How to Improve Help Center Content with a CCMS

The whole idea of a help center is that it should help your customers find the information they need quickly and efficiently, without having to contact support. But if your help center content is outdated, you could be adding to your customers’ problems instead of solving them. Or you may be struggling to manage your help center as your business grows. Here’s how a component content management system (CCMS) can help.

Before we dive into the benefits of writing and structuring your help center content in a CCMS, let’s take a quick look at what customers and businesses expect from help centers.

There are several benefits to a help center – both for your customers and your business. When customers have a question about a product, or are experiencing a problem, a help center can quickly give them the answer or solution they need. This improves customer satisfaction and helps build trust in your brand.

Another big advantage of a help center is that it helps your business scale. As you gain more customers, or add new products or services, help centers can limit your costs and resources related to support. Help centers can also give employees accurate information to better support customers.

Companies often write and publish help center content with software designed for customer service and customer support. These include Zendesk, Salesforce and Freshdesk. These tools include features for help centers, knowledge bases, customer portals, support tickets, and more.

Customer-service software can do a great job of creating a home for your help center content. However, it can be less than ideal for writing and updating your content as your business and range of products grow.

If one of your products changes, for example, you will need to manually change the product’s information everywhere it is mentioned. This is both a time drain on your employees and increases the risk that some information doesn’t get updated.

Translations and language localizations pose a similar problem. As your company expands to new markets, it can be difficult to keep translations up to date and ensure that key content is consistent across all markets.

The best way to solve these challenges is to combine your customer-support or CRM software with a component content management system (CCMS).

A CCMS is a platform designed to help you author, update and reuse content in the most efficient manner possible. You use the CCMS for authoring and structuring content, then, through an integration with your software, you publish the content in your help center.

What’s the benefit of this? To take the example above, about updating product information, this means you can make one change in the CCMS, then it automatically updates the product information everywhere it is used in your help center.

ShipStation, a provider of ecommerce software, uses Paligo CCMS in exactly this way. The company was writing technical documentation for its help center directly in Zendesk Guide. This meant they had to manually update and manage more than 600 articles. Now with Paligo, if they need to change a paragraph or image in 50 articles, they can update them all at once, helping them save time and increase consistency.

When writing an article for a help center, it’s common for a writer to create the entire article from scratch. On a smaller scale, this could work fine and meet the needs of customers. Similarly, if an article needs to be created for a different version of the product, the writer might manually copy the first article and make the needed changes. This process, however, soon becomes difficult to manage as your business grows.

Authoring help center content in a CCMS takes a different approach. Instead of creating long-form content, the writer creates smaller chunks of content, which are called topics. These topics are then combined to create the entire article. For example, you could have a topic that is a headline, or a paragraph with a product description, or even an image.

One benefit of this approach, which is called structured authoring, is that it makes it easy to reuse content and update it all at once. If you need to change an image or an instruction, you can change the content of the topic. Then you can automatically update the content everywhere that topic is used. This keeps your content consistent, so you don’t have to worry about customers finding outdated information that leads to frustration. With structured authoring, you get a single source of truth for all your content.

And if you need to create a slightly different version of your article, such as swapping out the name of a product with another product name, you can use variables. Variables enable you to reuse content that is mostly similar with slight variations, such as content about different products, versions or users. This saves you time and makes your content more consistent.

Paligo CCMS makes it easy to publish content to help centers through integrations with leading customer-service software, such as Zendesk, Salesforce, Freshdesk, and ServiceNow. Based on open standard XML, Paligo CCMS enables you to publish content to multiple channels and formats at the same time. This includes PDFs, HTML5, CRMs, Git repositories, and content delivery platforms.

Software provider Planning Center, for example, uses Paligo CCMS to publish content to Zendesk for 13 separate help centers, one for each of their products. The help centers share about 20% of their content. With Paligo, they can easily reuse and update that content, significantly cutting their workload. Planning Center also uses variables so they can reuse similar content with slight variations. Because of this, updates that used to take four hours now take only 30 minutes.

The Paligo CCMS also includes layout features that enable you to quickly create modern HTML5 help center homepages. You can then style these with CSS and JavaScript. ShipStation uses Paligo’s built-in layout features for collapsible headers (accordions), image lightboxes, and built-in glossaries. This ensures consistent formatting, headings and fonts.

If managing content for your help center has become too time-consuming, or you’re getting feedback that your content is out of date or inconsistent, it could be time to give Paligo a try. Paligo CCMS helps you deliver better customer experiences while saving time with content production and publishing. And the best part? Paligo CCMS helps you deliver on the vision of scaling your business without scaling your costs.

Paligo CCMS also has built-in features for efficient team collaboration and translation management. Ready to learn more? Request a demo to see how Paligo can revolutionize your help center.