Your help center is a goldmine for your customers, so having some help center best practices is a must.
When we think of customer support, we usually think of a support agent with a headset on talking to customers. In reality, that’s not necessarily the case. Self-service support has become one of the most useful, important elements of any customer support process, especially in SaaS.
That’s because customers want to solve their problems on their own. In fact, 69% of consumers first try to resolve their issues independently before contacting a support team. Self-service support is also a game-changer for you. It allows you to save your support agents a ton of time and spend fewer resources on other areas of your support processes.
So, what exactly are the best practices for a help center? And how do you provide self-service support that customers will love? We’ll offer a breakdown of all this and more, including:
- What is a Help Center?
- Help Center top features
- Help Center Best Practices
- Main benefits of the FROGED Pro Help Center
- Don’t overlook your Help Center as Customer Support Agent/Rep
Let’s get into it, shall we?
What is a Help Center?
A help center is usually an app or portal dedicated to providing customers with the support they need. It’s usually connected to the main website and offers lots of different features that help customers to learn more about a product or service, solve their current issues, or get in contact with the support team.
Because a help center is primarily a self-service form of support, it takes a huge amount of pressure off of your support agents. With fewer tickets coming in, they have more time to focus on the more complex support issues, not to mention you can save a serious amount of resources on live agents.
It’s important to note that a help center and a knowledge base are often used interchangeably. You can view a help center as a more general hub for support, whereas a knowledge base is a collection of information in the form of articles and guides. But we’ll get more into that in the next section.
Help Center Top Features
There are some top features that are an absolute must in a help center to help optimize your customer’s resolution times, engagement, and overall experience.
Knowledge Base
Currently, around 82% of customers use knowledge bases. So having one as part of your help center is really a no-brainer. Your knowledge base is perhaps the most important element of a help center (and it’s why these two terms are often used interchangeably).
As mentioned before, a knowledge base is a collection of information, usually in the form of articles, guides, and other documents. With a knowledge base, users get to easily search and find the information they need about your product, from how to install it all the way to how to use specific features.
Live chat
A live chat is a vital part of your help center. If a user cannot find what they are looking for themselves, then they need a quick and easy way to get a support agent to help them.
A live chat allows your support agents to have real-time communication with your customers, so they can reduce their average response time and resolution time, which ultimately increases that all-important CSAT score.
Video tutorials
Everyone learns in different ways, and some users are more visual than others. Having video tutorials as part of your help center is an engaging and effective alternative to written documents, especially for more complex step-by-step guides.
Some companies have video tutorials as part of their knowledge base, and some link to videos within their articles. Do whichever works best for you.
FAQs/Updates
Unlike knowledge base articles, FAQs and updates are short-form content that aims to solve smaller or simpler issues or doubts straight away.
FAQs list the most common user questions and provide a short answer. These are great to have in your help center since they’re easy to digest and usually solve a lot of issues that would otherwise be given to your support agents.
Having updates in your help center also helps to preemptively solve any further doubts about new features or changes within your product. Having these live “notifications” means that users always feel constantly aware of how your product is evolving.
Help Center Best Practices
If you have the above features as part of your help center, you’re well on your way to providing a great customer support experience. But there are some things that you and your support team can do within your help center to level it up.
- Make your help center easily accessible. If you want your help center to be the main form of support for your users, then make sure they can easily find it! Add a link to your support center inside your website and product where it’s super hard to miss.
- Keep everything organized. To reduce resolution times and keep your customers happy, your help center has to be organized spotlessly. You can organize your knowledge base by categorizing it through key features or services. That way, your users will find exactly what they’re looking for in no time.
- Link between your help center features. Remember, the elements of your help center should work together for a better customer experience. Add links to knowledge base articles in your live chat messages, link to video tutorials in your guides, or add the CTA “speak with an agent” on more complex articles.
- Use metrics to make better decisions. Data is your best friend. Use your support metrics to decide what’s working inside your help center and what’s not. Are users not reading specific articles? You might need to organize your knowledge base better or improve the quality of your documents.
Main benefits of the FROGED Knowledge Base Pro
Implementing all of the above can be tricky, which is why Product Success Platforms like FROGED offer an end-to-end help center solution as a life-saver. The FROGED Knowledge Base Pro creates a customized help center for your company with the following features and benefits that go the extra mile.
1. Omnichannel Support
As part of FROGED’s customer support solution, all your communication channels are combined and managed in one single platform so your support agents can easily take care of your customer’s needs. Whether it’s through your Whatsapp live chat or other integrations, your team can access it easily to optimize those resolution times.
2. Multi-language Support
FROGED makes sure all your users are benefitting from your help center by offering multi-language support. The content on your help center can be translated into an unlimited number of languages and will automatically be adjusted to the same language as your user’s browser. There are a variety of widget language settings available for further customization.
3. View metrics
Metrics are a vital part of keeping your support processes optimized, which is why FROGED provides you with a range of metric-focused features to help you. Get a clear overview of your knowledge base metrics to see your most-viewed and highest-rated help articles. Receive real-time reports on your live chats for data on key metrics like average resolution time and the number of open tickets.
4. Zendesk and Intercom Import
You can directly import your current KB into FROGED with easy integration.
Already have pre-created help articles? No problem. FROGED integrates with products like Zendesk and Intercom, so you can easily import your existing articles and other documents directly into the FROGED platform.
Once you have your articles ready, you can organize and filter your articles by feature or use case and use our SEO tool and Google Analytics integration to optimize your articles and grow your audience organically online.
Don’t overlook your Help Center as Customer Support Agent/Rep
Self-service support is the future, trust us! All in all, a help center as part of your SaaS support strategy can save you and your support team so much time and resources by becoming your user’s first point of contact.
With a well-organized knowledge base, an accessible live chat, and integrated video tutorials, your help center is good to go. But if you want to see a real improvement in customer engagement and retention while saving major resources within your support team, we really recommend opting for a Pro Help Center like FROGED. For just €25 a month, you can get all of the incredible features listed above and more!
Book a demo to learn more about our Proactive Customer Support Solution and Knowledge Base Pro!