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Creating content for self-serve and AI-powered support
Creating content for self-serve and AI-powered support

How to build a knowledge base to power your Help Center, AI agent, and AI copilot.

Beth-Ann Sher avatar
Written by Beth-Ann Sher
Updated over 3 weeks ago

Your support content is your team's most powerful tool. Invest time in creating, curating, and optimizing it.

This will guide you through creating your content strategy in Intercom, enabling your team to provide comprehensive self-serve support through the Help Center, as well as unlocking AI-powered support via Fin AI Agent and Fin AI Copilot.

We’ve broken it up into sections:

Before diving in, we recommend checking out our guides for Getting started with Intercom and Setting up the Inbox.


Step 1: Understand the basics

It’s important to understand the dual role your content plays. Great support content powers your self-serve Help Center and your AI-powered support, ensuring customers get timely and accurate answers—whether they prefer finding solutions themselves or interacting with Fin AI Agent.

  • The Knowledge Hub is a knowledge management system for creating, organizing, and optimizing all content that powers your Help Center, AI agent, and AI copilot.

  • Your Help Center serves as your customer-facing interface for self-serve support, which customers can access 24/7.


Step 2: Choose your content strategy

Deciding how to leverage your content is a critical first step in your support journey. A strong content strategy aligns with your business goals and addresses customer needs.

Consider your primary objectives:

  • Your audience: Who are your customers, and what questions are they asking?

  • Your goals: Are you focused on reducing human support volume, improving customer satisfaction, or driving product adoption?

  • Your channels: Where will your content be available—via a Help Center, AI agent, or AI copilot?

For most teams, we suggest prioritizing your Help Center first. This ensures you have a solid foundation of content that can later support both human and AI-powered interactions.


Step 3: Build your Help Center to enable self-serve support

Creating a Help Center is about providing clear, accessible information that empowers your customers to find answers and in-depth guides quickly. This is your first line of self-serve support. If you have an existing Zendesk Knowledge Base, you can import public articles from Zendesk to Intercom. If you’re starting from scratch, follow the steps below. 👇

Create collections

Collections are the backbone of your Help Center. Think of them as categories or topics that are used to group related articles in your Help Center so customers can easily browse and find what they need.

Key considerations for creating collections:

  • Aim for clear, intuitive collection groupings that make sense for your customers such as product area or support theme.

  • Start with at least 2 collections, each containing 3 articles.

  • You can always optimize your collections later as you add more articles.

Add articles

Transform your articles into actionable resources for your customers:

An article won’t be searchable in your Help Center until it’s added to a collection.

Your articles should answer the most common questions your customers ask. If you don’t know where to get started:


Step 4: Style your Help Center to ensure it’s on brand

Your Help Center is an extension of your brand. Make it look professional and welcoming, all from the settings page:


Step 5: Set your Help Center live

Bringing your Help Center to life is straightforward. Remember that this will be a journey which will require you to optimize your content continuously:

  • Double-check that all articles are published and in a collection.

  • Click around your Help Center to ensure it delivers a smooth, intuitive experience for your customers.

Tips:


Step 6: Organize your Knowledge Hub for AI support

Simply put, your AI agent or copilot is only as good as your content. This step is crucial for enabling contextual and relevant AI-powered support.

Create a structured repository of knowledge:

For flexible ways to organize and group content together, use content tagging.


Step 7: Personalize the customer experience

You might want Fin to target content to certain customers. This could be anyone from your VIP customers to a specific set of customers using a part of your product. Doing so enables Fin to be even more accurate with your customer interactions.

Fin will respect any Help Center audience rules you’ve applied to public articles, but you can add additional Fin audiences which can be applied to any content type. For example, you can create snippets that Fin only uses when responding to certain customers, or have an article in your Help Center that’s visible to anyone but Fin can only use it when responding to certain customers.


Step 8: Continuously optimize for self-serve and AI success

Your support resources should evolve with your product and your customers' needs. A great knowledge base is never static. It grows and improves with your understanding of customer needs.


What’s next?


💡Tip

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