How To Build A Good Zendesk Help Center?

Setting up your Zendesk Help Center is a relatively easy task. Getting the most of it can be more of a challenge.

Out of the box, the Help Center is a good way to start interacting and engaging with your clients and community. Building a good Zendesk Help Center pays for itself almost immediately. Less need to provide one on one support, the ability to preemptively solve problems, building a happier client base (when they find answers quickly), better documentation and more. All these factors contribute to lowering customer service costs while simultaneously improving customer loyalty.

On the flipside, a poorly designed center will result in high rates of abandonment, users who are frustrated (who then take it out on your poor customer service rep) and makes your product or service less usable.

The Help Center is a powerful tool if it is used to its maximum potential.

The Importance of Ticket Deflection

Clients can visit the help site, browse the knowledge base, submit requests and feature requests for your product and feedback in your Community section. Not only do you maximize ticket deflection (answering a customer service inquiry before they need to talk to someone), but you can generate actionable feedback in a much more organized manner. Ticket deflection is an art – the art of balancing work between your customer service team and your customers. The goal of a Help Center has to be making everyone work less (per support issue).

So what makes a good Zendesk Help Center?

Before deciding on anything, you need to understand your business, your goals and what you want to achieve with your Help Center.

Usability That Helps!

Good usability should never be underestimated. A Help Center must have an intuitive navigation with an easy to use interface, providing clients with faster resolve times, better satisfaction and less incoming support requests. Ticket deflection is a priority – and not in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” manner. Good usability means your customers get the info (and solutions) they need as quickly, and independently, as possible.

A Smart Knowledge Base

Having a deep understanding of your product and the pain points people are having with your product or service, is key to building a knowledge base. A good thought-out knowledge base from the very start, will influence your focus, procedures and make business processes much smoother. As Socrates said “A good question is half the answer”. Use that mentality in your knowledge base and the answer won’t only be helping your clients.

Designated & Sorted Submit Requests

Submit requests are the best way for your users to send requests directly to a designated team. This in return saves the agent’s time in identifying the problem and they can focus directly on what the client is requesting. This results in a more accurate response and faster resolution for the ticket (…and happier customers of course). To start off with more accurate submit requests, you need a mixture of good usability, well structured knowledge base and improvements to the submit request form (popups, update areas, etc).

Nurture A Community for Feature Requests and Feedback

The community is one of your Help Center’s more powerful tools and assets. Being similar to a forum, it allows users to interact with your agents, get answers to problems they’re having, suggest product improvements and let you get a good feel of the product feedback from your community. It can function as a “beta knowledge base”, from which you can generate articles as you see need. If well designed and supported, your clients will be encouraged that they are not only being served, but that their input is being actively used.

Make Sure It Works!

That might be obvious. You may have innovative features and a cutting edge user experience, but if it only works on Chrome and iOS 9, you won’t get much done with it. How easy is it to navigate your Help Center on a 5” screen? On the holdouts still using IE? Strive to make sure it is accessible from all devices and operating systems. Accessing the Help Center should not be a commodity, but a core feature for any of your clients.

That’s The Very Basic.

Before you start thinking about more advanced custom features, these are the most basic must haves for your help center. Whether you are on Zendesk, Desk or any other online customer service platform, these are the basics. There are plenty of really cool ideas and hacks that you can apply to your Help Center, but your priorities have to be in what we’ve mentioned above.

Usability, a smart knowledge base, submit request optimization, community and making sure it works (across all platforms) are the very basics. Get them done right, tweak, optimize and you’ll see a tremendous return on your investment.