Launch a help center from scratch

A new help center has a chicken-and-egg problem: customers won’t use it until it has content; you won’t write content until you know it’ll be used. This recipe is how to break the loop in about two weeks of focused work, with the help center going live to customers and AI agents at the end.

Goal

A live, public help center on your own domain, with 25 published articles covering your top customer questions, branded to your visual identity, and feeding your AI agents.

Prerequisites

• An admin role in Atender.
• DNS access for the domain you’ll point at the help center.
• The list of your top customer questions — pull from the last 30 days of conversations or ticket subject lines.

Day 1 — Skeleton

Categories first. Open Knowledge Base and create your category tree.

• Aim for 5–9 top-level categories.
• Use customer language (“Returns and refunds”, not “Reverse logistics”).
• Skip subcategories on day 1. Add them later when categories cross 10 articles.

Pick three roles if your audiences are clearly distinct (end user, admin, developer). Skip roles entirely if your audience is uniform.

Pick a layout shell. Settings → Knowledge → Design → choose Full-width, Left sidebar, or Centered. Don’t agonize — you can change it later.

Day 2–3 — Top-25 articles

Pick your 25 most-asked questions. For each, write a short article. Don’t aim for perfect — aim for accurate.

A workable shape:

• Title — the customer’s question, mostly verbatim.
• Summary — one sentence that answers the question.
• Body — three sections: the answer up front, then context or details, then “see also”.

Use the AI write helper to draft the boilerplate. You’ll still rewrite the lead and verify every claim, but the structure comes for free.

Publish as you go. Drafts and needs-review articles don’t count — published is the only status the public site sees.

Day 4 — Search and keywords

Each of your 25 articles needs a keywords field with 3–6 entries. Include:

• Synonyms (“refund”, “return”, “money back”).
• Common misspellings (“payement”, “subscibe”).
• Error codes if the article addresses one.
• Internal jargon you don’t want in the prose.

This is the difference between an article that retrieves well and one that mysteriously doesn’t.

Day 5 — Branding

Settings → Knowledge → Design → Theme:

• Upload your logo (SVG preferred).
• Set the primary color to match your brand.
• Upload a 1200×630 OG image for social shares.
• Upload a favicon.
• Toggle dark theme — verify the auto-derived dark colors look right; override if not.

Day 6–7 — Layout

Settings → Knowledge → Design → build the homepage:

1. Hero search at the top.
2. Quick links — pin 5–6 of your top articles for one-click access.
3. Category grid.
4. Recent articles (limit 5).
5. Contact CTA at the bottom.

Build the article page next. Most teams use: article body + table of contents on the right + “see also” + Contact CTA at the bottom.

Build the category page last. Often it’s just: category heading + article list in that category.

Day 8 — Custom domain

Pick a hostname (help.example.com). Set up the custom domain:

1. Settings → Custom Domains → Add domain — enter the hostname, Product = Knowledge Base.
2. Set the DNS records exactly as Atender shows them.
3. Wait for the domain to move from pending_dns → pending_ssl → active. Usually 10–15 minutes.

Test by opening https://help.example.com. If you see a cert warning, wait another minute and refresh.

Day 9 — Languages (optional)

If your customers span multiple languages, enable a language:

1. Settings → Knowledge → Markets and Languages → Add language.
2. Pick the language. Status starts as Pending.
3. Wait for translation jobs to finish — a few minutes for 25 articles.
4. Spot-check translations. Add protected terms for your brand and product names.
5. Flip the language to Active.

Repeat for each language you need.

Day 10 — AI integration

Your AI agents start retrieving from the KB the moment articles are published — there’s nothing to wire up. Verify it’s working:

1. Open Sidekick on a real conversation in any channel.
2. Ask a question that matches one of your 25 articles.
3. Confirm Sidekick suggests the article.

If retrieval feels off, troubleshoot search.

Day 11 — Soft-launch test

Share the help center URL with a small group — your support team and a handful of friendly customers. Ask them to break it. Common findings:

• Articles that read fine to you but make no sense to a fresh reader.
• A category name that’s “obvious” internally but cryptic externally.
• Missing articles for questions you didn’t think were common.

Fix what comes back over a day or two.

Day 12 — Launch

Add the help center URL to your product:

• The “Help” button in your app.
• The footer of your marketing site.
• Email signatures of customer-facing teammates.
• Auto-replies from your support inbox.

Watch the views and search shadow logs over the first week. The questions customers search for that don’t return matches are your next 25 articles.

After launch

• Layer 1 — manual updates. When a feature changes, update the article. The Self-Learning engine will catch some gaps automatically, but most of the maintenance is human-driven.
• Layer 2 — quarterly review. Every 90 days, walk articles flagged by the staleness dashboard. Re-verify or update.
• Add articles based on Self-Learning suggestions. Self-Learning watches conversations for questions the KB couldn’t answer and proposes new articles.

A help center that gets refreshed every two weeks is worth ten times one that ships brilliantly and ages quietly.