How komoot transformed their help center using Swifteq’s Zendesk apps

About Komoot

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Komoot is a popular mobile app and web platform designed for outdoor enthusiasts. It allows people to find, plan, navigate, and share hiking, cycling or mountain biking routes. Users can create customized routes based on their preferences, track various metrics during their activities, and integrate with various GPS devices or smartwatches. 
 

Komoot is the leading app in Europe for adventurers who want to explore the outdoors with more than 40 million users and 400,000 five-star reviews. The app has garnered millions of users worldwide and has grown exponentially over the past few years. 

 

Despite its popularity, komoot's support team remains relatively small.

 

“We have an extremely seasonal business. The difference in peak season volume is usually around 2-3 times what we see during the rest of the year,” says Nouran Smogluk, Director of User & Partner Success at komoot. 

 

“That’s always made it hard to scale the team rapidly enough in preparation for peak season, so investing in self-service was paramount.”

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The challenge

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Komoot needed to dramatically expand its self-service capabilities to maintain high-quality support.

 

“At the beginning, it was hard to define a clear direction with our help center. How often did our users look for answers there? Was it effective at deflecting tickets and providing help? How could we identify opportunities for improvement?”

 

Komoot originally started assessing their help center performance with a mixture of Google Analytics and native Zendesk reports. These provided a starting point but were rarely helpful when it came to identifying specific improvements that could be made on the article level. 

 

“We initially had to develop in-house solutions to gather feedback on help articles and spent a lot of time creating custom reports that were ultimately incomplete,” notes Nouran. “Even basic metrics like the self-service score – which Zendesk popularized – were hard to measure automatically with the tools we had access to.”

 

Measuring the impact of any changes involved the cumbersome and manual process of comparing before and after metrics for each article individually. 

 

Komoot also provides support in six languages, which meant that updates and improvements were extremely time-consuming and prone to errors.

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Analytics that lead to measurable results

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Swifteq’s Help Center Analytics app provides comprehensive and easy-to-understand analytics that go beyond basic pageviews, like: 

 

• Measuring total and unique views by article, section, or category.

• Distinguishing between staff and customer traffic, which is especially helpful when internal docs are hosted in the same knowledge base.

• Tracking user flows to see what customers do after visiting an article or how they get to one.

 

“It isn’t that you can’t do these things with Google Analytics, but the steep learning curve and time-investment is so much higher. Swifteq just offers these as standard reports at a very reasonable price,” summarizes Nouran. 

 

“One of my biggest pet peeves with Zendesk Guide reports is how helpfulness ratings are calculated.” 

 

Zendesk’s Article votes metric displays the sum of upvotes and downvotes. That means the total votes for an article that has 100 upvotes and 100 downvotes is 0. They would always translate that into a percentage so it’s easier to track improvements over time. 

 

Zendesk also doesn’t allow you to reset or track the vote count after an article update, so it’s hard to know if the update actually made the article better or not. 

 

“These are all very specific improvements that Swifteq does out-of-the-box. Having these reports has made is so much easier to identify high-impact articles, spot knowledge gaps, and continuously improve our help content – leading to a 20% reduction in contact rate.”

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Ease of translating into six languages

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Komoot had already been using Swifteq apps for some time before Help Center Translate was released. 

 

“It’s easy to underestimate just how time-consuming localization is in practice and how much complexity it adds to every step of the content creation and maintenance process,” explains Nouran.

 

Komoot uses a lot of custom HTML code in help articles to add design elements that make the text easier to read. These add call-out boxes to highlight specific information or make it possible to switch between tabs that have different instructions for Android and iOS.

 

“That custom HTML code made localization even harder. We started managing translations in Google Docs and would then have to manually format everything with HTML afterwards, which is hard when you don’t speak the language. We also tried providing the entire HTML export but then had to deal with broken code and the quality-checking process took even longer.”

 

Then Swifteq came out with the Translate app. 

 

“I’ve never been as excited for an update as I was for this one,” says Nouran.  

 

Swifteq’s translation tool lets you:

• Maintain the original HTML formatting of the article, which makes it much easier for translators to work with directly in Zendesk. 

• Add a glossary and tailor the translation prompt to save as much proofreading time as possible.

• Translate only partial updates, drastically reducing the time involved in quick one paragraph fixes.

 

“We’ve been able to halve the time spent on both managing and producing high-quality translations.”

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Automating bulk updates

 

Since one of komoot’s challenges is maintaining up-to-date help content across six languages, even small updates like new copy in the app or needing to replace a link would take so much manual effort. 

 

Swifteq’s Help Center Manager includes a few deceptively simple features that make this process a lot smoother:

• Find and replace across the entire help center or a subset of articles. 

• Automatically test Zendesk links for validity and correct them. 

• View all links, internal and external, and the articles where they are referenced.

 

Komoot’s support team used to have a spreadsheet to track which links were used where, to make it possible to update those links if needed. 

 

“It’s hard to quantify how much nicer it is to have that list provided for you and then not have to open every article individually to edit it,” says Nouran.

 

Komoot started working with Swifteq in 2022 and it’s been a valuable partnership so far. 

 

“Swifteq is great at identifying small quality-of-life improvements for customer support teams and bundling them into tools that are quick to implement and easy to use, without slapping enterprise pricing on them. It’s been a great investment for us over the last couple of years.”