Help centre
A help centre is the public site where a company publishes its support documentation so customers can look things up themselves. It combines the articles with a search box, category navigation and, normally, the route to get in touch when the answer is not there.
What is help centre?
A help centre is the public site where a company publishes its support documentation so customers can look things up themselves. It combines the articles with a search box, category navigation and, normally, the route to get in touch when the answer is not there.
Also: help center · support portal
Why it matters
What changes in a SaaS
It is the only part of support that works while nobody is watching. A help centre that works resolves questions at three in the morning, on a holiday, and in the minute the doubt appears — which is when the customer is willing to solve it alone. It is also indexable content: a good share of a SaaS search traffic ends up landing on its help articles.
Help centre in detail
Search is half the product
Most people do not browse categories: they type. If search only does exact word matching, the right articles do not surface when the customer uses different words, which is always. This is where search that understands meaning changes the experience more than writing ten new articles would.
Do not hide the contact route
Burying the form raises the deflection rate in the report and lowers satisfaction in reality. The goal is that writing in is unnecessary, not that it is difficult.
Measuring it
Searches with no results are the list of missing articles, written by your own customers and free. It is the most actionable report a help centre produces and the least looked at.
How Intake handles it
Questions about help centre
Does a help centre have to be public?
Not necessarily, but it should be. A public help centre gets indexed and attracts search traffic; one locked behind login only serves existing customers and loses that route entirely.
What should I measure in a help centre?
Searches with no results, most-viewed articles, and how many visits end up opening a ticket. The first metric is the list of what still needs writing.
Related terms
A term on its own is only half understood. These come up in the same conversation.
Knowledge base
A knowledge base is the organised set of articles documenting how a product works and how to resolve what gets asked often. It serves two audiences at once: customers looking up the answer themselves, and the team using it as the source for their replies.
Self-service
Self-service is everything that lets a customer meet their need without talking to anybody: searching the documentation, checking the state of something in their dashboard, changing a setting or downloading an invoice. It is the cheapest form of support and, when it works, the one customers prefer.
Deflection rate
Deflection rate is the percentage of questions resolved without a person getting involved, either because the customer found the answer themselves or because an automated agent closed it. It is the metric used to justify any investment in self-service or in AI.
Ticket
A ticket is the record of a customer question inside a support tool. It groups every message in that conversation under one identifier and adds what is needed to manage it: status, owner, priority, tags and the history of what has happened.
AI agent
An AI agent is a system that, beyond generating text, reads data and takes actions to finish a task. In support that means it checks the actual state of the customer account before answering, and when the answer involves doing something, it does it instead of explaining how.
Omnichannel
Omnichannel describes support where the customer can write through whichever channel they prefer — chat, email, WhatsApp, phone — and the conversation stays a single thread: the history travels with them and they repeat nothing when switching channel.
