What Is Zendesk Guide Customization?
Zendesk Guide is Zendesk’s version of a knowledge management and self-service hub that works externally for customers and internally for teams. It offers article hosting, FAQs, searchability, AI-powered suggestions, and links seamlessly with Zendesk’s support options.
Done right, Zendesk Guide can reduce the need for direct support interactions and help solve those fewer interactions even faster internally. This also means reduced support costs, improved customer satisfaction, and increased team productivity.
There are many ways you can approach Zendesk guide customization, and some of the most common include adding your company’s colors, branding, and logo.
Let’s dive deeper into more reasons why you should customize, any drawbacks to keep in mind, practical steps on how to do it, and best practices.
Why Would You Need Zendesk Guide Customization?
One of the biggest reasons to customize your Zendesk Guide is to enhance your brand identity.
The external Help Center could be a commonly used portion of your company website. By adding your branding, including colors, logos, and typography, you create a more consistent look and feel so customers can trust the brand even more.
Plus, the more people see your brand, the more they will recognize it.
Along those lines, it also helps to improve user experience. For example, if you use a simple WordPress website as your Help Center and have each “blog” as an article, then that’s not exactly the most user-friendly experience.
Whereas if you use Zendesk Guide, you can customize it with tailored navigation, layout, and content to fit your user needs. You can link relevant articles and embed relevant videos.
With these options and the robust search functionality, your customers will have an easier time navigating to find what they need.
Bonus: Zendesk Guide has analytics and reporting, so you can see the most commonly used articles and search terms. This allows you to update and customize your Zendesk Help Center as needed.
You can also add a Customer Support portal and contact methods that integrate with Zendesk Support so that your customers can create tickets as needed, even in multiple languages. You can use specific ticket forms to keep things consistent.
Zendesk Guide is also helpful internally by creating a Knowledge Base for your teams to use. You can still brand the internal side for a cohesive look and feel for your teams and also use it to organize it by different departments.
For example, the Marketing team can have its own section, and so can Customer Success. Your Support team could have their own and even have more sub-topics from there for each product or service you offer.
Are There Any Drawbacks to Zendesk Guide Customization?
There are a few things to keep in mind when exploring Zendesk Guide customizations.
Any customizations require maintenance, and any updates from Zendesk can break these.
For example, if you used Zendesk theme customizations, theme updates may require manual fixes. It’s important to note that almost any software does require upkeep for customizations, so this shouldn't be a huge surprise.
Additionally, customizations can be complex, and it would be particularly helpful to have advanced knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to implement some of the work. Zendesk goes over this in more detail to help you get through this.
If you don’t have the technical background required to make these changes, there is a higher chance of mistakes or changes being executed poorly. This can lead to inconsistent branding or a less-than-ideal user experience.
One way to help prevent this if you are keen to take on this work and may not be fully qualified is to test all changes across multiple devices to ensure consistency and responsiveness.
How to Customize Zendesk Guide
There are many different ways to customize Zendesk Guide, depending on your technical aptitude and the level of customization required.
Picking and customizing Zendesk themes
The easiest and quickest way to get started with customizing the Zendesk Guide is to head to the Zendesk Marketplace to choose themes or customize an existing one. And use Zendesk Guide templates. This allows a speedier implementation period with pre-built templates.
From there, it’s just a matter of adding any unique pages that you may need for your situation. For example, FAQ or Contact Us are common ones, and you can follow Zendesk’s official tutorial on setting these up, too.
Adding extensions and add-ons to Zendesk Guide
Depending on your needs, themes may not be enough, but implementing extensions and add-ons provides a much deeper level of customization.
For example, the Help Center Manager from Swifteq is an easy way to manage large-scale customizations efficiently. With this, you can:
Export help articles and their content.
Fix images and broken links.
Complete Bulk Operations.
Automatically translate articles to any language and much much more.
If your customer base requires support in multiple languages, then you can get even more language customization options with Zendesk Help Center Translate. This allows you to bring your own glossary, do total or partial translations, and keep formatting consistent across all languages.
A common quote by Lord Kelvin is: “If you can’t measure it, you can't improve it,” which is very true in the customer support world.
This also applies to Zendesk Guide. How will you know where your customers and teams are using it? What pages are they searching for? Are “staff” or “customers” looking at your external pages more? You can answer all these and more by using Help Center Analytics.
Code customizations
If you’re technical or have someone on your team who is, it is entirely possible to customize Zendesk Guide even more.
As mentioned earlier, it does require advanced knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Javascript and will require some more upkeep, but it is a strong option for those with the expertise and time required to get the most out of Zendesk Guide.
Any code changes will be made in the Zendesk theme editor, and this can allow for small and large changes.
To find it, simply navigate to your Zendesk Guide admin panel, select Customize Design, and choose Edit code to access the theme editor. Some common examples of possible changes done via code are:
Creating a collapsible navigation menu which will improve user experience and ease of navigation.
Adding a custom search bar to help customers and your teams find resources faster
Design and implement unique layouts for different articles to improve accessibility and engagement
Customize the footer to add additional links so users can navigate and find important links more easily.
Add interactive components like accordions or tabs to keep things more organized.
If you’re not sure where to start, there are lots of examples out there to get inspired with ideas, but I would recommend keeping it simple and starting with some of the add-ons mentioned above and prebuilt templates.
Whatever you choose, make sure the work you’ve done is responsive across multiple devices and browsers.
Best Practices for Zendesk Guide Customizations
As you can see, the world is your oyster in terms of what you can do with the Zendesk Guide customization options. That’s not to say you should do everything, though.
Let’s go over some best practices so that you and your users don’t get overwhelmed with the options.
1. Maintain consistent branding
If your brand colors are red and black, but your favorite color is green, and you want to throw that in, it may look nice, but it won’t align with your brand and will confuse your customers. Keep your brand identity consistent across all of your pages so it matches your main website too. This includes colors, typography, word choices, and more.
2. Prioritize user experience
Make it incredibly easy for users to navigate with intuitive navigation and visible search bars. If something is done in 5 clicks but can be done in 2, make it 2.
3. Limit administrative access
The last thing you want is someone accidentally undoing all of your hard work or breaking your pages. Lock things down so only those with applicable permissions and skill sets can make changes.
4. Regularly update content
If you regularly update your product, then your help articles may be going out of date fast. Make sure these are regularly updated and edited or replaced to remain consistent.
5. Test customizations thoroughly
Use Zendesk’s preview mode and then test live once any changes are made. Remember to test across multiple devices and browsers.
6. Document customization changes
Ever had to go back and fix something from a year ago and didn’t remember how? It’s pretty frustrating. That’s why it’s a good idea to document any changes to remember how to replicate or troubleshoot things.
Should You Customize Zendesk Guide?
The answer from me is a resounding yes.
At the very least, focus on creating a unified brand experience for your customers. From there, you can start to explore user experience in terms of navigation and ease of use. Use pre-built templates or practice code customizations for a whole world of opportunity.
At Swifteq, we’ve built a few add-ons to Zendesk Guide to help you get the most impact out of it, such as:
Sign up for a free trial today!
Mark Sherwood
Mark is an experienced customer experience leader and CX consultant specializing in developing CX teams and innovative CX strategies.