Designing and managing effective help centers
A quick-fire Q&A
I recently contributed my perspective on a few questions related to building and managing customer-facing help centers, and wanted to share all of my responses here.
What strategies do you use to make help center content accessible, easy to understand, and engaging for customers?
When I read this question I immediately thought of the famous quote from The Field of Dreams, where Kevin Costner’s character has a vision to build a baseball field in the midst of a cornfield. In his words, “If you build it, they will come”.
Unfortunately this isn’t true of help centers. The hard work of making content accessible, understandable, and engaging is absolutely vital to making an impact for your customers.
Accessibility
The first step here is considering people with accessibility needs like dyslexia or color blindness. I love that the first fundamentals from the Web Accessibility Initiative is, “it’s about people”. Organizations like theirs are one of many resources to help learn about accessibility standards and best practices for your audience.
From a systems perspective, there are great tools like UserWay that can integrate directly into your help center to let users adjust their preferences when viewing your content, and give you tools to audit your content to help you make improvements.
Comprehension
In terms of comprehension, I’m a big fan of using consistent formatting throughout your help center. That means a consistent UI/UX as you navigate through it, making use of a style guide to align how your content is presented across each article. Make use of formatting features like:
Structured headings
Text formatting to emphasize and highlight content
Bulleted and numbered lists (like this one)
Expandable sections
Tables
You should also consider how readable your copy is. The Flesch Kincaid reading ease score is a mainstay in this area, and you can use tools like this one that will score how readable your content is.
A readability score doesn’t measure your writing skills, your vocabulary size, or the sophistication of your argument. Rather, it tells you how much energy your reader will have to expend in order to absorb what you’re saying. — Grammarly
Engagement
For a customer visiting your help center, the most engaging content is what’s most relevant to them in the moment. For example, if they ran into an error message in your product, they’ll be looking for the fastest way to resolve it with self-serve content or to contact customer support. It won’t matter to them in that moment if you have a super-engaging product overview on the front page, or what related content you highlighted in the sidebar.
In other words, engagement is relevance, so I prioritize publishing content that addresses the current needs of customers. This requires a more flexible content strategy that gives space for content to rapidly evolve over time as your product, customers, and their needs change.
How do you ensure consistency and coherence across different types of help center content, such as articles, FAQs, tutorials, and troubleshooting guides?
Ensuring consistency comes down to what resources you’ve put in place ahead of time. In my book, these should at least include:
A style guide that outlines tone, article structure, content formatting, grammar do’s and don’ts, and much more.
A glossary of terms and definitions that you copy verbatim every time they need to be referenced.
A source of truth for the ins-and-outs of how your product works. Ideally, most of this is publicly available in your help center, but there may be things that are internal-only that you’ll need to reference at times.
Shared media assets that can be housed in and updated from a centralized repository, and re-used in multiple places (more on this below).
Article templates that provide a shared structure for the different types of articles you write. For example, if your product integrates with other services, each “integration” article should follow the same structure so the user experience is consistent across them.
A common thread through most of the above is that, as much as possible, you maintain centralized sources of knowledge/content/assets/process/structure, and push out updates to content from that centralized source. This strategy is called Change Once, Publish Everywhere, or COPE.
Some help centers come with this functionality for updating things like a glossary or media assets, but there are other third-party tools on the market to manage those alongside your content management system.
How do you ensure that help center content is kept up-to-date and relevant as products, services, and customer needs evolve?
This is such a challenge for anyone managing a help center, and I think it comes down to what you prioritize in your content strategy. Getting aligned on what factors influence the content you make, and why, will impact how you invest your time in keeping your content up-to-date and relevant.
Culture
Above all else, fostering a culture of knowledge sharing is going to be the deciding factor in how well you’re able to discover new needs, adapt to changes, and get helpful content into the hands of your customers. I won’t go in-depth here for now as I think this is a much bigger topic to explore, but I can highly recommend practices like Knowledge Centered Service that help to build this kind of culture.
Strategy
After culture, having a clear content strategy in place will be your most helpful tool in keeping content up-to-date. I categorize these into 5 key building blocks:
Strategic priorities: Ultimately, what’s most important for your organization should primarily inform your content strategy. Aside from the obvious benefit of staying aligned with business goals, it also more clearly helps to communicate the impact of a product education program when your KPIs rollup directly to what’s most important to your business.
Product roadmap: Depending on how frequently your product team releases changes, and how significant those changes are, will impact your content strategy. With a close partnership with your product and engineering teams, you’ll be able to look ahead a few weeks, months, and quarters in order to adjust your content strategy accordingly.
Customer feedback: Customer feedback is by far my favorite building block, and your direct line to what's working, what's not, and what they need in the moment. While it’s important to take action on customer feedback, that doesn’t exactly inform your broader content strategy. To do that, you need to identify common trends across a larger sample of your most recent feedback.
User behavior: Measuring user behavior using quantitative data insights will paint a bigger picture and help you better understand how customers are engaging with your content.
Content gaps: Focusing on filling the content gaps that will meet customers where they currently are will create much more impact in the long run.
What role does customer feedback and analytics play in informing the creation and optimization of help center content?
As I mentioned above, customer feedback is your direct line to what's working, what's not, and what they need in the moment.
In fact, my absolute favorite thing to do is to read through feedback, make content or product changes based on that feedback, and then tell the customer what you changed. Giving customers this kind of response is a wonderful way to show them that their feedback is important and that it’s resulted in a positive change.
You have to continuously listen to and learn from your customers, using their feedback to refine and evolve your product education strategy. And while it’s important to take action on customer feedback, that doesn’t exactly inform your broader content strategy.
To do that, you need to identify common trends across a larger sample of your most recent feedback. This can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be — for example, there are inexpensive tools like Formless that use AI to analyze customer feedback forms, or more complex software like Idiomatic that analyze customer conversations to help you build a voice of the customer program.
You need data—both qualitative and quantitative—to learn from your customers. Here are a mix of analytics and feedback tools worth checking out.
Whatever tools and approach you use, make sure that you’re able to identify what your customers are saying and what they need in order to inform what content you prioritize.
Looking ahead, what trends or innovations do you anticipate will shape the future of help center content writing in customer experience management, and how do you plan to adapt to these changes?
AI is the most obvious trend across the tech industry at the moment, and frankly I don’t think I have the expertise to dive too much into that topic at this time.
One observation I have though is that just like SEO optimization has shaped content marketing (and copy that’s written for all websites for that matter), the explosion of AI assistants who ingest help center content and use it to serve customers is already shaping how we write.
I think it’s too early in the game to say how this will ultimately shape how we write, but if we stay people centered — always thinking how customers want to be served, and how we can best support them — we’ll be able to adapt to the changes quite well.