Help Center - Best practices

[Paul Wiggers]

Hello all,

I would like to use Help Center to serve my customers with a help center and I am looking for inspiration and best practices on how to set this up.

All the documentation that I can find, talk about how quick and easy it is to get started (which it is), show a few tips how to to create article and leave it at that. Leaving me with a lot of questions, which, hopefully, you can help me out with.

• How do you organise your Confluence space? If I follow the tips for creating a Help Center, it will just leave me with a big, unwieldy, pile of articles that have no structure and cannot be easily maintained
• How do you make the articles browsable for your customers? Currently, the articles are suggested when creating a request and they show up when you search for them, but customers cannot browse the knowledge base when they just want to learn more about our product
  • When using categories, the article list becomes unwieldy and has no structure.
• What are the benefits of topics over categories? Is it just a container for similar information sources, or are there other benefits?

We have a knowledge base with a couple hundred articles and we would like to present them in multiple languages. 

Currently, we are using Refined and have been looking at K15t, but unfortunately, when using those apps, you loose the integration with JSM, customers need to jump through hoops to sign up and forms are not being accepted for request types. That is the reason we would like to return to the default Help Center, but are struggling to make it user friendly. 

As a last resort, we might use the Help Center only to enter and manage requests, while using another platform for our knowledge base that we have to link to manually. This is however, the last resort and highly unwanted since we would like our customers to have a one stop shop for all their information and questions about our product.

As a bonus question; how is your Help Center looking? Finding inspiration is quite hard it seems. 

Thanks in advance!

[Cheryl Joy (K15t)]

Hi Paul,

I'm Cheryl and I'm part of the Scroll Viewport team at K15t. What you've mentioned in your post is one of the challenges we see (and also experience) quite often so let me start by saying - hard relate on this one!

Confluence is an amazing tool for collaboration, but it's easy to fall into that space of 'too much content and clutter'. It's also why we've created a series of articles and videos on how you can structure and organize your Confluence space better and use it to create useful documentation that could benefit your customers. I hope you find this useful, too! 

The next step is transforming your Confluence pages and spaces into a fully-functional help center which is something you can easily do with Scroll Viewport for Confluence. In case you're curious about feature specs and would like to know more, here's a page with some more details on what we offer. It also has a section on real-world examples of help center sites built using Confluence and Scroll Viewport so you can check them out for inspiration as well!

Good luck, if you would like to see any of this in more detail please get in touch!