Creating a help center portal

A help center portal is a public-facing knowledge base where your customers can find answers without contacting support. By providing well-organized, easy-to-search articles, you can reduce ticket volume, improve customer satisfaction, and empower your team to focus on more complex issues.

Why create a help center portal?

Many customers prefer to solve problems on their own before reaching out to a support agent. A well-maintained help center gives them instant access to guides, FAQs, and troubleshooting steps. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It also serves as a resource your AI bot can reference when answering questions automatically.

Creating your portal

1. Navigate to Help Center from the main sidebar.
2. Click New Portal.
3. Enter the following details:
   • Name. A descriptive title for your portal (e.g., "Acme Support Center").
   • Slug. The URL-friendly identifier that will appear in your portal's web address. Keep it short and lowercase (e.g., acme-support).
   • Description. A brief summary that tells visitors what kind of help they can find.
4. Save your new portal. It will be created in draft mode so you can add content before making it public.

Adding your first content

1. Create categories to organize your articles into logical groups (e.g., "Getting Started," "Billing," "Integrations").
2. Write articles within each category. Use clear headings, short paragraphs, and step-by-step instructions to make content easy to scan.
3. Publish each article when it is ready for customers to see.

Best-practice tips

• Start with high-impact topics. Review your most common support tickets and create articles that address those questions first.
• Use descriptive titles. Write article titles as questions or clear phrases customers are likely to search for (e.g., "How do I reset my password?").
• Keep articles focused. Each article should answer one question or cover one task. This makes content easier to find and maintain.
• Review and update regularly. Set a recurring reminder to audit your help center for outdated information, broken links, or missing topics.
• Add visuals when helpful. Screenshots and short videos can make complex instructions much easier to follow.

Common pitfalls to avoid

• Choosing a vague slug. Once your portal is live and indexed by search engines, changing the slug can break existing links. Pick a meaningful slug from the start.
• Publishing empty categories. Categories with no articles can confuse visitors. Keep a category in draft until it has at least one published article.
• Overly long articles. Walls of text discourage readers. Break content into sections with headings and bullet points.

Frequently asked questions

Can I create more than one portal?

Yes. You can set up multiple portals if you need separate knowledge bases. For example, one per product or one per brand.

Will my help center content be available to the AI bot?

Published help center articles can be used by the AI bot to suggest answers to customer queries, helping resolve issues faster without agent involvement.

Can I rearrange categories after creating them?

Yes. You can reorder categories at any time from the Help Center settings to ensure the most important topics appear first for your customers.