Managing one help center can be daunting. But what happens when you have multiple help centers with different brands to manage all at once?
Luckily, managing multiple help center brands in Zendesk is made easier with Zendesk’s Multibrand and Swifteq in combination.
In this guide, we’ll cover when you should consider having multiple branded help centers (or not), how to set them up, and how to make the most of your self-service experience in Zendesk.
Why would you have multiple help center brands?
Imagine running a business with different brands, each serving a unique group of customers or offering different types of products.
For example, maybe you’re a SaaS company that's acquired multiple other companies, and you're continuing to operate each as a separate brand. To provide a consistent support experience, your help centers should reflect the differences.
This is where managing multiple help center brands comes in — it's about giving each customer group an experience that fits them.
Consider a gaming company like Nexon. Since Nexon has a library of many games, they created help centers for each one. This keeps the experience relevant to that specific game, thus avoiding confusion and ensuring that each game has a dedicated help center tailored specifically for its players' needs.
Multiple help centers lets you better meet the needs of different customer groups, making their experience segmented in a way that creates clarity. Each unique brand can maintain its unique identity, ensuring consistency in tone, style, and content that resonates with its specific customer base.
Are multiple Zendesk help center brands right for you?
While there are definite benefits of using a multi brand approach, it also can create a lot more complexity. There are many things to consider when deciding if it’s right for you:
Administrative workload: Managing multiple help centers can lead to additional administrative work. There are more articles to maintain, more tickets to segment, and more triggers to set up and manage—all of which can add complexity for your support team. Tools like Help Center Manager can help reduce the administrative burden by compiling all of your articles in one place for easy management across brands, but managing several brands will always be more complex than a single brand.
Risk of inconsistency: There’s a potential for inconsistencies in support quality between brands if each brand’s help center isn’t managed uniformly. This may result in certain brands feeling less prioritized compared to others, creating a strange experience for your customers.
Distribution of data: With multiple help centers, you also need to consider that it also means having different data sources to track, measure, and compare the performance of each. There will be an added layer of complexity setting up tracking for the various URLs of your sites and consolidating them into cohesive reporting. Help Center Analytics can make it significantly easier to streamline reporting across your various help centers, but, again, it’s always going to be more complicated than just having one help center brand.
If you decide to move forward with multiple brands, think about the impact on both your support team and your customers.
While the support experience will be more personalized, the workflows will be more complex. Each brand’s help center should be curated to reflect its identity—not just copying articles across brands, but tailoring content to fit each brand’s unique customer needs.
Mario Guisado, former Director of Customer Support at Everbridge, shared some insights from his project of bringing multiple products under a single support tool.
He explained that some products had their own identity but were also part of a larger suite, with knowledge bases at different maturity levels. Here are some things he considered throughout the project:
Ticketing overlap: Was there enough overlap in the customer base to funnel tickets into a single experience?
Knowledge sources: Were different teams authoring content? How would publishing into a single knowledge center impact this process?
Taxonomy: Was there overlap in taxonomy? How easy would it be for customers to find information about their product, and what were the trade-offs?
Supplementary tools: Did API references, status pages, and LMS tools have unified or separate experiences?
Ultimately, he chose to use multiple brands because customers primarily identified with the sub-brands, rather than the overarching brand. It was a two-month process to determine the best path forward, and he faced some internal pressure to create a single site.
However, the costs to make the changes needed to make a single site worthwhile were too high, and they opted for multiple brands—while still unifying the look and feel of the help centers to keep future consolidation options open.
It’s also important to consider the structure of your team and the overlap that exists between help centers.
With the separation in brands, customers will expect a specific support experience for each as well. Are all of your agents trained in each? Having a growing base of workflows, ticket types, and knowledge can create a need for specialization in each area as well.
Consider how your team may be impacted by the separation of information, and create a clear team structure to support that.
Setting up another brand in Zendesk
Zendesk’s interface helps make it straightforward to keep these different brands organized within a single account.
You can start by creating a new brand within the Admin Center. Then enable the help center for the brand and customize the appearance, content, and settings for the new brand.
Zendesk has a great guide on how to set up another brand and help center, so if you’d like step-by-step instructions, be sure to check it out.
Best practices when managing Zendesk multiple help centers
There are many things to keep in mind when choosing whether setting up multiple help center brands is the right thing.
If you decide multiple brands is the right choice for your organization and customers, here are some best practices to set yourself up for success:
Centralize your knowledge management: Where feasible, use a centralized knowledge base to prevent duplication of content across multiple brands. This helps reduce the “knowledge debt”—or the accumulation of outdated and redundant articles—which can cause confusion over time. You can also keep this information centralized by streamlining your help center workflows.
Unify your ticket workflows: While each brand can have its own help center, it’s generally helpful to keep ticket workflows consistent. This ensures consistent handling of issues across brands, leading to a more uniform support experience.
Avoid over-customization on each help center: Keeping the structure and layout consistent across brands will make it easier for support agents to navigate and provide efficient service, even if they are switching between brands. This will also create consistency in the customer experience so that they can also find information easily if switching between brands.
That last point highlights another vital thing to keep in mind: you need to think about both the customer experience and the agent experience and operational management of the systems.
Hilary Dudek, current Head of Customer Experience at Gamma, shared that workflows, ticketing, and reporting can get quite messy quite quickly if not managed properly with multiple brands:
“If you don't have someone already, assign someone to act as admin for the brands, someone who can liaison between multiple stakeholders while also performing the more operational tasks needed. This could be a great role for someone interested in growing into an ops role.”
Having clear ownership and oversight goes a long way in keeping each brand up to date and unified in order to keep the support experience as smooth as possible (regardless of which brand customers interact with).
When to consider one consolidated help center brand
For organizations that have customer bases with similar needs, maintaining a single consolidated help center can be a better option.
For instance, a parent company with several sub-brands that share similar products or services might benefit from a unified help center.
If you’ve opted for a single brand, then you should avoid these help center mistakes and make sure you’re structuring your help center according to best practices.
Even if you already have multiple brands, it could be worth condensing them if there’s a large overlap in content and information.
Using user segments and permissions in Zendesk allows you to provide tailored content within a consolidated help center. You can create segments based on different attributes like geography, product type, or user role, ensuring that customers still see only what’s relevant to them.
The easiest way to do this is to use tags at the Organization or User level, which you can then use to create those segments.
When a user accesses your help center, content they don’t have visibility to won’t display at all—including featured posts. If they can’t view any articles in a given section or category, those sections or categories won’t display to them at all.
As long as you keep your permissions up to date, it creates a really seamless experience — even if you have multiple audiences within one help center.
How you manage your help center makes all the difference
The decision to use multiple help center brands or consolidate them into one depends largely on your specific customer needs.
Multiple brands allow you to provide a customized experience, which can improve cohesion for different brands or product lines. On the other hand, consolidation can simplify administration and prevent potential inconsistencies and overlap that can come with managing multiple centers.
Whichever path you choose, it’s important to consider the long-term implications—for both your customers and your support team. If you need multiple brands, the easier you can make managing those help centers, the better your odds of success are.
Help Center Manager is the easiest way to manage your help center content, whether you have one brand or fifty brands. If you’re struggling to manage bad links, or understand how helpful your help center is, you can start a 14-day free trial today (without even submitting your credit card).
Neal Travis
Curious learner and builder of Customer Experiences - Head of Customer Experience at AIHR and Host of Growth Support