel. The widget sets no cookie.