Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Knowledge Professional or higher |
| Access | Agent, Admin |
You can see the article and your customer cannot. Five causes account for nearly all of it, and the first is simply that you are looking at it as staff.
Why can my customer not see the article?
- A customer says a link gives them nothing.
- They cannot find an article you can search for easily.
- Some customers see it and others do not.
One: you are viewing it as staff
Agents and admins fall in the Agents and admins segment, which exists by default, so anything restricted to staff is visible to you and invisible to a customer.
The fastest test is a private window, signed out. If the article disappears there, it is not public, and you have your answer in about ten seconds.
Two: the article is restricted to a segment
Check which user segments are set on it for viewing. An article limited to Signed-in users gives an anonymous visitor nothing, and a link to it looks broken from their side.
On Enterprise up to ten segments can be applied to one article, so read all of them rather than the first. On Growth and Professional an article carries one, which makes this cause quicker to rule out.
Three: the customer is outside the segment
They may not be signed in, or may have signed in with a different address from the one you are looking them up by, which puts them outside a segment built on organisation or tag.
Where the segment is tag-based, check the tag matching rule too: ALL of these tags and ANY of these tags produce opposite results from the same tags, and a segment set to ALL excludes anybody missing one of them.
Four: it is not published
A draft is invisible to everyone but its editors. Worth ruling out early, because it looks identical to a permissions problem from the customer's side.
Five: the section is restricted
An article can be public inside a section that is not. Check both, because the article's own settings look entirely correct in this case.
Why they report it as a broken link
In our experience the customer does not see a message explaining that they lack permission, so a restricted article and a deleted one are indistinguishable to them. That is why the report arrives as "your link does not work" rather than "I cannot access this", and why it is worth asking whether they were signed in before you go looking for the article at all.
One case is documented and behaves differently. Where the whole help centre requires signing in, a visitor who is not signed in sees the sign-in page rather than nothing, which at least tells them what to do. So a customer describing a sign-in screen has hit the account setting; a customer describing a dead link has hit one of the five above.
Comments
0 comments
Article is closed for comments.