Updated on January 28, 2023
Contrary to popular belief, your customers now prefer finding answers on their own rather than speaking to you every single time. Around 1/3rd of Gen Z prefer heading over to help centers for a search. The purpose of your customer support or help center is to aid their process and make it the easiest for your customers to solve their queries.
As a fact, 80% of the customers’ queries are the same. So, no matter if you’re in a product-based industry or a service-based one, assisting the same query to every single person is beyond reality.
However, creating learning material to assist and teach your customers can do the trick!
For that, it is super instrumental to build a help center for your business. It’s the place where your customers are going to resolve their concerns on their own. That said, if you’re wondering how to build a help center, you’ve landed at the right place!
This article will get you all covered in terms of creating a help center from scratch.
Below, we show you;
What is a help center?
A help center is a website or a dedicated section intended to help your customers find answers to their questions. This section covers the most common and basic information relevant to your business.
A good example could be; how I can change my password, how kommunicate works etc.
The help center of your website should be approachable, well-organized, and outright. This hidden workhouse incorporates articles, step-by-step guides, videos, and GIFs to resolve customers’ problems. It should be intuitive and competent.
Here’s a pretty good example of Netflix’s help center:
They have separate sections for different types of queries.
Bonus: How to Create an FAQ Page and Use It In Your Chat Widget.
Why should you consider building a help center for your company?
First things first, the only mode of communication between your business and your customers is through your customer support. By delivering a good customer experience, you can expect your business revenue to see a quick boost of 4-8%.
Further, as said above, a brand or business receives 80% of repeated queries from customers. Implying, your customer support will be answering the same queries over and over again. Both their time, effort, and pay may go in vain.
Set up a bot for customer support with kommunicate and cut out on expenses!
However, by setting up a help center, the clash of expectations can be avoided. You can direct your customers to the help center in case of common queries.
Apart from that, the help center serves multiple purposes.
Such as;
- Your customers are more into self-help than expecting you to assist them every time. A help center empowers them to do so. Thus, leading to fostering your relationship with your customers.
- 80% of the customer queries are the same. You can address them quickly through a help center.
- A help center helps in cost reduction by eliminating needless effort from your customer support. It also ensures effective use of manpower on tasks such as creating strategies and more.
- A help center works the best when it comes to building a strong connection with your customers. Thus, contributes to your business growth.
Your step-by-step guide on how to create a help page
Building a help center can be considered a resource-intensive task. You’re required to be equipped with both time and effort.
Below is an in-depth process of how to build a help center from scratch. You can start right here and now!
Goal Setting
Different businesses may be associated with different goals. Regardless, you need to understand and define your goal in the first place. Decide what you want to achieve with your help center.
For businesses who are just starting with a help center and for those who are improving, goal setting remains non-negotiable.
Tell us, is your purpose to nurture the relationship between your business and customers? Or is it to reduce the time wasted on frequent queries? No matter what, you must get a clear picture of it in your mind.
Pro Tip: Identifying the right goal for your business is vital. Seek help from the stakeholders to get a better idea.
Estimate manpower
Now that you’re done with setting your goal, it’s time to evaluate how many people you need on your help center team. Consider that you need to create graphics, long-form articles, short answers, and etc.
Along with that, hiring the right people is equally important. That’s how you develop a high-quality and accountable service.
See what skills would you prefer in your help center team. Do you require any technical skills or software knowledge?
Also, ensure that you’re hiring smart, talented, and dedicated people for your team for better returns.
Pro Tip: Rather than building a team on your own, getting a custom-made help center could be more profitable for you as it cuts out the headache.
Develop better customer relationships with a help center. Talk to us to get yours!
Create canned responses
A sure-shot way to be more effective in aiding self-service is to create canned responses. It’s the most helpful and powerful toolkit you can offer to your customers.
Here’s how Kommunicate aces the job in extending a comprehensive FAQ section.
In this section, you’re going to answer the most common issues or queries. It is often referred to as maintaining an FAQ page for your customers. Just list out the most relevant things about your business in this section.
Pro Tip: Write questions from the customers' point of view. Always try starting the answer with a "Yes" or "No", if possible.
Create a seamless experience across devices.
Providing the same seamless experience to your customers accessing your website through mobile phone, PC, or tablet is essential. Otherwise, it won’t take your customers to hit the back button and switch to your competitors.
Pro Tip: For an impeccable experience, keep your customers engaged. Provide them with a sense of being heard.
At kommunicate, we let our bot do the talking when our visitors switch to different sections.
Focus on the user journey
Before anything else, your topmost priority should be delivering an excellent user experience. You’ve successfully managed to gather some users on your website. How will you ensure they’re going to stay? -By providing a superior user experience.
To convert them into loyal customers, you need to give them a solid reason to stick to you. For that, you need to extend a great user experience.
It includes placing the most go-to options within reach, such as the search bar, your products/services, etc.
Another essential element is making your website visual-rich. Consider adding appealing visuals in terms of texts, photos, GIFs, etc to eliminate the boring thing.
Pro Tip: The most realistic yet effective way to improve is to get customer feedback. Run a small survey and ask your customers how you can improve things or if they feel satisfied with your services.
Use data and keep measuring the key metrics.
Data is the most valuable asset you might have for your business. Despite whatever you were told, it’s crucial to analyze the data and your performance from the first day itself.
These metrics will help you inspect what’s working the best for your business and what to avoid.
Pro Tip: Keep a track of things such as; the time taken by your customer support to resolve queries, the rate of queries solved by your support, and that done by the help center. It enables you to make smart decisions for your business.
By now, we’re sorted with how to build a help center from scratch. Let’s hop onto the benefits!
Benefits of having a help center
Investing in a help center could turn out to be the most valuable decision for your business. It’s your pathway to attract more customers, retain the existing ones, close more deals, and open up new revenue streams.
Further, if you’ve managed to satisfy your customers, it won’t harm anyone to ask them for testimonials.
That said, let’s look at the benefits of having a help center in place.
Cost reduction
Having a help center lowers your customer support cost. It saves your customer support from drafting the same answer over and over again. The saved money can be invested in the big picture.
Juniper Research found that a whopping $11 billion of annual savings are expected because of chatbots by 2023.
More customer satisfaction and retention
Want to change the way your customers perceive your brand?
Satisfy your customers by showing them the pathway to solve their queries. 93% of customers are expected to keep purchasing from brands with great customer service.
What’s more, a 5% increase in customer retention can yield a 25-95% profit for your business. So, take note that customer retention is more crucial than customer attraction.
More word of mouth
72% of your satisfied customers are more likely to spread a word of mouth about your business with 6 or more people. That’s a pretty good reason to nurture the relationship with your customers.
Quickly respond to queries
While on one hand, it may take you some time to address a query that needs explanation. You can skyrocket this process by directing your customers to your hidden workspace; the help center.
Increased revenue
Happy customers can be your forever business partners! The key to winning customers is now the experience you deliver. The more satisfying it is, the better for your business.
Provide additional and relevant information
If a customer is wandering around your help center, they are most probably searching for some information. What if you could direct them to other valuable resources as well? A help center helps you provide a better user experience through the means of sharing information with your customers.
Protection from in course of time mistakes
No wonder, customers share their bad experiences louder than the good ones. And it’s obvious that they’re not going to stay further with the brand. On a good note, if your customer service excels, 78% of customers would still give you a chance even after a mistake.
Pro Tip: 80% of the businesses incorporating chatbots are happy and satisfied with the ultimate results.
Provide 24*7 assistance to your customers with kommunicate!
Conclusion
Simply put, there’s more to a help center than meets the eye. Building a help center can be easier than you think, given you’re on the right path and working with the right people. We advise you to get clear with your goals first before building a help center. That said, we hope you must have got the pathway of how to build a help desk from scratch.
