How to create 24\7 self-service Help Center

There's no question that a great help desk is at the heart of excellent customer support. And it's about the relationships you have with your customers, not just the tools you use.

Zendesk's Help Center software is all about just that - improving the relationships between your company and your customers. It streamlines customer support with tools like triggers and automations. It's intuitive in that it's built specifically with customer service and support agents in mind. Moreover, it's designed to provide users with a round-the-clock complete self-service support option.

Creating a Zendesk Help Center will help you provide what your customers need. They're more technically savvy than ever, for starters, and research shows that the majority (nearly 70%) prefer self-service instead of speaking with a representative.

Zendesk Help Center: Why?

With Zendesk's Help Center, you can provide better customer service, and meet the needs of customers who prefer self-service. You'll reduce costs, and increase efficiency by eliminating repetitive costs. You'll build deeper connections between you and your customers. In fact, there are a lot of advantages to a high-quality Help Desk, including:

  • Working more efficiently - both customers and IT professionals.
  • You strengthen your brand and reputation
  • You improve the quality of your support and service to customers. In turn, this helps improve your customer retention. And a happy customer is likely to tell others about your brand.

Features

1. Knowledge Base

The Help Center has three main primary page types: category landing pages, section landing pages, and articles.

  • Category Landing Pages. These are the organizing containers of the Help Center. Categories contain sections that contain articles. Different products or services can be used as content portals.
  • Section Landing Pages. These are collection of related articles. You can assign viewing permissions for different sections.
  • Articles. These are content items such as tech notes or help topics.

2. Community

You can create and comment on posts to pose questions, provide answers, or share ideas in the community.

3. Customer Portal Service

This is the customer's home for information on their support requests. For instance, customers can search through previous interactions they're CC'd on to find answers to questions they've already asked, which saves times for everyone.

Building a Thriving Help Center

Goals

Define what it is you hope to achieve. Do you want to reduce the number of support tickets submitted to your staff?  Or, do you want to build relationships and engagements between your customers and employees?

Measure

Begin measuring the performance of your Help Center from the start. Things to keep track of include community analytics stats, resolution times, and the percentage of issues resolved by the staff and those solved by the Help Center.

Mobile: Not an Option

You must provide the same level of seamless experience and service whether your customer is on a laptop, tablet, or phone.

Get Employees Involved

Your employees should take an active role. And that means everyone, including marketing, product and support, and sales.

User Experience is Vital

You may be doing everything right to getting people to your site, but they won't stay long - or come back - if the user experience is below par. There must be easy navigation to the things that matter most.

Use Ticket Suggested articles

When the customer submits a ticket, Zendesk looks through your Help Center content and suggests relevant articles right next to the ticket subject. Such auto-answering system helps users to find necessary information without waiting. So your knowledge base should contain all the typical answers and essential articles. It will surely help to create a perfect self-service support service.

Be a Marketer

A Help Center isn't much use is no one is using it. Think about how you're going to attract visitors. How are you going to promote the site?

With its fully customizable Help Center, knowledge base, online community and self-service portal all in one, Zendesk makes it easy to deliver self-services experiences while reducing support requests.

It's time to get your ideal help center!

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