Make Sure Your Help is Helpful

In May, I attended Zendesk's one-day conference in Dallas titled, "The Future of Customer Experience". 

One statement that really resonated with me, as a developer of customer-facing educational content and self-service resources, is something said by Jason Maynard, who is the VP & GM of Zendesk Guide and Data Products. He said "Self service is a fixed cost that pays dividends as your business grows."

"Self service is a fixed cost that pays dividends as your business grows."
Jason Maynard, VP & GM of Zendesk Guide and Data Products

​The session reported on three typical approaches to launching a help center: 1. the agile improvers, 2. set and forgetters, and 3. patient planners. You can read an elaboration of these approaches here. Having worked with a number of software companies, I can see how the agile approach seems natural and appropriate for developing self-serve content, since many software companies are already using an agile approach to updates. Zendesk's own research bears out that the agile group does best when looking at how well self-service content deflects help center tickets.

I found the Zendesk conference and articles to be very focused on the support audience. And for good reason. I recently read a case study through another tool, MindTouch, about an 86% ticket deflection rate. In that case, the company already had help before (the reported case study), but the help was not easy for customers to use so it wasn't getting the desired results.

Help isn't always enough, but using a well-planned single-source approach to content development benefits not only support, but also can be leveraged for other educational content, like marketing, sales, onboarding and customer success, and throughout the customer's lifecycle. 

So for this post, I'd like to offer a few suggestions for creating helpful help, so that the effort and fixed cost that you put into developing your self-service content is as efficient and effective as possible and can easily be reused for other educational purposes.

1

​Define your goal to make sure you know exactly what you expect to achieve by spending the time/money to develop these resources.

2

​Decide what to write by asking your top few "How do I _____?" questions to start. Use the agile approach to add to and improve your topics over time. 

3

Write as if you are explaining the topic to a 12-year-old and be careful about skipping steps or making assumptions about what the reader already knows. In other words, include all of the steps and use the most simple, straightforward language possible. 

4

Make it look good by using consistent formatting and appropriate images.

5

Include video tutorials as your content evolves.

6

​Make it easy to find. No matter how great your content is or how much you invest in the platform to host it, if your users can't find the information, it's useless. Resist the urge to organize content by feature, and instead think about the user experience in terms of what they need to accomplish  and where they will naturally look if they get stuck on a task.

I don't want to trivialize the work that technical writers like myself do, nor minimize the value of collaboration with subject-matter-experts who may not be as good at writing. But because I'm also very interested in learning, I hope to start a conversation about how to help people be better, more effective workers - not just the people creating the help content, but the readers who rely on it as well.

​​I'm planning a training session and/or online course to elaborate on these suggestions. I'd love to hear your comments on location, format and any additional topics to include.