“If you’re any good at all, you know you can be better.”
Lindsay Buckingham
This is a nicely explicit quote for those who strive for perfection and believe that excellence can be reached by constantly experimenting, monitoring, and assessing and improving performance. Zendesk Guide’s philosophy of success aligns with the following three steps:
- Improving;
- Improving;
- And guess what? Yes, improving :)
Well, who ever said there will be a time to lie back on the sofa with popcorn? Exactly! Nobody!
Let’s have a look at the performance cycle of any product or service. There’s a 90% chance you already have Zendesk Guide. If that’s the case, then you are probably between the “Maintaining” and “Improving” stages.
You might not be certain of what can be done with your Zendesk help center, especially if you have already customized it. But that’s exactly what this article is for – to reveal ways to change a Zendesk theme in order to squeeze the most out of any business. This can be done by simplifying the interface, adding most-wanted features, or implementing tools that will solve tasks and save the time (and therefore money) of customer service agents.
The most important point for changing Zendesk theme is customizing it according to the type of business, industry, corporate style and customers’ specific demands and priorities.
Let’s briefly walk through a simple Zendesk theme improvement process to highlight the important points.
Once you decide to make changes to your Zendesk theme, there are typically two options.
Option #1 – Make minor visual improvements
Here are some of the simplest, yet effective Zendesk theme changes:
- Change Zendesk html templates via the code. These changes can include fonts, colors, icons (among 700 Font Awesome and 5K cool Streamline icons), layout changes and so on. It’s easy to underestimate the effectiveness of making such seemingly minor changes, but visual art plays an important role in marketing, and colors, fonts, and design elements can affect customers’ behavior, overall impression and experience with a web-site. For instance, after analysis of customer mouse activity, changes of certain elements would be pretty useful!
- Customize Zendesk help center without interfering with the code. Such improvements include changing favicons, name of the help center, main hero image (if it’s a part of the existing Zendesk theme), logo or language.
- Videos are a great tool to help the customers get their answers in an interactive manner! Embedding videos in help center pages is another cool extra to consider!
- Adding smart quotes (like in this article ;)) with either positive customer feedback, a virtual assistant, or even just entertainment purposes is another way to sweeten the user experience.
- Improve the structure of the help center by adding a list of categories or categories tree. Hide the least used categories and emphasize the most popular ones. Alternatively, you could logically group sections by type.
Each category is presented as a tile. By clicking on a tile, you open a category page.
This is a list of categories in a Help Center. Each category contains a list of sections. Each section contains a list of six articles with a link to more articles, if there are any.
Option #2 - Full customization of Zendesk help center with compliance of corporate style, marketing objectives and brand management
Full customization of a Zendesk theme means changing the layout, fonts, and background images to better fit with corporate brand book style or web-site. Make sure every section of the web-site is consistent.
Even at first glance, it’s clear that “on the surface” changes are often not as effective as a comprehensive, all-inclusive approach.
The ability to stand out among similar web-sites with the same templates demonstrates an entirely different positioning. Although many standard features available, it’s simply impossible to include everything a web-site can possibly require. Yet, everything’s possible to implement with the help of developers, designers and marketing experts.
Last but not least
“Do ordinary things extraordinarily well.”
Gregg Harris
Generally speaking, changes drive better performance in any part of the business.
Each element of Zendesk html templates is a puzzle piece of a larger picture. Hence Zendesk theme changes and customization allow you to adjust almost anything you can imagine.
However, remember that individually defining each setting or option (by giving the task to the existing company’s team) can be very challenging and requires extensive knowledge of the inner structure of Zendesk Guide, familiarity with its peculiarities, and the ability to adapt the design, etc.
If leaving the current staff to sweat it out is not an option, you may want to consider professionals who offer branding and customization services here at Lotus Themes.
Owing to expertise in development of 800+ of websites pretty much any wish you can think of will be our command.
