How to Build a Help Center in 2024 (+Examples, Tools) - Whatfix (2024)

• Support

• August 29, 2022

The online services, tools, and platforms that we use today are expected to be reliable. However, users often encounter friction points that require troubleshooting, from general FAQs to technical support to how-to guidance on specific features or tasks.

When issues occur, users seek out technical documentation, help resources, and other forms of guidance on overcoming their issue(s).

Even with the most well-designed software and streamlined processes, users need guidance to resolve issues and learn new features. Whether the goal is to support your organization’s workforce or customer base,in-app supportis becoming increasingly vital to help users engage with software applications.

With real-time,self-serve support, users can learn and resolve issues on their own terms without frustration or IT intervention. In-app resource centers are valuable tools for supporting employees and meeting customer expectations.

Once viewed as purely a tech support function, help centers are increasingly being recognized as an integral component of customer experience—one that has the potential to significantly impact the bottom line.

In this article, we’ll explain how to create ahelp centerfor your organization and provide examples of effective in-app resource centers that provide effectiveend-user support.

Let it be known – a help center is not the same as a help desk, knowledge base, or ticketing system, which are tools that capture customer problems and complaints and serve them to support agents to reach out and solve.

• A help center is an extension of a website or an app that lets customers help themselves. Help centers typically have knowledge bases, FAQs, video tutorials, and live support options. A help center is nothing but a superset of several support options.
• A knowledge base is considered a subset of the help center. It holds important reference documents such as how-to guides, troubleshooting articles, product information, etc.
• A help desk is an individual, group, organizational function, or external service that an IT user calls to get help with a problem.

A help center doesn’t have a set pattern or format and could offer a combination of FAQs, help articles, or tutorial videos.

An organization’s resource center’s effectiveness lies in its content’s effectiveness. Here are some of the most critical features to incorporate into your in-app resource center more valuable to users:

An FAQ page is a popular resource to have in your help center tool kit. Useful for users with a variety of needs, FAQs are affordable, quick to set up, and easy to maintain. While an FAQ is traditionally thought of as a standard list of questions and answers, it can significantly optimize your help center and allow you to create more helpful content over time.

Take this further and improve user adoption by incorporating advanced educational resources like step-by-step tutorials, community forums, and how-to articles into your in-app resource center. Features like community forums can facilitate community interaction as users learn how to make the most of your application and services.

The obvious benefit of building a great self-service help center is that it helps answer customer questions. But there’s more to it than simply helping customers be successful.

Here are the top five benefits of help centers:

The support process can be daunting and touchpoint-heavy for users as they have to spend time looking for support contact information, getting in touch with a support rep, describing the issue in detail, and lastly working together to resolve. Then there’s the chance of dropped calls or connections, or misunderstandings about the issues at hand – equally frustrating situations that can cause friction with customers.

It would be much simpler for customers if they could search and find the required answers by themselves. This can be done by referring to the credible help center of the organization.

A help center increases customer satisfaction by providing better service and fulfilling their self-service needs.

Customers may not want to have to reach out to your support team for the answers they need. According to a report from Pegasystems, 56% of customers go to a company’s website before calling customer support, and 82% say they prefer to use self-service options. Building a self-service help center gives customers the support tools they are asking for.

Sophosis a leading threat intelligence cybersecurity solution that used Whatfix to create Sophos Assistant and provide in-app guidance to its XG Firewall customers as they learn to use the software. Because Sophos customers are not often cybersecurity experts themselves, this in-app guidance is vital for ensuring firewalls function properly.

Sophos Assistant is an embedded resource center that lives within the web-admin console UI of its firewall product. Stocked with around 700 links to product-related content and paired with guided flows, this in-app resource center supports customers as they configure, deploy, and maintain firewalls.

This in-app knowledge base can be accessed within the flow of work so users can search for relevant support content and access necessary technical documentation.

In-app guided flows complement Self Help widgets by easing users through new processes step-by-step.

By ensuring relevant and personalized content based on activity data and user roles, Sophos Assistant has dramatically improved user adoption and reduced the submission of support tickets year over year. Sophos Assistant has saved the company thousands of hours in support-related time, amounting to nearly $4000 annually.

Read more about this Whatfix success storyhere!

Airtableis a cloud collaboration platform that helps organizations plan campaigns and manage projects. The AirtableHelp Centerincludes a search tool and features educational resources in various formats, from templates and help articles to webinars and community support forums.

Within the application, Airtable uses a pop-up widget to steer users toward the Help button in the top navigation of the page. From there, the Help button triggers a sidebar that appears with a search bar and links to recommended topics and additional resources.

Whatfix is adigital adoption platform(DAP) that provides in-app guidance for effective user support andsoftware adoption. Whatfix allows teams to aggregate support content into a centralized library and deliver that content to users as they interact within an application.

Here are some best practices we suggest for using Whatfix to build an ultra-effective in-app resource center for your organization:

Whether you’re just starting to think about establishing a help center or you’re hoping to improve what you currently have, the first and most important step is to define what you want to achieve.

Are you hoping to reduce the number of support tickets coming in? To nurture relationships and engagement between your customers and support reps? The key is to identify the right goals for your business and ensure all stakeholders are aligned.

Some customers may not always understand why they can’t resolve an issue on their own or where to find the answers. Organizing your help center content into top-level categories will help your support content resonate with the customers. The more you group the guides by categories, the easier it is for customers to navigate the help center from the top down to hone in on their actual issue.

Whafix Self Help learns from your customer documentation and help resources, allowing you to automatically present end-users with contextual support content and help entries based on where they are in your application, as well as their user role.

Once the structure is built, create and compile all the relevant resources you want to integrate with your Self Help resource center. Whatfix makes creating, integrating, and organizing all kinds of assets easy for optimal user experience.

Self Help integrates with all your knowledge repositories, include your FAQs, knowledge base, help desk, video tutorial library, customer education resources, changelog, onboarding resources, and more. Whatfix has native integrations with SharePoint, Confluence, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and many other knowledge repositories.

This drives awareness and accessibility of your help center, allowing users abundant access points to find the information they need right at the moment of need.

Use Whatfix Analytics to determine the content needs of different users and steer your content creation, from which topics to focus on to the most appropriate media formats for your content. The widget can display a searchable, categorized list of resources, ensuring users can quickly find the help they need.

Create In-App Resource Centers With Whatfix Self-Help

Whatfix Self Help allows teams to embed their resource centers on any application to empower users of all types in their moment of need. With a no-code editor, in-app guidance, andAI-powered tools, your teams can build an effective support structure to deliver a positive user experience and reduce help desk costs.Whatfix Analyticstracks user behavior and activity to detect friction points, analyze role-based trends, and analyze user flows to help teams continually optimize applications and support content.

Leverage Whatfix to enable users with an in-app resource center. Request a demo today!