Packed with data and valuable insights, the Zendesk Report 2022 gives folks who work in customer support even more homework, from how to work with AI and automation to how to implement conversational services, organize agents' training, in addition to other helpful recommendations.
But what exactly does Zendesk have to say this year about organizing the help center? The report doesn’t say too much directly, but they do have plenty to say about it if you read between-the-lines. We’ve done the close reading at Lotus Themes and want to share our takeaways and advice with you here! Let’s take a look!
"70% of customers say they expect a company to have a self-service portal or content available to them." — Zendesk CX Trends, 2022
Not only are customers looking for a self-service portal—they’re also looking for informative conversations! Customers want to feel independent while searching for answers, and at the same time, also want to be able to have meaningful contact with the company. This means that the content on any company's communication channel — like the help center, among others — needs to be in tune with how a customer is used to communicating.
Advice💡: Don’t limit yourself to only adding articles to the self-service portal — give attention to the organization of content on all your platforms: the main website, social media, the help center, and your newsletter. Remember, your customer is everywhere, so make sure that you maintain your brand's continuity and your content resonates visually and textually in all channels.
Example: FullStory refreshes their help center according to changes on their main page.
‟More than 60% of customers now are willing to walk away after just one bad experience” — Zendesk CX Trends, 2022
What are the first alarms that signal a customer is having a bad experience in your help center? The amount of time they spend on the website and getting messages like, "I can't find what I’m looking for." Of course, it’s ideal if customers stick with you and put the effort into problem solving, but the stats suggest otherwise: more often than not, disgruntled customers are more likely to turn away and leave your company. Zendesk Report 2022 tries to curb this trend. With CX, even if a customer has a bad experience with the sales manager, they won’t have one with the support department or self-service portal. Nonetheless, this doesn’t change the fact that if your help center has lousy navigation, a lack of helpful content, and a weak search engine, it can still tarnish your company's image and lead to its failure because of bad usability.
Advice💡: While navigating customers on your self-service portal, try not to let them get lost in your content; side and top navigation, table of contents, prev/next buttons, and contacts widgets can all be helpful.
"65% of companies want to add tools that allow agents to work across multiple channels" — Zendesk CX Trends, 2022
If your support team already works with Zendesk, they might not have problems switching between channels and navigating customer issues — everything is on one screen. But what is more important is to train agents to flow between channels, for example, between chatbot history and phone call conversations or messengers. According to the Zendesk Report 2022, surprisingly, only 28% of agents are highly effective at finding the information needed to respond to customers.
Advice💡: Implement training for your customer service agents that is dedicated to the help center.
To be sure, your agents are good surfers, don't forget to provide them with additional tools like a knowledge base or help center— any contact with the customer needs to be reinforced with fixed data, a.k.a. “knowledge.”
"69% of customers say they're willing to interact with a bot on simple issues" — Zendesk CX Trends, 2022
How to build a help center capable of reducing tickets?
Read the white paper and learn how to make the most of your self-service.
As expected, a help center is a sufficient source of information for simple issues. But today’s customers are very interactive. The conversational era is on the rise, so giving visitors in your self-service portal the option to switch between searching and messaging is crucial. Even if the question is simple, we never know in what state of mind your customer visits your help center.
Advice💡: Add a "contact agent" button to your help center or integrate extensions like Contacts Widget, so the different communication channels are available in one place, for example, a call, chat, and ticket form. We use it here, too, at Lotus Themes — and it works well.
We hope you’re able to put to use some of these crucial help center insights from Zendesk CX Trends 2022. And if you come across any other interesting ones, don't hesitate to share!
