Most concepts, when broken into their roots, can be easily defined. Let's breakdown the term to form its meaning:
"Help Center":
Help - how folks ask for support with a concern, like a question or idea
Center - in this context, a place where people go that is easily accessible. In city planning and design, the center was the congregation point - located in the middle of the city so that it wasn't too far away from anyone on group.
So then... what's a Help Center?
It's a place on your platform where people get help to their questions.
🎤*mic drop*🎤
I know - you're S̳H̳O̳O̳K̳.
Who would have thought that people come to your help center to get HELP?! 🤯
This isn't rocket science — your content thrives on two key elements:
Real Questions: Root your articles in situtations you've encountered or could encounter at different stages of your SaaS/product cycle. Don't just focus on your newbies - while the temptation is strong, your existing and veteran customers need attention to their questions too!
Identifying Queries: You can't just hit the easy onboarding questions. You should be covering everything from bugs to inbound questions to feature deep dives and more!
You probably already have them. You just don't know it.
Scour your inbounds. Ask your sales reps - what are the ten most common questions you get every day?
Look at your question history in your support channel. Pick the 10 most common questions - they each get an article.
Shout out to your success team. What are they answering?
In essence, answer the questions your team has. These are your high priority articles to make.
As new questions come in, try checking your help center. Ask yourself:
Can I answer this question with a resource found in our help center?
If you know the question is answered in the help center and you cannot find the post with your search, increase the tags or keywords in the post to increase optimization.
If the question is super-unique, like a unique bug or break, that you have not seen before, log it for later. It's likely not a Help Center question, but it could be helpful for the tech team in the future.
If you have seen the issue more than 5 times in your chat in the last five days AND it's a bug, make an article with troubleshooting steps, a bug bashing timeline, and a "who to direct your report to" next steps area. This will help teams get more data about a bug faster. Plan to move this to an area of your Help Center called "Squashed" or "Patched" or whatever you want to call your 'Solved Problem' area. Pro Tip: This Solved Problems area is a great place for Sales to point to! It shows your proactive involvement and continuous development.
If you have seen the issue more than 5 times in your chat in the last five days AND it's a not a bug (expected pattern), you need to make an article AND address this behavior in your in-the-moment materials. If the question is coming from sales, add it to your campaign. Coming from implementation? Add it to onboarding. Coming from a feature you see used in Month 7? Add it to user stim contacts.
Make help articles for new features. Be proactive! What questions do you anticipate?
Make help articles about updates - especially ones with UI changes. If a button has moved, language has changes, heck - even if you took away a colored dot - you need to call it out. Again - be proactive!📝
Building a smooth and expansive help center can feel like a daunting task. But, when you break it down into steps, these help centers can help to decrease your incoming support requests!
Do this and you will have a rocking help base that #sales, #implementations, and #success can all use!!