How do I build a knowledge base?

The knowledge base is a help centre for your business, written only from your own site, your own help articles and your own words. See What is a knowledge base?.

1. Prepare the preview (free)

Open the site's Knowledge base tab and press Prepare My Knowledge Base. In a few minutes you get:

• The questions your customers will ask, stage by stage, for every service your site sells, each with the evidence that people ask it.
• Where the answers would live on your site, and how they get there for your platform.
• Three sample answers written from your own pages, so you can judge the writing before you pay. Open one to see each sentence next to the words on your site it comes from.

The preview also lists the help centres it found linked from your site or set in your chat widget. Add one it missed under Your help centres.

2. Choose a size and build

Press Review and Build.

• Questions we'll answer. Every question in the map is ticked. Untick any you don't want answered; we fill the size you choose from the rest, the essential ones for each service first.
• Add more (optional). Type the questions customers ask you most, one a line, and anything customers should know that your site doesn't say. Each question you add counts as evidence and can raise the sizes offered.
• Choose a size. Any multiple of 25 answers the question map can fill, up to 300. The price is 50 credits plus 2 credits an answer. A size your balance doesn't cover can't be chosen.

Then press Build the Knowledge Base. A 25-answer build takes about twenty minutes, the largest over an hour. You get an email when it's done.

3. Untick what you don't want, then publish

The Answers tab shows one list: your answers, written from your own site, by category. Every answer is ticked, and every sentence in it comes from your own pages, your help centre or your own words. Open any to read it.

1. Untick any answer you don't want on your site.
2. Press Publish. Your ticks are saved and the Publish page opens. (Save keeps the ticks without leaving the page.)

That's it. See How do I publish the knowledge base?.

On a site about money, health, legal matters or safety, the button says Review and Publish: on the next page a named reviewer approves all the ticked answers in one step before they go out. See On medical, legal and money sites.

Questions your site doesn't answer (optional)

Below the answers, Not in your knowledge base yet lists the questions we couldn't answer from your site, such as a turnaround time only you know, with one line on why. They are not in your knowledge base, and nothing waits on them. If you like:

• Press Answer beside one, type the answer in a sentence or two and press Add to My Knowledge Base. It joins the list at once, as your own words, free.
• Or press Leave It Out on its page and it drops off the list.

See Why isn't a question in my knowledge base?.

Afterwards

• More questions. Questions that didn't fit your size, including general ones about your kind of service, are under More questions you could add at the foot of the Answers tab. Tick them and we write them at 2 credits each.
• Every fact the answers use. The Facts page lists each fact with its quote and how many answers use it. If one is wrong, correct it there and the answers that use it are checked again.
• The weekly check. Every week we reread the pages behind the prices and policies in your published answers, free. If one changed, the answers that rely on it come out of what gets published and you get one email.
• Your client. Send the answers to your client for a look, without an account. See How do I send the knowledge base to my client?.