An increasing number of digital customers prefer finding the answers to their questions and issues and merely learning more about your product or service themselves via the Zendesk help center instead of filling out multi-step request forms or holding on the line to be connected with your agent.
The trend of independent customers is beneficial for brands since they can accommodate larger numbers of potential or current customers, many of whom will not even get in touch personally. It means fewer hours spent by the support team, a lower load of ticket numbers and greater coverage of the target audience.
Yet, this shortcut to addressing more customers has another side of the coin. You need to make sure that your Zendesk Guide is really effective, or, in other words, genuinely impeccable, resourceful, easy to use and navigate. Otherwise, the trick won’t work, and you will end up having approximately the same number of tickets and inquires as before or cause additional questions.
Create many direction points to Zendesk Guide
Even though this recommendation may sound just like common sense, it’s not that plain. Think of additional ways to drive your customers from your corporate website to the knowledge base, apart from having the link to it in the footer.
Calls to action are simple and probably the best solutions to draw the attention of your audience to the self-service offerings. You can insert the links to your Zendesk Guide across the pages of the main website. Furthermore, if your product is presented online, you can use links to generate more traffic to it too.
Your Zendesk Guide should be on-brand
Support experience is a decisive factor for many customers, which their future behavior will be based on. Apart from having a consistent domain and subdomain names throughout the company’s resources, you need to ensure 100% consistency in terms of voice, tone, look and feel criteria.
You should have similar or exact-looking colors, header, and footer. If you position your business seriously, then it’s your responsibility to convey the message through the visual elements, icons, fonts, formatting, effects and every single detail that was developed by your designer as a part of your corporate branding package.
Compatibility across all devices
An easy way to frustrate your customers is having your Zendesk help center incompatible with their device. Regardless of the browser, OS, size of the screen or the gadget’s producer, people should be able to receive immediate support at any time; otherwise, they may feel like they are unimportant to you.
The smart organization is the key
Always visible search box and menu bar are not the only elements of an effective Zendesk help center. Another tip relates to the logic of listing the sections and categories. The best way to sort out your material is in chronological order starting with the most necessary information for newcomers and finishing with additional hints and tricks for the pros.
An additional important hint is making your content crawlable to optimize it for Google search. Inserting a contact form along with the links to the support channels into the footer of your Zendesk Guide is a great solution that builds trust. By adding your telephone number, email address, live chat and other contact options available you will considerably improve your users’ experience. By doing so, you give customers a chance to ask a question right away in case they didn’t find the answer on their own.
Avoid repetition for your own sake
Defining features multiple times across the materials of your Zendesk knowledge base is not only time-consuming and not cool to read, but it also complicates the life of your staff at the end of the day. For instance, in case of changing the definition you need to go through every single article where it was used. Instead, you can go ahead and write it just once in one place and enter the links to that page from other parts of your Zendesk Guide.
For the dessert
Here’s the final recommendation for the dessert. Even if you have that impeccable Zendesk Guide we’ve been talking about above, make sure that you keep track of incoming inquiries and questions as they will not always be the same. On the contrary, you should actively look for ways to update and expand the materials of your Zendesk help center.
The inquiries that are worth covering in the knowledge base are those that need more time and information to be gathered and those that can be solved with just a single response. Think of it this way—every new article or addition to the existing material can save hours for your staff in the future.
Now, if you are convinced about the necessity of making changes and optimizing your Zendesk help center to perfection, it’s time to choose a reliable partner; those who prefer quality, guarantees and timeliness are welcome to contact an official Zendesk partner—Lotus Themes. We specialize in developing and optimizing Zendesk Guide and know it inside out.
