Improve Your Help Center in 4 Steps

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4 minute read

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Why You Need a Help Center

A help center is a self-service hub that lets customers solve basic issues on their own without involving a support agent. Shoppers increasingly want to handle problems themselves, putting the demand on brands to build consistent and up-to-date help centers for faster solutions.

If you don’t build help center functionality, you’ll fail to provide the customer experience the modern shopper expects. According to Gladly’s 2022 Customer Expectations report, just two bad experiences can turn shoppers away from your brand for good. In that sense, improving self-service is not just a helpful internal tactic, it’s also a key component of creating customer loyalty and fostering long-term value. Now is the time to double down on your help center and give it the boost it needs to keep shoppers coming back for more.

REPORT

2022 Customer Expectations Report

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Four Ways to Improve Help Center Functionality

1. Manage Your Help Center and FAQs From a Single Source

As your brand, products, and policies naturally change over time, so should your self-service tools in response. But constantly updating your help center information so it’s consistent across pages and channels can be a challenge.

To combat this, use a platform that filters all help center and FAQ information through a single repository. This will remove the guesswork and the need to continuously double-check your pages by ensuring consistency no matter where or how a user accesses information.

Pro tip: Gladly has an intelligent, cross-channel Knowledge Base that publishes consistent information wherever it’s needed in a customer service context, from offering self-service Public Answers to even informing real-time responses from live agents.

2. Add Search Function to Your FAQs

Depending on your brand and the products you sell, your FAQ pages might have a lot of information that customers need to sift through to find their specific solution. Take the extra leg work out of the equation by implementing search functionality into your help center, putting control and accessibility firmly in your customers’ hands so they can get to the answers they need even faster.

Pro tip: Adding new search capabilities doesn’t have to take enormous backend work from your developers. The Gladly-powered Help Center comes with searchable functionality built in, reflecting the customer-centric approach the platform takes whenever possible to improve experience and shorten the support timeframe as much as possible.

3. Include Images to Improve Help Center Design

A picture is worth a thousand words, and that’s especially true in your help center, where guiding imagery and informative diagrams can provide enormous benefits for shoppers looking for some quick insights. These images can be anything from step-by-step assembly instructions (think IKEA manuals), to schedules, to maps of in-person locations, or whatever you find your shoppers need most.

Pro tip: In a Gladly-powered help center, you have access to in-line images that work both in public answers on your website as well as in email responses, widening your channel reach to provide exceptional, well-designed service experiences.

4. Report on Your Help Center Content

Data is the key to determining the effectiveness of your search and help center content. Make sure you have visibility into the way customers and support agents are interacting with your help center, including search behavior, clicks, and how often content is used in replies. This should form the basis of any optimization processes to improve the quality of information over time.

Pro tip: Gladly provides useful out-of-the-box customer service reporting and insights as soon as you launch your help center. You can also customize your reporting dashboards and reports to maximize value.

Gladly Liveboards Unlocks CX Reporting

🛑 With Liveboards, managers and team leads using Gladly can monitor day-to-day contact center activity with real time dashboards, plus keep an eye on trending topics, agent activity, channel statistics, and more.

There’s no time like the present to improve help center efficiency and give your customers the self-service experiences they deserve.

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