Have you ever caught yourself wishing people actually read all the amazing help center articles you’ve written? Or even better, send them to customers? (I know I have!) Managing a help center isn’t just about creating well-written articles and organizing content. It is also about how you use this content and how your help center agents engage with it.
When your team frequently uses the help center, they become more informed, consistent, and efficient in their responses, ultimately improving service quality.
In this article, we’ll explore ways to increase help center agent engagement, measure it effectively, and encourage your team to leverage help center content in their interactions.
Why Engagement with the Help Center Matters
An engaged support team is one that is aligned, efficient, and empowered to help customers better.
Without the latest information, you risk misinformation, time being spent on lengthy investigations and replies, and, the worst one: having to answer the same question over and over again.
Encouraging your team to engage with your help center means they can stay updated with the latest information, deliver accurate responses faster, and reduce time spent finding solutions from scratch.
By integrating the help center into their daily workflows, your team will become that much more attuned to getting this information to your customers in the best way possible.
How to Increase Your Team’s Engagement with the Help Center?
There are many different ways you can get your support team (and even other teams!) engaged with your help center. Generally speaking, the more of these opportunities you can capitalize on, the more value you’ll see from your help center.
Integrate the help center into onboarding and training
Start building the muscle on day one by making the help center a core part of your team’s training. Familiarize new hires with the help center, how to search for content, and which articles they should refer to for common questions.
Encourage agents to explore, bookmark, and suggest edits to articles so they feel a sense of ownership. There’s nothing quite like a fresh pair of eyes to tell you where gaps are.
In my experience at the Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR), we’ve done a walkthrough of structure, company-specific naming, and how to use our knowledge management tool as an early session to get new team members in the habit of going to it.
Throughout onboarding, we encourage new hires to go through our experience as if they were a customer and provide three to five takeaways from that time. This way, they can spend time exploring and learning what our customers can see and find.
Recognize your team’s contributions to your help center
Acknowledge agents for using help center articles in their responses, contributing new content, or making meaningful updates to existing resources.
Recognizing top contributors sets a standard and motivates the rest of the team, highlighting the value your help center brings to your organization and customers.
An example of this would be to include help center contributions and recognition in your monthly reporting or a Support newsletter (if you send one to your company, which I strongly encourage).
Efforts like these increase the visibility of the team’s efforts to the broader organization.
Outside of this, I personally love to showcase the metrics behind their work. Showing agents article usage and helpfulness scores can go a long way to showing that others also find their work impactful.
Create opportunities for your agents to take ownership of help center content
Assign agents responsibility for different sections of the help center.
Let them own specific product areas or topics and be in charge of updating, improving, and optimizing content over time
This approach not only helps keep the help center up to date but also gives agents purpose and expertise in those specific areas.
Tools like the Help Center Manager can help facilitate this by making it easy for your team to update your help center (no matter how big your Zendesk help center might be).
Make it visible and easy to access
One of the biggest mistakes I see is having the help center separated from your team’s workflow, which can make it easily forgotten. You need to make it easier to access your help center directly within their flow of work.
Here are some ways to do this:
Use macros or canned responses that link directly to relevant articles.
Pin the help center as a tab within your support platform.
Add quick access shortcuts so your team can easily access it whenever needed.
Leverage Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) practices
Organizations use Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) practices to enhance agent engagement.
KCS is a methodology developed by the Consortium for Service Innovation that integrates knowledge authoring directly into the flow of work, having agents on the frontlines generate help center articles and share their knowledge.
This enables teams to answer questions quickly, deliver answers where people are looking for them, and drive improvements in products and services.
Additionally, KCS provides insight into which questions are being asked the most and identifies recurring problems so we can remove them from the environment by building a knowledge management team with a KCS approach, you can foster a culture of collective ownership.
These practices help ensure that knowledge is continuously updated and relevant. Recognizing agent contributions based on the value they add can also encourage meaningful participation.
When rolling out KCS practices at AIHR, we found that the team really got involved when they knew they had an impact on how the help center would better support them in the long term.
This created a feeling of ownership, as well as excitement to build new skills as we developed the authoring skillset.
Include it in your regular update meetings and workshops
Keep the conversation going by having your team share knowledge gaps or common issues they face.
This collaborative approach encourages agents to view the help center as a living resource that is shaped by their experiences and not just a static collection of documents.
Help your team to understand how it helps them
Helping your team understand how leveraging the help center can help educate customers on self-service materials for the future and save them time can go a long way to getting them to engage.
When coaching your team on quality or responses, highlight areas where including an article could have helped.
Here’s an example:
Imagine you need to write an email to a customer explaining how to set up a new payment method in their account. This process has a few steps, and you need to explain them each time. (depending on the process this can get quite long).
How could an article help here?
Instead of needing to list all the steps every time, you could have an article created, and just link the reference with brief context. This would save quite a bit of time in the long run, and when you have other customers needing the same support, you wouldn’t need to rewrite all of the steps.
Ultimately, no matter which methods you choose to use, the core of getting your team to engage with the help center is to build a culture of knowledge-sharing.
This includes sharing knowledge with customers that can educate them on self-service materials, sharing their expertise with the rest of the team, and sharing their experiences with you to improve documentation.
How to Measure your Team's Engagement with the Help Center ?
Now that you’re getting your team to engage with your help center, you’ll need to see if the changes are making a difference and how engagement is improving.
Here are the metrics I recommend:
Article Usage Metrics - Track the number of times agents view and share articles from the help center. With Help Center Analytics, you can easily monitor these metrics, providing insight into how effectively agents are using the help center and which articles or sections are being used the most.
Contribution Rate - Measure how often agents contribute to the help center, whether by writing new articles, suggesting edits, or commenting on existing ones. A higher contribution rate is often a sign of a well-engaged team.
Resolution Time - Compare resolution times for agents who frequently use help center content versus those who do not. Faster resolution times can indicate that agents are finding helpful information in the help center, and leveraging it more effectively. For example, teams who implement KCS see an average of 25-50% improvement in resolution times just within the first year.
Feedback and Surveys - Regularly ask your team for feedback on the help center. Use surveys to find out whether they think the articles are helpful, if they’re easy to find, and what improvements they’d like to see. You can easily spot team members who are engaged with the content through their feedback (or lack thereof) on the help center and their knowledge.
Getting Your Team Engaged Is All About the Culture
Increasing your help center employee engagement with your help center content is about creating a culture of knowledge-sharing.
Getting your team involved also helps you to see people’s interests and opportunities for personal development. You can promote growth by giving projects or ownership to the agents that you see are really stepping up.
What if a good chunk of your team was actively engaged in helping you manage and improve your help center? If you’re like most support organizations, that would be a huge win and have a big impact on how you operate.
Every team is unique, and that also means finding what works best for you. Use these seven ways to boost agent engagement with your help center as a starting point, then get creative and figure out how your team would like to be supported!
If you’re using Zendesk, Swifteq has a number of apps that can help make using and improving your help center a better experience for everyone involved — from making improvements to measuring the impact those changes have over time.
Start your free 14-day trial today and see how Swifteq can help you get more from Zendesk and build a better support team.
Neal Travis
Neal is a curious learner and builder of customer experiences in scale-ups. He is the Head of Customer Experience at the Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) and Host of Growth Support