It is no secret that many customers LOVE self-service options and would rather use them than open a ticket or speak to a customer service rep.  To accommodate the wide variety of needs in this area Awesome Support provides multiple self-service options for FAQs and Knowledgebases.  In this brief article we present three of those options.

Frequently Asked Questions

This is probably the easiest module to use.  You can create questions and answers in different categories and then set up a page where the user can view the questions in an accordion style presentation for each category.

• Pros: Simple to set up and every effective.
• Cons: Sometimes its just too simple.  With just a single presentation style you either love it or hate it.

View Product Page

Documentation

For a more complex knowledge-base you can use our DOCUMENTATION add-on.  This extension allows you to present information in a multi-pane view.  In the left pane you will have your Products with tree views for chapters and sections.  Each article can be every extensive and will appear in the right pane.  The bottom will show additional related articles and categories.

• Pros:  Can present information with complex relationships for multiple products, complete with cross references
• Cons: Takes a little more effort to set up than FAQs

View Product Page

Public Tickets

A more unusual knowledge-base  is your own ticket history.  You can make all or part of it public and even give your end users control over whether their tickets and replies are public or private.  You can present the tickets as a searchable archive with multiple layout options: LIST, ACCORDION and GRID

• Pros: Uses your own solved tickets as the knowledge base
• Cons: Might make your users uncomfortable since their tickets are public

View Product Page

Wrap Up

This was a very brief article but it addresses a question that we get all the time - namely what options do we have for self-service.  While there are many dedicated knowledge-base products on the market, sometimes, simple is better.  All three options presented above are relatively simple to implement and are deeply integrated into the core Awesome Support plugin.  But, if you do use a third party knowledge-base product or you have built your own, it might still be possible to integrate it into the Awesome Support ticket system using our CUSTOM FAQ add-on.