Best Practices for Zendesk Help Center and Self-Service

Posted on 1 Oct 2021

Many companies use the Zendesk help center to provide information on their products and answer their customers' questions concerning their services.

There are numerous strategies for improving your help center so that your users can solve their problems without your customer support agents. It saves time for both in the end.

 

1. Brand the Theme

The main idea is to make your help center more recognizable and provide a more seamless experience for the user. Your users will find your site more reliable when they know where they are, what to expect, and what to do next.

Branding your theme is the best way to achieve that. You can do it by customizing the key components, such as the logo, icons, fonts, colors, and background image - to make your help center visually resemble your main website.

 

branded help center

 

2. Provide a Neat and Simple Design

Another strategy you can use to make your help center more intelligible for the user is to provide a neat and simplistic layout of the pages. It will be easier for your customers to look for the information they need if there is minimum ornamentation on the screen and every item is easily readable.

 

clean help center design

 

3. Format Your Articles

You can also format your articles to make them more exciting and easier to read. Remember, a typical customer has no time for long reads and no patience for a cumbersome compilation of texts.

Your articles will be more gripping if you make it easier for the reader to navigate the text and find necessary information, no matter how long the text is. There are lots of ways you can achieve that:

  • Highlight significant parts of the text to draw the reader's attention to them.

  • Use pictures, photographs, and videos to make the reading experience more visual and entertaining.

  • Organize your content in diverse ways, such as: Tabs, Lists, Charts, Tables

 

Format your articles

 

4. Provide Side Navigation

In most cases, you cannot put all the necessary information on one page, and the reader begins to travel around your site. It is easy to get lost and forget where to go next or return if various sections do not form one coherent whole. And most readers find it annoying if they have to return to the homepage every time.

Make the content structure always visible on each page to help your customers find what is relevant to them at the moment. You can design a user-friendly and visually attractive side navigation bar to enable the reader to skip sections and move across your site more freely.

 

side navigation for zendesk help center

 



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5. Create a Table of Contents

Another way to facilitate the navigation around your help center is to provide the reader with an easily intelligible table of contents for long articles. Such a table will:

  • Enable the user to scan the text and read relevant parts of it only
  • Considerably improves the article's readability
  • Make your help center look so much more professional and reliable

 

table of content 

6. Add a Video Gallery

Another excellent strategy for creating more informative content is to create video galleries to help your customer better understand the content of your help center.

Videos make it easier to grasp information, and they are less tiring than long reads too. Besides, videos are more entertaining: they will make your help center so much more pleasant to use, and your customers will associate your site with more positive emotions.

 

videogallery for zendesk help center

 

7. Compile Frequently Asked Questions

In most cases, customers approach help centers with identical issues and send tickets to ask for the same information. You will facilitate their self-service considerably and decrease the number of those tickets if you include popular articles and frequent searches on your help center's homepage.

 FAQ on main page

 

8. Reveal Your Server Status

One more powerful strategy involves constantly letting your customers know of your current server status. It makes a big difference if they know whether you are available at the moment.

It will help reduce the number of otherwise unnecessary or untimely tickets and make your customers know you care about them.

 

Server status

 

Conclusion

The purpose of the Zendesk help center is to improve your customers' access to relevant information about your products. By implementing our simple strategies, you can facilitate your users' self-service, make your knowledge base look more professional, and keep your customers better satisfied with it.



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