The Knowledge Base

Your Knowledge Base is the self-service help center your customers read and the article workspace your team writes in — all from one place. This guide walks through everything: writing articles, deciding who can see them, collecting feedback, embedding video, and using Insights to learn what your customers are looking for.

What the Knowledge Base is for

The Knowledge Base does two jobs at once. For customers, it can publish answers on the Client Portal address shown in your workspace settings. For your team, it is the place to write, organize, and improve articles — including articles that stay internal.

Why this mattersEvery question a customer answers themselves is a ticket your team never has to handle. A good Knowledge Base quietly lowers your ticket volume while making customers happier, because self-service is usually faster than waiting for a reply.

One article, several access choices

Visibility is not a single three-way choice. You can select appropriate internal audiences and public exposure on the same article:

Internal: agents, admins, and selected teams can be given access to operational guidance.
Public in your portal: a published article is listed and readable in the Client Portal knowledge base.
Public with a shareable link: anyone with that link can read the published article, even when it is not listed in the portal.

Choose these deliberately before publishing, especially for articles containing internal information. See Who can see it.

Where it lives in the app

Open Knowledge Base from the main navigation. The article list, editor, and Insights views let authorized team members manage content and see how readers use it. Use the tabs above for each task.

Who does what

Authorized staff write and edit articles, set who can see them, and review feedback according to their role permissions.
Your customers read published articles on the portal and can tell you whether an article helped.

New to FyneDesk?A good first move is to write three or four articles answering the questions your team gets asked most, publish them to your portal, and let the Insights tab show you what to write next. You don't need a big launch — the Knowledge Base grows naturally as you learn what customers search for.

Writing & organizing articles

Articles are created and managed from the article manager inside the Knowledge Base. The manager gives you stats at a glance, plus filters by category, status, visibility, and tag so you can find any article quickly. You can mark articles as favorites, and each one shows clear status and visibility badges so you always know what's a draft and who can see it.

The editor

The article editor is a rich editor — you can add tables, images, and code blocks without touching any markup. For power users who'd rather paste their own HTML, there's an HTML source view (the </> button) that lets you edit the underlying markup directly.

Let AI draft from a resolved ticket

If you've just solved a problem in a ticket, you don't have to write the article from scratch. FyneDesk can draft a Knowledge Base article from a resolved ticket, turning the back-and-forth you already had into a starting draft you can clean up and publish.

TipSearching reads the full article — title, summary, and body — so write a clear one-line summary and use the words your customers actually use. That's what makes an article easy to find. See What customers see.

How to create and publish an article

Open Knowledge Base and choose New Article.
Add a clear title, a short summary, and the article body. Choose a category and any useful tags.
Set internal and public visibility carefully. An article intended only for staff should not have either public option selected.
Use Preview to check formatting. Choose Save Draft to keep working privately or Publish to make it available to its selected audiences.
Open the published article as a reader with the intended level of access and verify that it appears where expected.

Who can see each article

The editor's Visibility panel separates internal access from public access. More than one option can be selected, so review the combined result before publishing.

Agents, Admins, and specific teams — internal audiences for runbooks and team-specific guidance.
Public in your portal — listed and readable on the Client Portal knowledge base once published.
Public with a shareable link — readable by anyone who has the link once published; the link appears on the saved article.

Drafts are always privateAn article saved as a draft is only ever visible to your team inside FyneDesk, regardless of its visibility setting. Nothing reaches the portal until you publish it.

How visibility and status work together

Think of status and visibility separately: Draft keeps an article off the public portal, while Published makes its selected public exposure effective. Publishing without selecting either public option does not make it a public help article. A link-only article is accessible to anyone with its URL, so do not treat the URL as a secret.

Reader feedback

Every published article ends with a simple "Was this helpful?" prompt. Readers tap Yes or No — and on No, they can leave an optional comment telling you what was missing.

How it behaves

It works for anonymous readers, not just logged-in customers.
Each reader gets one vote per article, and it's spam-protected.
It's privacy-conscious — no raw IP addresses are stored.

Where you read the results

Each article has a feedback log showing every helpful / unhelpful vote and any comments readers left. For the bigger picture — helpful-% across articles, and the most common complaints — head to the Insights tab.

What to do with a string of "No" votesA few thumbs-down with comments is a gift — it tells you exactly where an article falls short. Read the comments, fix the gap, and the next readers get a better answer.

Adding videos to an article

You can embed a supported YouTube or Vimeo URL inside an article so readers can watch without leaving the page.

Good forSetup walkthroughs, short product tours, and anything that's quicker to show than to describe. A 60-second clip often answers a question that three paragraphs can't.

How to embed a video

Place the cursor where the video belongs in the article body.
Choose the editor's Insert Video button and enter a supported YouTube or Vimeo URL in its dialog.
Insert the embed, then use Preview to confirm the player appears correctly before saving or publishing.

Marking the article type as Video adds a play badge to its card; it does not insert the video itself.

The Insights tab

Insights is a tab inside the Knowledge Base that turns reader behavior into a to-do list. Instead of guessing what to write or fix, you can see what customers actually read, what helped, and — most usefully — what they searched for and didn't find.

What's in it

Most-read articles — over 7, 30, or 90-day windows, so you can see both what's hot now and what's consistently useful.
Helpful-% per article — with drill-down into the negative comments behind a low score, so you know exactly what to fix.
Failed searches — what customers searched for and got no good answer. Each row has a one-click Create article that starts a draft from that exact search. (Failed-search logging never stores anything that looks like an email address.)
Stale articles — a list of articles that haven't been updated in a long time, so old content gets refreshed before it misleads anyone.

The failed-search loop is the magicThe failed-searches report tells you what your customers want that you haven't written yet. Click Create article on a failed search and you start a draft pre-aimed at that exact question. Write it, publish it, and the next person who searches finds an answer.

A simple weekly habit

Open Insights once a week, skim the failed searches, and write one or two short articles to close the biggest gaps. Then glance at helpful-% and the stale list to catch anything that needs a refresh. Ten minutes a week keeps your help center genuinely useful.

Heads upInsights fills with data as readers use the new pages, so a brand-new Knowledge Base starts mostly empty. The longer your articles are live, the more useful the reports become.

What your customers see

On your Client Portal, customers can browse and search the articles you published for portal access. The exact homepage and article layout depend on your portal settings and plan, so preview your own public address before sharing it.

Search that reads the whole article

Search looks at the full article — title, summary, and body — with smart ranking, not just titles. Customers find the right answer even when they don't use the exact words from the headline.

The article page

Each article page is built to get customers to an answer (or to help) fast:

Breadcrumbs so readers know where they are and can step back to a category.
An "Updated X ago" freshness signal so the content feels current and trustworthy.
An automatic table of contents on longer articles for quick jumping.
Related-article suggestions to keep readers self-serving.
A clear "Still need help? Submit a ticket" path on every page — so no one hits a dead end.
The "Was this helpful?" prompt covered in the Reader feedback tab.

Check the customer viewUse a browser session without staff access to test public articles, navigation, feedback, and the path to request help. Internal and link-only articles should not appear in the public portal list.

Want customers to have a portal at all? See Client Portal for turning it on, and Knowledge Base Settings for categories and publishing controls.