https://userdeck.com/blog 2014-04-25T12:05:40-05:00 https://userdeck.com/blog/guides-revision-history 2016-12-09T02:47:56-06:00 2017-01-30T03:49:32-06:00

We're excited to share with you today a new feature for Guides called revision history. From the start, each time you change an article, we've been storing a copy of the original article. Starting today you can now view all of your article revisions including the author and the date in one place and restore an older version at any time. This is great for seeing how an article has changed over time and correcting mistakes from accidental changes. Learn how to work with article revisions.

https://userdeck.com/blog/announcing-conversations 2015-08-27T21:40:35-05:00 2017-01-29T23:26:07-06:00

We are incredibly excited to share a new product with you today that we're calling Conversations. Our goal since the beginning was to build a platform to allow businesses to provide better support to their customers. Multiple Channels The web has changed a lot in many recent years and customers are now wanting to communicate over many different channels, from traditional email to social media to in-app and they want support wherever they go. You can still setup an email address forwards to automatically create tickets and when you respond will come from your business. We're happy to have integrations with Twilio to power SMS messaging and Twitter to start with more as you request them. Expandable Integrations There are several website widgets that support both authenticated sessions (behind a login wall) and unauthenticated and use sessions to allow customers to manage their tickets so they can continue where they left off with their last message. Our widgets have two primary types, inline and overlay. The overlay can be placed onto any page in a modal/box window that expand when a customer clicks "Help". The inline is like Guides where it blends into a page of your site and inherits the design. The widgets allow customers to contact your business as well as see a list of tickets and manage them as a ticket portal. Pull in data from your billing system in real-time into the sidebar when viewing a conversation to be able to get a quick heads up for important metrics or information to make a reply to a customer that much faster. We'll be adding one click 3rd party integrations such as CRM and payment systems like MailChimp and Stripe and notification tools like HipChat, Slack, and Zapier to keep you aware of what's going on down the road as well. Team Collaboration Conversations features what we are calling Mailboxes, each being a separate group of ticket buckets for organizing. You can separate your sales and support into two mailboxes, or if you have several businesses you could make one for each. Then we have important features like private notes, assignments, statuses. Whether you're just starting out with your first website and want tools that will scale with your project as it grows or an enterprise business with hundreds of agents we think the tools should be easy to use and affordable to use by all to help push our vision of better customer support for everyone. Give it a try and let us know what you think. Be on the lookout for our new API documentation which will give you complete flexibility for how you best want to use our platform.

https://userdeck.com/blog/multiple-guides 2015-05-11T15:06:39-05:00 2017-01-29T07:35:00-06:00

We're happy to announce our newest feature by popular request for Guides. You can now manage multiple Guides under a single account. Whether you manage multiple websites and want a knowledge base for each or have multiple businesses, you can now manage them all easily. Now when you login to the control panel, you'll see a new dropdown which lets you switch context between Guides or create a new Guide. Learn more about creating a new guide.

https://userdeck.com/blog/guides-widget-events 2014-12-01T21:23:33-06:00 2017-01-29T19:59:51-06:00

We're excited to mention a new feature of Guides embedded widget. It's been our goal to provide a way to not only customize, but extend the customer support experience in a unique way that makes sense for your business. Today you can now extend the widget even more by hooking into events that are triggered when a customer takes actions inside your knowledge base. Right now you can hook into ratings and other events and provide a better customer experience. For example if a customer rated an article as unhelpful, you could display a modal and ask them to contact you to get in touch to better help them. Learn more about hooking into Guides widget events.

https://userdeck.com/blog/seo-support 2014-08-15T18:14:12-05:00 2017-01-29T17:41:39-06:00

We're proud to release a huge addition to the platform, SEO (search engine optimization) support. Even though search engines are getting better all the time to try to detect, parse, and even index JavaScript based content, the reality is it is still far from perfect and content owners need to do more work to ensure the content gets properly indexed. Content doesn't help customers if they have a hard time finding it. One of the benefits of putting content into Guides is to reduce support time by allowing customers to solve their own problems using self support. Customers often use search engines to find answers too and we have now optimized the entire platform out of the box when you embed Guides, your content will be shortly indexed and drive more traffic to your Guide. If you have already installed the embed code you will need to update it as it will use a new URL to point search engines to. By default, URLs in search engines will use the generic domain, you can change this by configuring your web server. Learn more about setting up SEO support.

https://userdeck.com/blog/guides-article-ratings 2014-07-16T19:19:23-05:00 2017-01-29T20:02:27-06:00

We're happy to announce our newest feature for Guides is article ratings. Ratings allow you to gauge how well customer's problems are being answered through self service by seeing which articles are helpful to them. If an article has a high number of helpful ratings and one of the most popular in your knowledge base, chances are the writing style used should be replicated. You can then apply that to the most unhelpful articles and consider rewriting them. You can see the new ratings when viewing an article. Learn how to view ratings for an article.

https://userdeck.com/blog/guides-file-attachments 2014-06-10T12:31:26-05:00 2017-01-29T07:34:59-06:00

We now offer the ability to allow file attachments to be added to any article in Guides. Attachments are great for when you want to provide customers files they can download and great for added support such as PDFs. You can see attachments inside the widget at the bottom of any article that has one or more. You can start using attachments today, so why not learn how to attach a file to an article.

https://userdeck.com/blog/guides-image-uploads 2014-06-02T11:53:51-05:00 2017-01-29T07:34:59-06:00

You can now upload images through both the WYSIWYG and the Markdown editors. Images are hosted by us and we handle the scaling as we do with the widget. Adding images to your articles such as screenshots can explain better and help even more than just text based how tos by showing users more context of the answer you are providing to reduce questions and support time. When you are ready, learn how to upload an image to an article.

https://userdeck.com/blog/userdeck-for-wordpress 2014-05-29T04:26:18-05:00 2017-01-29T07:35:00-06:00

We are really excited to announce an exciting new way to integrate UserDeck's embedded software into your existing site. We've made it even easier to add Guides to any page of your WordPress site by simply installing the plugin and choosing how you want to integrate it into your WordPress page. Learn how to add UserDeck to your WordPress site or view our plugin on the WordPress plugin directory.

https://userdeck.com/blog/guides-embed-anything 2014-05-18T17:56:31-05:00 2017-01-29T07:34:59-06:00

You can now embed a single article, a category, or a collection instead of the entire guide on any page of your site. This is great when you want to add a dynamic F.A.Q. to a pricing page or put an article as a dynamic page you can change easily without doing deployments to make a change. We're excited to see how you use this new feature. You can start using immediately, so go embed any type of content to your page.

https://userdeck.com/blog/guides-search 2014-05-11T16:36:07-05:00 2017-01-29T07:34:59-06:00

We've just added the ability to search Guides. Your customers can now find answers faster through self-service and save you time from support tickets and emails. Search is now available for all Guides and comes enabled by default so you will see it live on your site immediately. Try it out in our support page.

https://userdeck.com/blog/ssl-support 2014-04-29T23:14:10-05:00 2017-01-29T07:34:59-06:00

Today we've added a new feature to our platform, SSL support. With SSL support, widgets can now be used on any SSL page or even websites that requires SSL accross an entire domain.

https://userdeck.com/blog/announcing-guides 2014-04-25T12:05:40-05:00 2017-01-29T01:38:01-06:00

Today we are happy to announce Guides, a powerful knowledge base widget that embeds into existing websites. We've been thinking for a while about what a future knowledge base system could look like, how it could work, and why it could be better.