IN-PRODUCT
HELP CENTER
OVERVIEW
As part of another initiative, I surveyed our customer support team and set up focus groups with 8 call center reps. In the survey and focus group findings, we realized that there was another user problem to solve: Users didn’t have a place in the product to find answers to their questions. Several of the focus group participants stressed the need for help content in the portal. Users were often confused, couldn’t find answers, and then called — frustrated and panicked.
I partnered with cross-functional team members (Lead Product Designer, Product Designer, Senior Marketing Manager, Senior Product Manager, legal, customer care) to create the first in-product help center for our users.
THE USER PROBLEMS
- Users didn't have a place to find more information about the product
- Users were confused about how to activate certain features and what certain alerts meant
THE BUSINESS PROBLEMS
- Feature activation was low
- There was a high number of calls to the call center that could easily be prevented by more content in the portal
- Because users weren't activating features, they weren't seeing the value in the product
THE CHALLENGES
- Creating a Help Center that requires no dev resources for content updates
- Ensuring the language was in compliance with legal regulation
- Ensuring the advice given in the Help Center was consistent with call center
THE PROCESS
As lead of this initiative, I started the project with a kickoff with cross-functional partners. Together, we filled out a Lean UX Canvas and defined user problems, business problems, possible solutions, and a hypothesis.
Before I started on the content, I also gathered research from the previous customer support survey and focus groups, as well as evaluated comments in our NPS survey. In addition, I analyzed research done by our marketing department on our customer base. Based on that research, I was able to get a better idea of what our customers expected from a product like ours. I wanted to make sure that we answered the most critical questions for users. Then, I mapped out a list of topics that would be shown per page in the product (below).
After drafting content, I went through several rounds of cross-functional reviews. I reviewed internally with the content team, which included our Senior Marketing Copywriter and Sales Copywriter. This helped me also make sure that the language used in the product was consistent with marketing materials. Then, I reviewed with our Product Designer and Senior Product Manager, as well as our customer support and legal teams.
Before flipping the switch, I worked with the Product Designer to create an in-portal pop-up that informed users where they could find help: in the new Help Center. We also created contextual corner pop-ups to point users to the Help Center if it was needed.
Once we were confident that the content would help our users efficiently and effectively, we launched!
We saw great results after launching. In a survey, the customer support team indicated that they saw a decrease in calls about a certain feature once the Help Center launched. We were happy with the conversion rate of users visiting the Help Center, and we evaluated the top topics that users were clicking on and made plans for the next iteration of the Help Center.
SAMPLES FROM THE FINISHED PRODUCT
RESULTS
- 2,107 views in the first 20 days
- 5% drop in the cancelation reason "did not find the product useful"
- In conjunction with marketing efforts and other in-portal messaging, we lifted the feature activation rate by ~25%
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