How to Measure and Maximize Self-Service ROI with the Zendesk Help Center

measure-and-maximize-roi-with-a-zendesk-help-center

When businesses are coping with increased support volumes in times of uncertainty, it’s more important than ever to reduce costs and, at the same time, provide clients with efficient customer experience. Zendesk help center is a solution that allows you to increase return on investment (ROI) and give your customers a great support channel that is easy to use.

An online help center costs only a few pennies for each customer.

Harvard Business Review

According to Harvard Business Review, a support agent interaction is over $7 for a B2C company and over $13 for a B2B company. In contrast, the cost of self-service interaction is just several pennies. As a result, businesses that have online help centers can reduce their annual customer support costs by $1,000,000 to $3,000,000 (Accenture).

A well-executed help center can save from $1,000,000 to $3,000,000 a year.

Accenture

How to measure the self-service ROI of using a Zendesk help center

According to various studies, there is no doubt that customers like finding answers on their own. For instance, the recent statistics mentioned by Zendesk reveal that 91% of clients would use a help center, and 76% prefer self-service.

91% of customers would use a help center, and 76% prefer self-service.

Zendesk

But what about the financial part? Is it really cheaper for your business to invest in a help center rather than hiring human agents? To find out this, you can measure the ROI of self-service for your company using the following formula:

* If you don’t know ticket deflection for your industry, you can use the average 30% that many organizations reported.

If you calculate the self-service ROI in your company, it will become evident that an online help center is a must-have if you want to adopt a cost-efficient customer support solution. However, you should understand that you won’t get these results by simply adding a knowledge base as one more support channel. The research confirms this by stating that 55% of users complain about the quality of help centers claiming the self-service is difficult to use.

55% of users complain that help centers are difficult to use.

The Northridge Group

The main problem is that a lousy help center doesn’t encourage your clients to use it and consequently has a low return on investment. As a result, businesses get disappointed and don’t consider self-service as an effective support channel and money saver. However, if your Zendesk help center has a good design and takes into account customer behavior, it will lead to significant cost savings. The reason is that it is more convenient and easier to use than contacting a human agent.

Let’s find out what steps will help you create a thriving Zendesk help center and maximize self-service ROI.

What makes a good Zendesk help center

Make it easy to find your help center.

Your self-service portal can be user-friendly and professional-looking, but who cares if customers can’t find it. Add links to the help center on your main website. You can do it in the main menu in the header, footer, and across your content on different pages.

Create relevant content.

Begin with questions your customers ask most frequently and continue monitoring their requests to add new content and improve the existing articles on a regular basis.

Let your customers find information fast and easily.

Organize your content in self-explanatory categories and sections. Create intuitive and easy-to-use navigation with a table of contents for articles and side navigation for the entire help center. Additionally, format the content with callout blocks, tabs, accordions, Font Awesome icons, and many other components to make it more digestible.

Make your help center accessible on all devices.

WARC predicts that by 2025, 72.6% of users will use smartphones to access the internet. These users demand fully responsive websites. They don’t tolerate increased loading times, difficult navigation, the necessity to scroll and zoom, images that don’t fit the screen, and other technical problems.

Make your help center similar to your main website.

If your help center looks different from the main site, your users will think they are in the wrong place, which isn’t connected with your business, and they will leave it. To avoid this, you should use the same branding (logo, colors, fonts, icons, etc.), header, and footer as on your corporate website.