Help center

Your help center is a public, search-friendly knowledge base that also lives inside the messenger. Visitors can find answers on their own, and the answer bot suggests articles before a teammate even replies.

Collections and articles

Content is organised in two levels:

• Collections are topics such as “Getting started”, “Billing” or “Account”. Each has a name, a short description, an optional emoji icon and a position in the list. Manage them in Help center → Collections.
• Articles belong to a collection and answer one question each. Manage them in Help center → Articles.

Every new workspace starts with a “Getting started” collection and a sample draft article you can edit or delete. Agents, admins and owners can all write articles.

Write an article

1. Open Help center → Articles and create a new article.
2. Add a clear title (up to 200 characters). Phrase it the way customers ask, such as “How do I reset my password?”. The title also becomes part of the article's URL.
3. Pick a collection and, optionally, write a short excerpt (up to 300 characters). The excerpt appears in search results and article cards. Without one, the first lines of the article are used.
4. Write the body in the rich editor and add images where they help.
5. Publish. Set the status to Published when it's ready. Until then it stays a Draft.

What an article can contain

Article bodies support headings (H2–H4), paragraphs, bold, italic, underline and strikethrough, links, bulleted and numbered lists, quotes, inline code and code blocks, images with captions, tables, keyboard keys, highlights and tip, info and warning callout boxes. For safety, the HTML is cleaned when you save. Scripts, forms, iframes and embedded audio or video are removed, so link to videos instead of embedding them.

Draft and published

Only published articles appear on your public help center, in messenger search and in answer-bot suggestions. Drafts are visible only to your team in the dashboard. Switch an article back to draft to take it offline without losing it.

Your public help center

Every workspace gets its own help site at:

https://talkingdot.com/help/YOUR-SLUG

The slug is created from your workspace name when the workspace is set up. Pages use readable, search-engine-friendly URLs that include the item's number and title:

Help center settings

In Help center → Settings you can adjust:

• On or off: turning the help center off also removes help from the messenger and stops answer-bot suggestions.
• Title: defaults to “Workspace name Help Center”.
• Home page text: defaults to “Advice and answers from the workspace name team”.
• Color: defaults to your messenger color.
• Show the messenger on help center pages, so readers can start a chat when an article isn't enough.
• Search engine indexing: on by default. Turn it off to keep the help center out of search results, for example while you're still writing.
• Address (slug): the YOUR-SLUG part of the URL.

Help inside the messenger

When the help center is on, the messenger shows it in two places (you can turn this off with the messenger's help option):

• Home screen: a search box and your most-viewed articles.
• Help tab: popular articles, your collections (those with at least one published article) and full search across titles and article text.

Articles open inside the messenger, so visitors never leave your page. Each article has a button to open it on your help site and a “Send us a message” button for when the article doesn't solve the problem.

Open an article from your website

Link any article from your own pages with the JavaScript API. The number is the article ID, which is the number at the start of the article part of its URL (42 in /articles/42-how-do-i-reset-my-password):

<button type="button" id="billing-help">How does billing work?</button>
<script>
  document.getElementById('billing-help').addEventListener('click', function () {
    if (window.TalkingDot) TalkingDot('showArticle', 42);
  });
</script>

This opens the messenger and shows the article. It works well for “Learn more” links next to tricky form fields or features.

Views and “Was this helpful?”

• Views: opening an article counts a view. The most-viewed articles are the ones shown as popular in the messenger.
• Votes: after reading, visitors are asked “Did this answer your question?” and answer with a happy (yes) or sad (no) face. Each visitor gets one vote per article and can change it later, so repeated clicks don't skew your numbers.

Articles with many views and many “No” votes are the best ones to rewrite first.

Answer bot

When a visitor starts a conversation, the answer bot looks for published articles that match their first message and posts up to three under “These articles might help while you wait:”. It's on by default and needs at least 8 characters of text. It only suggests articles that contain most of the message's keywords, or whose title matches strongly. See how the answer bot picks articles.

Tips for structure

• Start with your top ten questions. Look at your Reports tags and recent conversations, and write those first.
• One question per article. Short, focused articles rank better in search and make better answer-bot matches.
• Use the customer's words in titles. Search and the answer bot weigh titles heavily.
• Keep collections to a handful (four to eight) so the Help tab stays easy to scan.
• Lead with the answer, then add steps and screenshots. Use H2 headings for longer articles.
• Write an excerpt for important articles. It's what people read in search results and suggestion cards.
• Turn answers into articles. If you type the same reply three times, publish it and link it from a saved reply.