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The knowledge base feature enables you to develop a website that can help your customers when your support team is offline, with public and internal (available only for your agents) articles & sections, create forums for customer discussions, and collect feedback and suggestions for improvement from your customers. All articles, forums, feedback, and suggestions can be organized into categories to maintain easy navigation. Each LiveAgent account comes with a built-in customer portal that can be customized as per your needs. Our knowledge base is also built using this feature.
To access your knowledge base to create & manage its content, navigate to Customer portal > Knowledge base.
Creating Knowledge Base Content
To create a new knowledge base item, click on the "+ Create" button in the knowledge base navigation panel. By selecting an option from the drop-down menu you can create an article, category, forum, or suggestion category when located in the Home section or a category, or additionally, also you can create a topic when located in a forum, or a suggestion when located in a suggestion category.
Category
Categories represent sections of your knowledge base into which you can add articles, forums, suggestion categories, or even other categories. Categories are used to separate the content of your knowledge base to keep it organized.
When you create a new category, you can select its title, set it either as public (available for all visitors) or private (visible only to your agents after logging in to your customer portal), and define keywords for this category (useful if your knowledge base is searchable by search engines).
Setting up a category as internal automatically makes all its content internal as well.
Article
An article is a single document usually providing valuable information, solutions or answers for a particular topic, product, service or issue. It can be an FAQ, a guide, a tutorial or any other type of informative resource.
When you create a new article, you can enter its title, write its content, select its status, set it either as public or private, define keywords and description of this article, and choose how it will be previewed in your knowledge base.
The article editor offers you the option to write the article either in the WYSIWYG editor (what you see if what you get/live preview) or enter the Source mode by clicking on the "Source" button in the editor's panel to work on your article in HTML code.
The Status of the article defines whether the article is published and therefore (depending in the Access setting) visible either to all visitors or just to your agents, or whether it is an unpublished draft that shouldn't be displayed in your knowledge base to anyone and can be accessed only from LiveAgent panel. The Access setting allows you to select whether the article is public (available for all visitors) or private (visible only to your agents after logging in to your customer portal). The Access setting is applicable only if the article is published, as draft articles are not displayed in your knowledge base to anyone.
The Keywords and Description fields allow you to define multiple keywords and a short description of the article. This is useful if your knowledge base is searchable by search engines. The description can be also used as the article's preview instead of article's truncated or full text.
The Preview option defines how is the article displayed in your customer portal, whether as a truncated preview containing a few initial sentences, or whether the article's description should be used instead of the preview, or if the whole article's text shall be displayed.
Once you save the article, a link to it will be generated and displayed below the title, containing auto-generated unique numerical ID of the article and its title, e.g. https://support.liveagent.com/383529-Customer-Portal-Overview--Configuration. The ID of the article cannot be customized.
Forum
A forum is a space where your customers can discuss, obtain and share information, questions, or knowledge about specific topics or issues. Each entry of a forum is called a topic.
Creating a forum is essentially the same as creating a category, however, additionally you need to select the department in which forum topics will be created as tickets.
Forum topic
Forum topics can be created either by a logged-in customer from your customer portal by navigating to a forum and clicking on the "Ask New Question" button, or by an agent from the LiveAgent panel by navigating to Customer portal > Knowledgebase, as already stated at the beginning of this article.
When a new topic is created it creates a ticket in your LiveAgent account, which your agents are able to answer it like any other types of tickets. Additionally, logged-in customers are also able to participate in existing topics and add comments to them.