This Full circle session will provide best practices on how you can allow your customers to answer their own questions by creating a simple yet powerful knowledge base in your help center. 

During this session, you’ll learn how you can:

• Get started with Zendesk Guide 
• Design Best Practices 
• Deflect FAQs and empower agents 
• Measure the impact of your Help Center

Grow what you know:

Capture your agents’ collective knowledge and build on it over time to respond to support requests more effectively.

Give them the good stuff:

Give customers the most relevant answers and information automatically—and in context—for a faster self-service experience.

Get smarter as you go:

Measure and score the popularity and effectiveness of your content to see what needs work, and what you should write next.

Part 1: Getting Started with Zendesk Guide

There’s nothing quite as empowering as solving a problem on your own. When it comes to customer support, 73% of consumers want to solve product or service issues on their own, and 90% of consumers now expect a brand or organization to offer a self-service customer support portal.

Guide is the only knowledge-base solution that works natively with Zendesk Support to help turn solved tickets into useful content, deliver seamless self-service experiences, and empower agents to provide fast, accurate support.

Create your Help Center, your way!

Using Guide you can create a Help Center that includes:

• Branded customer-facing support site
• Knowledge base, for publishing self-service content
• Community for customer collaboration
• Customer portal, where customers submit tickets and also manage their tickets

It is important to make sure you end users feel supported but also provide them an experience that reflects your brand. By utilizing the standard Copenhagen Theme or by building out your own theme, Guide enables you to customize colors, banner images, fonts, logos, etc. with the Copenhagen theme. For this function, no technical expertise is required.

Using the standard Copenhagen Theme:

The Copenhagen theme is enabled by default when you set up your Help Center. This is a best practices, mobile-responsive theme.

You can update the Copenhagen theme in the following ways:

• Update the look and feel. You can easily add your branding to the Copenhagen theme by updating the images, logo, colors, and font in the Settings panel (see Branding your Help Center). You can find recommendations for image and logo sizes for the Copenhagen theme in the branding article.
• Update design elements and functionality. You can easily hide and show some common search functionality and knowledge base and community elements in your theme in the Settings panel (see Hiding and showing elements in your Copenhagen standard theme).

Creating a custom theme:

The HTML for the Help Center is contained in editable templates that define the layout of each page type, as well as the global header and footer. You can also use a full-featured templating language called Curlybars to access Help Center data and manipulate content in page templates. See Customizing your Help Center for more details on what can be done with custom themes.

You must have Guide Professional or Enterprise to access page code for your Help Center theme.

Take a look at the beautiful help centers built with the Zendesk Guide Pinterest page to see examples of how others customer have done it.

Anatomy of the Help Center

Use the knowledge base for the official content provided by your company or organization. The Help Center consists of three main page types: category landing pages, section landing pages, and articles.

Category landing pages

Categories are the top-level organizing containers of the Help Center. Categories contain sections and sections contain articles. If you have only one category in your Help Center, then the category itself is hidden to end-users, and they see only the sections in your Help Center.

Section landing pages

Sections are collections of related articles. To add a section, you must have at least one category to act as its parent container. You can assign viewing permissions to sections so that they are viewable by everyone, only signed-in users, or, on Guide Professional and Enterprise, only agents. Also on Guide Professional and Enterprise, you can apply user segments to sections to further restrict access to a section based on tags, organizations, or groups.

Articles

Articles are content items such as tech notes or help topics.

Part 2: Design best practices

When designing out your help center there are some things we recommend:

Gather useful information:

• Check your One-Touch tickets for repetitive questions
• Gather feedback from your agents about the questions they receive from the customers
• Review the top 5 - 10 macros that are used the most

Create a clear content flow:

•  Keep it short and concise,
•  Use simple language and try avoiding jargon
•  Use rich media like videos and visual images when possible.

Improve knowledge-base visibility

• Label your articles
• Make your content visible with a single click
• Enable customers to discover your self-service content

Take a look at the Zendesk Support where these types of design best practices are used to make a clean, easy to navigate help center.

Ticket Forms  

For the instances where customers were not able to find a resolution to their problem, create an end user facing ticket form (see contact options above).

The form, when enabled, is clean and simple by default and requests the user's name, email address and description of the issue.

The minimum information you want to collect from your customer is:

• Name,
• Email address,
• Telephone number (if a call back is needed),
• Inquiry type and subtype (if available),
• Description of the request,  
• and if needed any attachments

Add custom fields to your form to get more in depth and actionable information from your customers.

If you plan level allows it, you can also enable multiple ticket forms to only present relevant fields to the customer based on the forms they choose to fill out.

Part 3: Ticket Deflection & Support

Providing self-service resources is one of the best ways to increase customer support efficiency. We refer to it as “ticket deflection,” because it reduces the number of tickets users submit.

The more that you can link to your support center, the better. We see teams do this through link on their website, in ticket comments and through other tools to that can present knowledge base articles to your customers.

Drive users to your knowledge base and you will see that self service ratio start to rise.

Web Widget

Another popular tool to help create a seamless experience for your customers is the web widget as it allows you to provide your help center and support from the location your customers need it most.

By using the Zendesk Web widget your customers can get immediate help from a single interface, in whatever form they like best.

The web widget can be placed in any page on your original website and support the customer while shopping, or it can be placed in your help center for easier content search.

Here are the different ways that your customers can get help from the Web Widget and how those methods correspond to your Zendesk products:

1. Customers can search Help Center articles for immediate self-service.
2. Customers can submit a support request using a contact form.
3. Customers can request a callback, or view a phone number that they can call instead.
4. Customers can start a live chat with an agent.

Supporting your agents with Guide

There are also some great tools that can used to help your agents with accessing the knowledge base to help provide answers back to your end users along with letting your agents know the journey the end users took before they reached out to support.

Agents can use Knowledge in the context panel to search and link articles in tickets and to flag articles that need updates.

Part 4: Measure the impact of your help center

Last but definitely not least, we want to be able to see how our knowledge base is working and be able to take action on those result to improve our users and agents experience.

The following reports and dashboards will help you to measure the impact of your Zendesk Help center:

• Knowledge Base dashboard
  The Knowledge Base section shows you vital stats like how many articles you have published, the total number of views, net votes, visitors' subscriptions to articles, and comments posted on articles. You can toggle between these charts and set your date range, filter by brand, or even isolate a specific channel from the default view of all help center, Mobile SDK, and Web Widget stats.

• Search dashboard
  Customers often miss or can’t find the answers you already have in your help center. In Guide, the Search tab holds invaluable information by surfacing the exact search strings entered. Understanding how customers ask questions enables you to speak their language and more accurately label your content. Look to the Searches without any results or clicks: They indicate when users can’t find the results worth clicking into and which searches result in a high volume of incoming tickets. Are there opportunities for improved content? 
  This dashboard was built to empower you to figure out what content your customers are looking for and the efficacy of what you already have. 

• One-touch tickets
  If you are looking for inspiration for your help center, report on One-touch tickets to see which tickets are resolved with one reply.

• Community dashboard
  A community is a great way to empower your customers to collaborate with each other and with you. It offers a space to ask questions, and provide feedback, ultimately helping customers help themselves. The Community dashboard provides statistics around your community: how many questions have been posted, total views, votes, how many conversations are being followed, and how many answers have been posted.

There's also a lot of reporting that can be done with some custom reports that can be set up by you and your team. Follow these link to Explore Recipes for some great ideas on other reports.

Bringing it Full Circle