The ultimate guide to designing a great help center

What is a help center and why it is important

Providing your customers with a well organized and easy to navigate help center is one of the most crucial elements of your self-service support offering, as well as your overall customer experience strategy.

Your help center is an online customer education resource that provides your customers with a collection of articles and documentation designed to help them find answers to their questions, and solutions to their problems, without needing to contact your customer support team. It is a self-service resource that provides your customers with up-to-date and important information about your product, best practices and troubleshooting.

The goal of your help center is to provide all the information your customers need to self-serve in one place. To provide help documentation so robust that your customers are able to quickly and easily find the answers they are looking for, meaning they do not need to contact your customer support team to resolve an issue. And the reason this is so important for your overall customer experience is simple: it's what your customers want! Today’s customers are savvy and self-reliant, and overwhelmingly prefer self-service support when facing an issue. They are more than comfortable finding answers to their questions online and, more often than not, start their search for answers through your help center with a study conducted by Forrester reporting the help center is the preferred method of self-service support for customers.

A complete and up-to-date help center, one that allows your customers to quickly and easily resolve their issues, is one of the keys to driving increased customer loyalty and retention, as well as driving down support ticket volume. In this blog post we will discuss some best practices for designing your help center and some of the most important characteristics that will help your customers self-serve through your help center.

Key features of designing a great help center

A great help center is more than just a collection of help articles and help documentation. It should be designed to enhance the learning experience for your customers and allow them to successfully solve problems on their own. When designing your help center, it is important to keep these characteristics in mind:

• Make sure your help center is easily accessible and easy to navigate
• Group your help articles into categories
• Ensure your provide simple and effective search functionality
• Optimize your help center for both desktop and mobile
• Ensure your help center is on-brand
• Write great help center articles

Make sure your help center is easily accessible and easy to navigate

Ensuring your help documentation is easily accessible and easy to navigate is a critical aspect of building an effective help center. If your customers are unable to find your help documentation they will be unable to use the content to help answer their questions. No matter how well constructed your help documentation is.

Start by designing a clean and simplistic structure for your help center. It is often difficult to include all the necessary information for a customer to resolve their issue in a single help article or a single page in your help center. Your customers will be required to navigate through multiple sections or multiple pages in your help center which makes it easy for your customers to get lost in their journey. It is therefore important to ensure your help center is easy to navigate and to keep your content structure visible on each of the pages on your help center by incorporating a side navigation bar that allows effortless movement across your site. Providing a clean and simple layout for your help center will help your customers find the answers they need more easily, removing friction from the process and improving your customers’ experience.

Group your help articles into categories

Organize your help articles into categories and collections to make it easier for your customers to find the information they need quickly and efficiently. How you create the categories and collections for your help center will be determined by the complexity of your product and needs of your customers. They are often grouped by common topics your customers will be interested in reading about, for example, “getting started” or “setting up your account”. Another approach is to identify the most common topics your customers are interested in, and the content they use most, to help prioritize the placement of this information on your help center homepage to make it as easy for your customers to find this content as possible.

Ensure your provide simple and effective search functionality

More often than not your customers arrive to your help center with a specific question in mind so it is important to ensure you have simple and effective search functionality in place on your help center. This is a crucial step in ensuring your customers get their help journey started on the right foot, and to ensure they are easily able to find the relevant help articles for their issue. Including search features like a sophisticated autocomplete in the search bar can be the difference between your customers easily finding the answers they need easily or those answers being hidden among hundreds of help articles.

Keep in mind that your customers will often begin their search from within the browser bar (aka Google) rather than from directly inside your help center. It is therefore also important to ensure, where possible, you make your help center publicly available which allows it to be found through search engines like Google. Gating your help center, and keeping it private by requiring login credentials, will mean your help center will not be indexed by search engines and the content in your help center will not appear in the list of search results provided by the search engine. As a result, your customers will not be able to use their preferred search engines to find answers from your help center which increases the likelihood of your customers needing to contact your customer support team to resolve their issue.

Optimize for both Desktop and Mobile

The steady rise of mobile users in recent years has been well documented meaning a significant number of your customers are now accessing your help center from their mobile devices. Therefore, providing your customers with a support experience that is fully optimized for mobile needs to be a priority when developing your help center strategy.

One way of optimizing the experience for your mobile-first customers is to include mobile versions of product screenshots in your help articles. This is a great way to build trust with your customers and ensure they are receiving the same level of support as if they were visiting your help center, or using your product, from a desktop.

Ensure your help center is on-brand

To provide your customers with a more recognizable and trustworthy experience, it is important to ensure your help center looks and feels like your brand. By customizing key components such as the logo, icons, fonts, colors, and background image, you can create a consistent and cohesive visual identity for your help center that matches your website and other marketing collateral.

It’s important to keep in mind that your help center is no longer just a resource for support, it will often contain a mixture of both marketing and support content, and is an important part of your customer acquisition funnel. Potential customers will often visit your help center, and the content in your help articles, to research your product and get a deeper understanding of how your product supports their particular use case before making a purchase decision. Your help center can be a powerful way of moving potential customers to paying customers, and should therefore follow your company's brand guidelines. Including fully up-to-date product screenshots, and showcasing the look and feel of your product, is another great way of ensuring the visual identity of your help center is consistent and to help potential customers see how your product works in action to make informed decisions.

Write great help center articles

Structuring your articles to make the content within the article easy to navigate, and including product visuals such as screenshots, is a crucial way of keeping your customers engaged and interested when reviewing your help content, and helping them to find the necessary information.

To prevent your customers from getting lost in large blocks of text, consider breaking your articles into smaller and more easily digestible pieces of information. Breaking your content into steps is a great way to avoid using large blocks of text and helps make your content more digestible. Also consider using elements like tables, bullet points and lists to make your content easier to navigate and increase the likelihood of your customers finding the information they need to solve their problem.

Visual aids such as product screenshots, GIFs and videos are other effective tools to enhance your help center content. Including annotated product screenshots can help you more easily break your content into step-by-step instructions and can reduce the amount of text required to communicate the steps a customer needs to follow. Additionally, they also immediately convey to your customers what the content is trying to help them resolve. Your content only has a few seconds to capture the attention of your customers so visual cues like product screenshots are an important way of letting your customers know they are in the right place to find the answers they need.

Keep your help center content fully up-to-date

We know that customers prefer using self-service support options, and specifically the help center, to resolve their issues. However, if your customers find irrelevant, out-of-date or, even worse, misleading information in your help center it can be confusing and may prevent them from self-serving even if they landed on the right content to resolve their issue. Out-of-date information in your help center can be frustrating for your customers, leading to a poor customer experience which, ultimately, could lead to customer churn.

To ensure the best experience for your customers when using your help center, it is important to regularly update and publish help articles that are relevant and accurate. There are several different methods teams use to keep their help content update-to-date and accurate, which include:

Working closely with the Product team to sync on new feature launches, create help content around customer pain points and to review content for accuracy and fine-tuning Using hyperlinks to relevant content in help articles rather than repeating information across multiple articles which makes it harder to maintain Doing regular help center audits to review the relevance and accuracy of existing help articles and identify outdated content

One of the most important aspects of your help center maintenance is ensuring your product screenshots are fully up-to-date. Product Screenshots immediately communicate to your customers that they are in the right place to resolve their issue. If your product screenshots are outdated, your customers may immediately leave the help article even though the answer to their question is right there in front of them. At LaunchBrightly we are focused on automating the product screenshot process so the screenshots in your help center will never be outdated, and will always be fully up-to-date.

Conclusion

If your customers are able to use your help center to self-serve, and resolve their own issues, it will reduce ticket volume for your customer support team and allow them to focus on more complex issues and provide other enhanced support experiences. A successful help center is more than just a subdomain on your website filled with help articles and help content. It’s important to consider the features and characteristics we shared in this blog post when designing your help center, and also equally important to ensure your help center is always fully up-to-date to give your customers the best chance of self-serving. To maximize the impact of your help center you should integrate it with other support channels (e.g. chat and other in-context support channels) to ensure access to the information your customers need is always easily available.