Write and search for knowledge base articles_1
Your knowledge base is there for customers, even when you're working on other requests, at home for the day, or away on holiday.
Here are some reasons you might write knowledge base articles:
- You get a lot of similar requests. Like "How do I access office wifi?". When customers search for 'wifi' in the help center, they'll find your article. If they send you a request, you can share the article rather than walking them through the steps in a comment.
- You're upgrading a system. You can write a step-by-step upgrade guide and link to it from an announcement in the help center.
- You're troubleshooting the same issue with customers. If you normally walk people through a series of steps to diagnose and troubleshoot a problem, such as a broken printer, a troubleshooting guide will save you time.
How to write articles
After you set up your knowledge base space, the issue view displays a panel called Related knowledge base articles:
If you don't see a relevant article, you can create a new one from the issue. You'll need the Add page permission in the Confluence space. Customers can read any article that doesn't have a red padlock.
Steps
- Click the create an article link.
- By default, the issue summary becomes the new article's title, you can edit this.
- Choose either the How-To or Troubleshooting template.
- Follow the prompts to create the article, then Publish.
- Check how it displays in the issue view.
Page labels are essential in knowledge base spaces. These are used to add topics to your articles, and allows your knowledge base to become self-organizing over time.
You can also create articles from the sidebar, then Knowledge base 
> Create article.
How to share articles
There are two ways you can share articles with customers:
- Hover over an article to share it as a comment on a request:
- Share links from a knowledge base article that you access via Knowledge base in the sidebar.
When customers click the link from a request or their email, the article opens in the help center:
Help people find articles
The knowledge base suggests articles to customers and agents using keywords from request summaries. For the knowledge base to work properly, make sure your request types have a visible Summary field.
Learn how to set up request type fields
Help customers find articles
When customers search the help center, they see related articles that might help them troubleshoot their problem. To make it even easier for customers to find what they need, you can suggest articles when they fill out a request:
In the above example, the request type wifi access is restricted to the label wifi. When the customer starts typing in the Summary field, the help center uses their text to search the knowledge base and suggest matching articles that are labeled with wifi.
To suggest articles for certain request types, go to Project settings > Knowledge base > Auto-search on request types, then in the Search KB column, select Yes:
To help make sure customers get the right articles for their request, you can also restrict the search to articles with a certain label. To make it easy for agents who write articles to remember which label to use, we recommend using a label similar to the request form.
Help agents find articles
When agents view a request, the knowledge base suggests related articles that they can reference or share with customers.
Your service desk uses the request Summary to search your knowledge base space for articles. If you don't see an article that you think you should see, try changing the article title to use more keywords from the Summary.
Agents can also search for articles using the knowledge base in the project sidebar.