Create help center and community from scratch
Business problem:
As a B2B SaaS tech startup, Celigo did not have a platform help center or community. This made self-service impossible, customer frustration was high and user retention was low.
Summary:
I built a content team from the ground up, with everything from creating a content style guide to recruiting to onboarding to building the self-service strategy.
Challenges:
- few potential stakeholders were interested in providing content,
- setting up Google Analytics for tracking,
- create content style guide,
- optimize for SEO,
- make site responsive,
- users had no reason to look in the help, as there was nothing that could help them there,
Process & methodologies:
- set up tracking with Google Analytics and Zendesk Explore
- performed competitive analysis to identify doc gaps
- analyzed internal and external search terms to identify doc gaps
- identified areas from which content could be derived, particularly support tickets
- created visual language
- created information architecture
- brought important information, such as Office Hours, to the forefront
- set up platform status tracking
- cognitive walkthroughs and usability testing,
- prototyping,
- a lot more
Tools:
- Zendesk Guide, Support, and Explore applications,
- Google Analytics and Google Search Console,
- Axure,
- Illustrator (to create icons and branding)
- HTML/CSS and JavaScript to code help,
- support tickets,
Organizing into categories
After three years working on the Help center and community, I'm happy to report that it has had 3 years of MAU growth (22K users), with a self-service score of 22:1. I created content every day for the community for an entire year, going through several support tickets and working with agents to ensure that the information was correct and general enough for common consumption. I built a gamification system, set an SLA of a 24h response time, and built internal support for the community, including a monthly incentive for top contributor. Today, PMs, engineering, services, QA, and support team members all respond to community posts. It has become an important self-service channel that the company now touts. To improve findability, I added it into the product sidebar as soon as it had enough content to be helpful.
