5 awesome tips for building a help center

You have a product, and you want to provide support for that product. Naturally, you need a help center for your customers to visit. But what to look out for when you’re building a help center?

The numbers say that an ever-growing number of customers turn to self-service. Of course, having actual support staff on duty is not something you can skimp on, but you can greatly lighten the workload on your staff and speed things up in the process by building a knowledge base. These things take time, obviously, but everyone needs to start somewhere.

In this blog post, we have 5 tips for building a help center that will improve the customer experience, greatly reduce the resolution times of your customer messages and make both your support staff and customers happy.

1. Define your goals

Having well-defined goals is a requirement for pretty much every project let alone for building a help center, that much goes without saying. Are you planning to reduce the workload on your support staff? Are you going for a strong web presence that will drive traffic to your website? Or, you might be looking for a way for providing a better customer experience. First thing you need to do is choosing the right help desk software, and then the rest follows.

Defining your initial goals will help you make better decisions when you first set out to build your knowledge base and set up your agents for success. If your product has unique requirements for customer service, identify those and make them top priority. You’ll be able to cover less important areas later on as you keep expanding your help center.

2. Don’t overlook mobile devices

Mobile is fast becoming the most popular platform when it comes to browsing the web. When building a help center, ensure everything is accessible with a mobile device and design your website and page templates with mobile in mind. As consumers (read: your customers) continue to shift their preferences to mobile more and more, its importance becomes more apparent.

Making the content easily accessible with a mobile device will also make your customers’ lives easier, as they’ll be able to find the answers to their questions as quickly as possible. In the planning phase, integrate mobile into your designs and go from there. It’ll make everyone’s life better.

3. Measurement is paramount

If you’re building a help center from scratch, it’s a good idea to start measuring everything that’s going on with your operation. Tracking the performance of page analytics will give you an idea of what to focus on down the line. Measuring performance metrics like the resolution times will be a treasure trove of information that you’ll be able to leverage for refining your help center.

For the knowledge base, the importance of tracking what content gets viewed can not be overstated. If a specific article has more hits than others, it might indicate an aspect of your product that needs improvement, or the content itself needs expanding.

4. Identify key topics

When you’re starting out, prioritize the most frequently asked questions first. It is a great deal when you’re building a help center. You can utilize the records in your help desk for this. Getting the bulk of user messages covered is the real objective here, and by doing this you’ll be killing two birds with one stone: you’ll be taking a huge weight off your customer representatives’ shoulders by freeing up their time, and you’ll speed up the whole support process by allowing your customers to find solutions to their problems themselves.

Start off simple, and gradually grow your FAQ and knowledge base over time. Since your solution database will evolve as your products improve, it’ll be easier to update the most asked questions later on. Do the simpler stuff first, and you can move on to the more advanced topics as you measure and analyze your call center statistics.

5. Get customer feedback whenever possible

Customer feedback is your lifeline when it comes to establishing any kind of resource center for them. Their input is crucial for you to spot potentially overlooked gaps in your knowledge base. You might have a list of most commonly asked questions handy already, but those lists are never comprehensive enough when technology and the scope of your product are constantly changing.

Asking your customers which articles are helpful is a good way of determining if that topic needs to be expanded. Ensuring the articles in your knowledge base are comprehensive enough without getting into too much detail is important for the success of your knowledge base documentation.

If it all sounds too complicated and hard, don’t fret. With Desk360, you can start building a help center just by creating FAQ pages and expand your knowledge base for your customers, track and measure everything that goes on with your staff, and much more. Check out Desk360’s help center solutions today.