Setting up your self help portal
Every self-service portal needs to achieve different goals depending on the types of customers it’s made for. Taking a little extra time when designing your self-service portal will create a seamless experience for customers who need help.
1. Understand your customers’ needs
When setting up your self-service portal, you need to first understand the customers you are trying to help. After all, the portal is a resource for them. Here are a few questions you can ask to help better plan out your support portal:
- Where do they come into the self-service portal from?
- Are they primarily mobile or browser users?
- Assisting users that need more internal support
- Closing topic threads that get out of hand
- Archiving irrelevant ideas or threads as the product evolves
Once you understand what your users are looking for, identify the types of information or resources you want to include on your self-service portal:
- What types of information do you need to share? (ie API documentation, Guides, FAQs and Help Desk articles)
- How many sections or categories do you want to organize your documentation into? This is the Information Architecture of your knowledge base, and this organization makes browsing a much nicer experience for visitors.
- Does your marketing team have additional resources like e-books, case studies or whitepapers to share with customers?
Collecting all the information first will help you create a well designed, beautiful self-service portal - instead of throwing everything at a wall and seeing what sticks.
2. Set access controls and permissions
Are there parts of your documentation that need to be locked down for logged in users, certain plan types or even internal users? Make sure you set up access controls and user permissions before launching your new self-service portal.
On Freshdesk you can also choose whether users from the same company can view other employee’s tickets. This makes sense for B2B products where there is a system administrator, but it should be turned off for B2C self-service portals.
3. Customize your theme
Make your self-service portal stand out from the crowd by customizing your self-service theme with your company’s branding. Your help center should feel like a natural extension of your website - because it is!
Keeping the look and feel of your self-service portal consistent helps build trust with your customers. They know that they are talking to the same company they purchased from because everything looks the same. Freshdesk makes this easy by providing plug-and-play themes that can be quickly updated with your logo and brand colours. Or, if you’ve got bigger plans, use the CSS editor to fully customize your self-service portal right down to the bare bones.
It’s also great to bring your brand personality into your self-service support center. That might be as simple as including pictures of your customer support team (yep, real people work here!) or updating the text to reflect your brand voice.
Finally, use a custom domain to reinforce your brand to identify and remove any third-party identifiers from your self-service URL.
4. Direct customers to your self-service portal
Once you’ve set up your self-service portal, make sure it’s easy for customers to find. Add a link in customer communications, ticket autoresponders, on your homepage and in-product. Welcome new customers with an email that showcases your help center. They will probably need help at some point, so make sure they know where to go to get it!
Frustrated customers don’t want to Google for your help center - so don’t make them. All of your customers should know that the self-service portal is the first place to go for help.