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Build an Effective Self-Service Help Center
Customer-friendly support doesn’t have to be complicated or burdensome for your team. Offer a self-service help center as an effective and cost-efficient way to grow your business. Follow these tips to get the most value out of self-service.
When you build a customer-friendly self-service help center, you set up your customers and team members for success. Your customers are happy to get the answers they’re looking for. Your team is happy to focus on trickier issues, making sales, and checking off other to-dos.
Make Sure That Customers Can Find Your Content
Your self-service site isn’t useful if your customers don’t know where to go for help, so make it easy for customers to find.
- Include a link to your help center on your website’s most highly trafficked pages. Consider including links in other places, too, like in email communications, member pages, and product pages.
- Help customers find answers by adding a search bar on your help center.
- Use labels, categories, or tags to guide customers to the right place.
- Consider optimizing your content for search engines, as your customers could turn to a web search before they find your resources. Include keywords that your customers might search for in your titles and content.
Write Clear, Relevant Articles
Helpful articles are clearly written, informative, and useful. Use simple and clear language to describe what customers need to know. Cut details that don’t help them succeed.
For a relevant and useful help center, gather your customers’ most common questions and turn them into articles. We recommend that you start with a variety of content such as common support requests, troubleshooting steps, FAQs, and detailed product information. You can include images and videos for a more hands-on approach that your customers will love.
You don’t have to start from scratch—look to your team’s past interactions with customers. You or someone on your team likely answered basic questions about your company, helped a customer fix an issue, or wrote out a step-by-step tutorial for your products. Start with what you have to be able to quickly write and publish your initial set of articles. You can make adjustments later.
Open the Lines for Feedback
Listen to feedback to build trust with your customers. Start by anticipating what your customers want and offer a few articles to them. But if you let your them provide feedback, you can gather useful data that takes the guesswork out of your customer support.
Our recommendations:
- Offer readers the opportunity to vote on or rate articles to show you if they think the information is useful.
- Include a contact form in your help center so customers can reach out if they can’t find the answer to a question.
- Offer more support such as email, phone, live chat, or messaging apps, and show those links prominently on the page.
Include Article Maintenance in Your Team’s Processes
Your help center isn’t a one-time task. Your team should always listen to customer feedback and find new questions and solutions to document. We recommend hosting regular reviews to go over feedback data and re-read articles to make sure that you’re truly helping your customers.
Add Branding for a Seamless Experience
Give your customers a consistent experience between your help center and your corporate site. Use the same colors, icons, header, and footer across all your web properties, and use the same domain or subdomain.
Branding doesn’t stop at visuals. Create a style guide for your team to keep your articles consistent in voice, tone, and formatting regardless of who writes them. Look for similar examples online to consolidate and adapt as you write your first articles.
Keep Mobile in Mind
Smartphone users increasingly turn to their phones instead of a desktop when they want answers. Your help center should be responsive and reformat to fit on the viewer’s screen. If you omit mobile, you lose opportunities to help and maintain customer relationships.
A self-service help center is the first place your customers go for help, so make it relevant and easy-to-use. When you nail self-service, your customers are happy to avoid a lengthy phone call or a game of email ping-pong. Your team is freed up to focus on complicated support issues, sales, and everything else they need to get done.
