There are many reasons why your website needs a Help Center. Let’s start with the obvious ones:

Knowledge Management for your staff and support team

Your organization may be growing. New employees are onboarding. How do you ramp them up about company policies, business process flows, reports, organizational updates, and even how to get started? Putting your information in one central place is a good practice because it is organized in such a way that it never gets lost and it is easy to search.

You may have different applications in your organization with important information sitting around. Some of them might be in Jira, Slack, Confluence, or even in your email inbox! A good knowledge management software can interface with these applications and make sure no important information is wasted.

Eventually as the company grows, you may want to expand your customer care department and have them answer inquiries from chat, phone, email, social media, etc. They would need to be able to provide updated information to your clients based on accurate information. This is where your Help Center proves to be useful.

Knowledge Discovery for your website visitors and users

Now what about your website users? Let’s say you have an e-commerce website. You probably have shipping policies, return policies in place and that is good. But what about instructions on how to reset their passwords, or how to cancel an order? Or even how to navigate your website or contact customer support? Maybe you’d like them to leave a review on Yelp or Google which they would not know how to do. All these are essential for making your customers feel cared for and important. It also does not leave them in the dark. Users do not really like calling customer service or tech support and having to wait between 15 to 30 minutes to get instructions. It would be best if they could instantly find the answers to the questions they have.

Reduction in long call waiting times

Imagine if those incoming calls for customer support just stopped ringing. You would be saving a lot of time and money simply because your customer had instantly found what they were looking for. That would also make your customers happier knowing that they didn’t have to go to their phone, press some numbers and characters, and wait for a long period of time.

Now for the not so obvious ones:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Believe it or not, your online documentation is considered as relevant content and is good for SEO! Have you noticed that Google always provides answers to questions in search results? Why is that? That’s because people who use Google mostly ask questions when they search. If search engines see a trend of search queries or questions, they would find possible answers on the internet suited to answer that question and your answer might possibly be chosen. It is important that your technical writer considers relevant keywords when writing out the knowledge base.

Shareable Content

Ok you might be wondering why someone would actually share a knowledge base article on social media. Think that’s weird? Actually not! On LinkedIn, you will see a lot of people sharing articles through posts. LinkedIn has become a social community where industry professionals come together and share ideas and their knowledge to one another. Even websites like YouTube and Facebook will have “How To” videos on using a certain product or app. Forums like Reddit, Quora or Stack Overflow have millions of users exchanging ideas and comments. It is no doubt that your Help Center could be a valuable, relevant piece of shareable information.

Why is a Help Center important for your website?