Bookmark
A complete, step-by-step guide with help center examples and tools to help you create the perfect help center for your business.
I've been looking for a comprehensive help center guide and this is exactly what I needed. The step-by-step instructions and examples were incredibly helpful.Alex Styl – Founder of Ubidrop
01
What is a Help Center and
Why do I need it?
A help center is a self-serve resource for customers covering the most important and up-to-date information about your product, best-practices, workflows, and troubleshooting.
A SaaS Help Center is...
Instant help for your customers.
You’ve probably heard this phrase before: it all starts with great customer service.
Unless you have built a flawless product (congratulations 🤩), your customers will always have questions. They want to get immediate help when they need it most. No emails, no chat, no annoying waiting for an answer.
A complete and up-to-date knowledge base has to be an integral part of your customer support.
All information in one place
- A help center can provide all the information that your customers need in one place. It can range from FAQs about your product/service, common issues and their solutions, videos with tutorials on how to do things and more.
Reduces your support volume
- The best thing about a help center is that it not only helps your customers find answers faster but it also drastically reduces the support ticket volume for your customer service team.
02
Must-Have Characteristics
of a Great Help Center
A great help center isn't simple just a knowledge base website with a bunch of help articles. It is compromised of various characteristics that enhace your users learning experience and make it a great help center.
Responsiveness
Optimized for both Desktop and Mobile
In the past few years, the number of mobile users has been steadily increasing. There will be three billion smartphone users globally soon which means that a full 50% of your potential customers are now accessing your site from their mobile devices.
It's essential that your help center is fully responsive and optimized for mobile, tablet and desktop.
Search
A search bar to help customers find what they need
A help center should have a sophisticated search feature so that customers can immediately find the answer to their questions. The search should have an autocomplete function so that users get article suggestions as they type.
Ideally you want these queries to be saved and analysed based on search misses so you can improve your knowledge base in the future.
Customize
A professional customizable on-brand design
Your customers deserve a professional looking knowledge base. A great knowledge base looks and feels like your brand and allows you to adjust the accent color, backgrounds as well as icons.
Analytics
Learn from your users and optimize your support center
A great knowledge base software shows helps you understand your knowledge base usage. Learn about how many users visit your site, the most popular articles, user countries, referrers and more.
Ideally you want a privacy friendly and cookie-less way so you do not have to display those annoying cookie banners and your users data does not get sold to big tech.
SEO
Search engines love to display your articles
Google, Bing and other search engines should love to rank your knowledge base articles. To maximize your SEO appearance you should be able to customize your Meta Title, Meta Description, Favicon Image, and OG Image.
Widget
Reach your users in context with a widget
An embeddable widget with your knowledge base can be installed on your own website and help your customers right when they need it without ever leaving your site.
The sooner a customer can fix their problem and continue using your product the better. Widgets are a great way to keep your customers engaged and focused.
Custom Domain
Host your help center on a dedicated subdomain
You ideally want to host your help center on a subdomain of your main website with a commonly recognizable word domain support.acme.com or help.acme.com.
Wondering if you should host your help center on a subdomain or sub path? We did a little study 👇
Subdomain vs Subfolder
The questions of questions and we have the answer. We crawled over 300 help centers from all around the web and discovered that the majority of help centers are hosted on a subdomain.
The two most common used subdomains were support.acme.com and help.acme.com.
03
Category Structure
You might be wondering: What categories should my help center knowledge base have? While it depends on your product, we have collected the four must-have categories every help center should have including helpful sample articles to get you started.
👋
Getting Started
Help your users learn more about the basics of your product and how they can get started.
What is {Your Product}
How do I install/login to {Your Product}
{Your Product} Glossary
Click me ☞
💰
Billing & Subscription
Help users learn about billing cycles, payment methods, invoice location, and plan differences.
How do I upgrade my current plan
How do I cancel my subscription
What payment methods are available
Grab our free Notion template with all categories, example articles and the guide on how to write them.
Get the Notion Template🛠️
Troubleshooting
Use this category to educate and help users solve commonly known issues.
How do I fix {Common Issue}
I found a bug, how can I report it
Why can't I do {Common Issue}
👤
Profile & Account
Help users with tasks such as user management, account access, or updating profile settings.
How do I change my profile settings
How do I delete my account
How to manage email notifications
04
Writing Help Articles
Nothing is worse than help articles that don't... help. Articles are the core of your help center. You want them to be as helpful and easy to read as possible. Here are the top five tips to write a killer support article.
What to write about
-
Naming your articles
-
Make content easy to read
-
Use your customers voice
-
Add visual elements
What to write about
Customers turn to your help center to solve their problems. Your goal should be to help them find answers to the questions they have about your product or service. Besides the most common questions addressed in the category section above, the best way for you to come up with content for your help center is by looking into your support tickets.
Your support tickets are the best resource for finding things your users are struggling with. Turning questions from your support tickets into a dedicated help article whenever you receive a new one is a fantastic way to fill up your knowledge base with relevant and helpful content.
Takeaway
Create a new help center article whenever you receive a new support ticket
Naming your articles
The best article titles are simple, concise and straight to the point. Think about what your customers might search for. If your help center tool offers insights like to search intents, you can even take inspiration from there. When naming your article rely on action words in the active voice. The two most commonly used forms are either the question title or the '-ing' title:
- How to {X}?
- Using/Setting up {X}
After analyzing dozens of help centers we have noticed that the most popular way of naming articles was by using the gerund or in other words the -ing form.
Takeaway
Give you articles simple, concise and searchable names by using the -ing form.
Make content easy to read
Your readers time is precious. Make the content easy to skim by using appropriate headers. No one wants to be intimidated by a wall of text. If your text is longer consider adding a table of contents.
Make your users feel smart. Do not use fancy terms or jargon if not absolutely necessary. Write your articles with the mindset of a fresh beginner and try to avoid making any assumptions on what they user might already know. Explain everything.
Takeaway
Write easy to skim content that can be understood by absolute beginners
Use your customers voice
Know your customer's words and use them. You can observe the words your customers use from support tickets, social media, Google, and many more sources.
Your article does not have to be boring either. Let a bit of humor shine through your articles. Write like you speak for more authenticity and also make sure to show empathy. Even if it is your users fault, encourage them to not worry and that their problem will be fixed asap.
Takeaway
Speak your customer's language and do not shy away from some humor
Add visual elements
When demonstrating users how to use your product, you can write fewer words and make your instructions more appealing by adding screenshots, GIFs or videos showing each step in your workflow. Bullet points and numbered lists are another great way to structure your content and make it more appealing to read for your users.
Be sure to checkout our resources section below to find amazing tools for creating visuals.
Takeaway
Make your articles easier to understand by using multi-media visuals
07
The Ultimate
Help Center Checklist
Check out our carefully crafted checklist that will help you get your help center set up in no time. Pinky promise.
Found our guide useful?
Share the Help Center Academy
with your colleagues and friends
We spent countless hours researching and crafting this guide to help you build a better help center. If you found it useful, we would forever be grateful if you share it with your colleagues and friends.
Thank you ツ
Made by a Notioneer at HelpKit
Build your Help Center
with Notion
Hey 👋
I’m Dominik, the founder of HelpKit.
HelpKit is the perfect tool for creating your company's knowledge base, help center or documentation with Notion. Write your help articles in Notion and HelpKit takes care of the rest. It's as simple as that.
HelpKit is powerful, flexible, and allows you to create and maintain a knowledge base that lasts. Embed a 🎛️ Widget on your website to provide customer support any time they need it. HelpKit is also optimized for 🔍 SEO so that search engines easily find your website. Oh, and did we tell you that HelpKit pages load up 💨 faster than default Notion pages as well?! 😎
Creating content, answering questions, and adding tutorial videos has never been easier. There's no need for coding or technical knowledge, just sign up and get started for free!
👉 Create your Help Center with Notion
