Enhancing a Help Center with Sample Data

Team

Product design lead:
Sara Anderson

Content design lead:
Charla Myers

Product management:
Amy Taron, Jeannie Wu

Engineering:
Mark Fox, Scotty Portorreal, Jiaxiang Liu, Garrick Krol

Design leadership:
Filippo Lovotti

Product leadership:
Brian My

Background

The current help center experience is uniform across all trialists, lacking in-depth content and personalization. However, recent advancements in data segmentation capabilities have paved the way for a more tailored approach, aligning with Zendesk's overarching trial vision of delivering immediate value to users with minimal setup.

Before redesign

Vision

Zendesk envisions a visually appealing help center that not only addresses trialists' immediate needs but also ignites excitement and confidence in the platform. By curating relevant content for each use case, Zendesk aims to accelerate the trial evaluation process and set the stage for seamless adoption.

Redesigned B2C help center

Business value

Segmenting the help center aligns with Zendesk's larger trial strategy of providing a comprehensive trial experience from day one. A well-curated help center not only enhances trial engagement but also influences downstream monetization rates, ultimately driving revenue growth.

Strategy

Our strategy to realize this vision involves populating the trial with sample data and tailoring the trial experience based on specific use cases.

The importance of the help center in this strategy stems from its widespread adoption among customers and trialists, who frequently access it during their trial period. As Zendesk's most visually impactful product, the help center presents a prime opportunity to impress trialists and dispel any perceptions of Zendesk being overly formal. Moreover, research indicates that trialists who engage with multiple products are more inclined to convert. By providing an aesthetically pleasing and relevant default help center, we aim to enhance engagement during the trial and contribute to an incremental increase in conversion rates. Additionally, we are committed to further promoting multi-product adoption during the trial phase.

This effort corresponds with two primary trial themes: simplifying evaluation processes and enabling customization options.

Approach

  1. Identify pain points.

  2. Define success criteria.

  3. Conduct an audit to identify patterns across B2B/C/E help centers

  4. Conduct imagery discovery

  5. Begin design feedback loop: review > collect feedback > iterate

  6. Partner with brand to create bespoke illustrations

  7. Hand off approved high-fidelity design to Engineering

  8. Launch an experiment to test the redesigned landing page.

Pain points

The initiative tackles several key challenges:

  1. Potential customers have limited time to evaluate Zendesk and require a fully developed instance to efficiently understand its functionalities and unique selling points compared to competitors.

  2. Trialists seek guidance on implementing Zendesk effectively, and offering a trial that aligns with best practices provides them with a significant advantage.

  3. Zendesk is occasionally seen as daunting and overly formal, a common challenge for sophisticated solutions. Leveraging the help center presents an excellent opportunity to create a positive impression and deliver a memorable "aha" moment to potential customers.

Success criteria

The success of the initiative will be measured through increased help center engagement and trial conversion rates.

Research insights

  • Trialists prioritize efficiency and ease of use.

  • Sales teams emphasize the need for hands-on product experience.

  • Trialists seek industry-specific implementation guidance.

  • Visual appeal plays a crucial role in shaping user perception.

Content audit

Focus: establish the foundation of the sample data by pinpointing the most commonly searched topics in help centers

Image discovery

Constraints: resourcing limited to stock photography

B2B

B2C

B2E

Brand partnership

Resourcing became available for product design to partner with brand to create bespoke illustrations.

B2B

B2E

Design deliverables

A crafted and aesthetically pleasing help center featuring content tailored to the trialist's specific use case—whether it's business to consumer, business to business, or business to employee—serves to ignite excitement about using Zendesk and provides them with a jumpstart on the setup process.

  • Home hero image

  • Community hero image

  • Community banner

  • Favicon

B2E sample article 1

  • Categories

  • Sections

  • Articles

B2C

B2E sample categories

B2E sample article 2

Impact

  • The initiative resulted in a 16% increase in Help Center article views, indicating improved user engagement.

  • Although there might be a decline in overall Help Center creation, ongoing investigation is in progress.

  • Despite inconclusive findings on deeper trial engagement and monetization rates, the initiative was fully scaled to 100% implementation due to observed increased engagement in the Help Center and the belief that a robust Help Center benefits all trialists without negative impacts on monetization metrics.

Validation

Assumption 1: Segmented sample data in the help center will increase help center engagement.

Takeaway: Implementation of segmented sample data in the help center resulted in a noticeable 16% increase in overall help center engagement.

Assumption 2: Segmented sample data in the help center will increase overall Trial engagement.

Takeaway: This assertion might not hold true given our limited dataset, and the effect on overall trial engagement remains inconclusive.

Next steps

Go-forward plan:

  • Validate help center creation decline.

  • Refine metrics for measuring help center engagement.

  • Monitor trialists' interaction with sample data post-launch.

  • Continuously iterate based on trial performance and user feedback.