How to help customers help themselves.

You finally have the help center you are proud of. Probably you spent months talking with the product team, reading support tickets, writing new articles and refining existing ones. Your new shiny help center is ready, steady, go!

Then every day you look at the number of incoming tickets and hope it will go down. But it doesn’t. Or not by much. Your team is still getting tickets that could be easily solved by reading one of these articles. Only if the customer will look for them!

In this issue, I will describe a set of best practices that will help you get customers to see your knowledge base. Not some fancy AI or KB tech. Just a set of simple practices.

Your customers are busy and selfish (in a non-negative sort of way). They don’t know or care about your help center. If you announced it in an email campaign, they probably ignored it. When a product doesn’t help them do their job as it should, they want a resolution. To get it, they revert to their default behaviour and reach out to your support team. You need to change this default behaviour bit by bit.

Start by building awareness in your customers’ mind that help is available and easy to get. You can do this with nudges, simple actions that subtly lead customers to take the right decision, which is checking out the help center first:

In addition, outside the customer support org, use any reasonable opportunity in the customers’ journey to let them know about the help available: welcome emails, onboarding emails or customer success communication.

Last but not least you need to build and enhance customers’ trust in the help articles available. Think about it this way:

Next time, the same customer will be more likely to look for help in the knowledge base first.

To earn customer’s trust, the help content needs to be clear, complete and up to date. This article explains how to use data analytics to grow and improve your help center.

Most of the SaaS apps that I’m using have one link to the help center somewhere in the product menu, top page or inside a nice-looking chat widget. Hopefully, a customer that needs help will find the link, click on it, go to the new tab, search for an answer and find it. Too many steps!

Intercom is one of the few SaaS products that do this very well. I love the way they embed how-to articles and videos into features.

These are several steps you can do to bring your help center closer to the product:

1. Make a list of complex or frequently used features in the product. Look for features where many steps are required by the customer to achieve something. You probably have come across these when explaining them to confused customers.

2. For each feature, get the best article from the help center that explains it well. Ideally, you’d have a “Getting starting” article that walks the customer through the feature but also includes references to more advanced aspects of the feature.

3. Work with the product team to add links to these articles on the main page of each feature. If you have any how-to videos, add them as well. Videos are a great way to explain a complex workflow to users.

4. Include links to relevant help documentation in tooltips, feature nudges, labels, modals, and anywhere else it makes sense

5. The product app’s home page is also a good place to share short tips with links to the help center, where applicable.

6. If the product has an onboarding flow, make sure to highlight self-service options during onboarding: help articles, videos and other resources.

Last but not least, all these are product changes so make sure to get the product team on board and involved from start to finish.

Everybody searches on Google, including for product or technical documentation. I see myself doing that a lot. If I need more information about certain aspects of a product, I rarely go to the product’s help center and search there. I go straight to Google and type “[insert product name] [insert problem description or feature name]”.

Therefore if you want customers to find your help articles, make sure Google finds them first.

Search engine optimization is a complex topic and well beyond my area of expertise, but I did some research and these are some of the tips I found:

You can find more useful tips in this article and this one.

Remember, the objective here is to help customers, not to make it impossible for them to reach out when they need help. Try as you might, you can’t “force” your help center down customer’s throat. If you do that, you create poor customer experiences with all the consequences that come after that: churn and bad image. Remember those never-ending conversations with “stupid” chatbots on social media?

Instead, create the right context and conditions for the customer to find the help he or she needs. Nudge your customers towards the help center by creating awareness, bringing help into the product and making it easy to find on Google. This will gradually translate into happier customers and lower pressure on your support team. Step by step, bit by bit.