Can a help center redesign substantially reduce the number of support tickets? Buffer says yes!
Ticket form challenge
Buffer is a company that offers a software app designed to manage accounts on social media. Its team searched for a well-thought solution to provide its customers with the most relevant articles to answer their questions. The idea was to offer a list of suitable entries when clients start filling out the ticket form.
In this way, a ticket system would be used to only get advice on complex technical issues and reduce the workload of support specialists.
Answer Bot fails. Pop-up brings a new solution.
Initially, the Buffer team decided to apply a standard Zendesk feature – an Answer Bot. The tool identifies and suggests the relevant articles based on the analysis of the request.
However, Answer Bot failed its mission because it could not estimate the question accurately enough to provide the customer with only relevant information.
So, the help center team was looking for a solution to refine the recommendations and decided to hard-code their ticket forms. Every specific topic should offer a list of accurate help center articles when customers start filling out the form.
To generate the current solution, Buffer conducted some custom development with Lotus Themes.
Just 5 months after the enhancement was introduced, the company recorded a 26% reduction in the ticket submission.
We have worked with Lotus Themes a number of times over the past two years and I can't recommend them highly enough. Their designs are fantastic, their communication is outstanding, they are able to share advice on how to achieve what we're looking to implement, they always deliver on time, and they are just a true pleasure to work with. A great partner to work with!
Hannah Voice, Buffer
Pop-up in action: freeing the human resources
A redesigned Buffer's ticket form contains dropdown menus with a choice of request categories and a list of relevant topics.
When customers choose a topic, a pop-up with articles appears. It offers valuable materials for the users and obviates the need to create and send a ticket to the support team. The full article can be opened directly from the pop-up with just one click.
The substantial reduction of support tickets liberates the human resources and cuts the workload.
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Measuring the help center success
The amount of submitted support tickets is not the only metric that the help center applies to evaluate its efficiency. The number of visits to the help center and their length, the self-service score based on the tickets per user ratio, the search refinements, and search exits reflect how the self-service performs.
The company successfully got a perfect solution for something they wanted but couldn't implement with Zendesk's out-of-the-box functionality.
How redesign of the ticket form supports other help centers
OneDayOnly's help center has also improved the initial Zendesk ticket form to raise its efficiency and reduce support tickets and the workload of the support agents. Its new form also applies a dropdown menu with selected topics.
This company decided to show suggestions with relevant articles on the right from the ticket form. Several possible solutions help the customer find an answer and avoid sending a request to the support staff.
Examples of Buffer and OneDayOnly show that ticket form redesign alone can improve ticket deflection and save support costs by freeing human resources. And you’ll get even better results if you customize all the help center pages according to your customer needs.
We've had the pleasure of working with Lotus Themes for various improvements to our Help Center over the last few months - we couldn't ask for a better partner to collaborate with. They are highly knowledgeable in the Zendesk theming space, they're timely with their work and deliver great results.
Amanda Marochko, Buffer
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