Unlocking Help Center Excellence With Paligo

A Help Center serves as the nerve center for helping customers resolve issues and guides them on how to best use your products and services. A key part of a Help Center is the knowledge base. It’s also the most challenging part. Managing a knowledge base can quickly become a tangled mess of outdated articles, conflicting information, and frustrated users. 

In this blog, we’re exploring the common challenges of maintaining Help Center content. We will discuss how the Paligo CCMS (Component Content Management System) can streamline your workflow, empower your support team, and dramatically improve customer satisfaction.

The best Help Centers are more than a support ticket system where customers submit tickets and wait for someone to give them an answer. They are also a knowledge base of searchable content related to your products. From help articles to FAQs to complete installation, troubleshooting, and maintenance guides, your knowledge base includes everything a customer needs to understand and use your products.

A Help Center is also valuable for collecting customer feedback that you can then use to improve the quality and type of support content you create. One service management software company includes a way to add comments on documentation in their knowledge base to help them find issues with the information, such as spelling mistakes or outdated information. You can also use this feedback to identify new features and functionality your customers desire.

It makes sense that a business would want to offer a Help Center with a knowledge base. It can significantly reduce resolution times, because customers can find answers to common questions or issues. When customers can solve their issues quickly and on their own, the support team can focus on more complex issues. The advantage here is an increase in customer satisfaction and a decrease in support costs.

Help centers can also increase support team productivity because support reps can use the knowledge base to search and find answers for customers instead of searching across multiple file shares or systems to find information.

It’s clear that providing customers with in-depth product and help documentation, and an easy way to search and find the specific information they need, is a good thing. However, maintaining a knowledge base has its challenges.

A common challenge is maintaining separate copies of product documentation in the Help Center. When a guide like an administration guide is completed, a copy is added to the Help Center, where customers can read and search it. Sometimes, this content is available as a PDF; sometimes, it’s available as HTML files; in other cases, it’s available in both formats.

As the documentation is updated at the source, it then has to be updated in the Help Center, which can often take time. As a result, the content in the Help Center may be incorrect for a period of time. Suppose the changes to the documentation are small, and the content is available in HTML format. In that case, the Help Center content support team may have to manually make the changes. Again, this can lead to delays in updating the content, but it can also lead to mistakes made by copying and pasting or typing in the updates.

Another challenge is that if multiple product versions are supported in parallel, then updating all relevant versions is very error prone. Even if all locations where content needs to be updated is changed, very often the changes are made inconsistently. Oftentimes some of the versions are not updated, leading to erroneous or out-dated documentation.

In some cases, help desk teams write their own support articles for the knowledge base. Support reps handle a lot of customer inquiries, so they have first-hand knowledge of common issues and how to resolve them, enabling them to write support articles quickly. They can also catch mistakes in existing content, make edits, and create content for product updates.

The challenge happens when these writers aren’t aligned with the product documentation team that creates all the product documentation. In some cases, the support articles don’t match how the product should actually work or be used. In other cases, the content might be inaccurate and not reflect the most recent updates to a product.

According to Gartner, the most common reason for self-service failure is that customers couldn’t find content relevant to their issue. Now imagine that the content they did find was inaccurate or went against what the product documentation said?

Inconsistent or inaccurate documentation can confuse and frustrate customers because they don’t know which content is correct. The inconsistency can also cause support reps to provide the wrong information to a customer, which can also increase their frustration.

Finally, there are costs associated with maintaining two sets of product content in two different systems, longer times to resolve support issues due to inconsistent or inaccurate content, and decreased customer retention (because customers who can’t get their issues answered fast tend to find a new provider that will).

It might seem like there’s no way to get around these challenges, but there is. Product and technical documentation teams use a component content management system (CCMS) like Paligo to create and manage product-related content. And it can also be used to create and manage support content in a Help Center.

Why is a CCMS better to use? Glad you asked.

Paligo CCMS provides topic-based authoring and smart content reuse for product and technical documentation, knowledgebases, and other critical content. Organizations use Paligo as the single source of this documentation, enabling them to manage it in one place while publishing it to the channels where it’s needed. 

One of the key integrations Paligo provides is integration with Help Centers like Zendesk, ServiceNow, and Salesforce. This integration enables organizations to manage all their support content in Paligo, alongside other product documentation, and publish it to the Help Center as it’s created or updated.

This integration means all content is created in one place, driving efficiencies in managing support content. Several key features of Paligo CCMS are relevant to supporting Help Centers.

• Single Sourcing – All product documentation and support content is created, managed, and stored in a single location – the CCMS. Writers work on the content in the CCMS and then publish it to channels where needed – the Help Center, a Customer Portal, as downloadable PDFs, etc. 
• Structured authoring and smart content reuse – Paligo supports a structured content model, where content is broken down into individual topics or sections. This approach allows multiple writers to work on a publication simultaneously, speeding up the time it takes to create a publication. Structured authoring also enables writers to reuse content in multiple publications because the content is separated from its presentation, saving time writing duplicate content and ensuring information is consistent across publications. 
• Collaboration and Publishing Workflows – Paligo offers a workflow that eases the work required to collaborate on technical content. Set up a review and approval workflow and invite people to work on a piece of content, including writers, editors, subject matter experts, reviewers, and so on. For example, a technical writer authors a new support article and an SME reviews it for accuracy before approving it for publication.  
• Version Control – Product documentation is constantly updated to match updates to the product, bug fixes, and other changes. Paligo provides version control to help documentation teams track changes to documentation over time. It also allows writers to work on documentation related to upcoming changes so that when the product updates go live, the documentation changes can be published at the same time.
• Translation Management – If your content is available in multiple languages, you can connect Paligo to a translation management service to translate content. Because content is topic-based, the translation only needs to happen once for each topic, and it’s updated everywhere the topic is used. Here, you not only have faster turnaround times for translations because there’s less content to translate, but you also have significantly lower translation costs because the content is separated from its presentation, and translators do not have to deal with desktop publishing formatting issues (desktop publishing formatting can be 30-50% of the total translations invoice).

Integrating Paligo CCMS with your Help Center provides several benefits to your technical writers:

• Focus on content quality not presentation – Technical writers want to focus their time on writing quality content that helps customers. They don’t want to deal with trying to make the presentation of that content work (think about formatting a PDF every time you change the content). Structured authoring gives writers the flexibility to focus on the actual content and let someone else define the publishing output formatting. 
• Reduced manual effort and content errors – By writing content once and reusing it where it’s needed, technical writers do not have to create the content multiple times. Even if they are cutting and pasting, there’s still an opportunity for mistakes to happen. It’s also faster for writers to make changes because they only have to update the content once.
• More efficient collaboration – Without Paligo, writers would have to work with SMEs through email, sending the content in Word or PDF format, having the SMEs apply edits, and sending it back to the writers to incorporate the changes to the document. This process is time-consuming and error-prone. With Paligo, SMEs receive an email notification with a link to review the content in the CCMS. Depending on how the review is set up, they can modify the actual content or write comments. The writer then reviews the comments and makes the changes themselves. Everything is done in one environment with a single source, making it more efficient and faster. 

The integration of Paligo CCMS and a Help Center also has many benefits for the business overall, including:

• Improved support efficiencies – Product documentation teams constantly update product documentation – it’s their job. As they update content, it is delivered to the Help Center where support teams and customers can find it. Support reps can then focus their time and efforts on helping customers, not writing content. 
• Reduced ticket volume – Well-structured, searchable Help Center content allows customers to quickly and easily find the information they need to resolve their issues themselves and answer their questions without speaking with a support rep or submitting a ticket that could take hours or days to get a response.
• Consistent, accurate information across all channels – When you manage all product-related content in Paligo, you can set up multiple publishing options to support the channels where it’s shared. Need to create PDF versions? Check. HTML or HTML 5? Check. In-app Help? Check. As content is updated, selecting the channels or formats to publish the content is straightforward.
• Cost Savings – Managing content in a single location and reusing content where possible can lead to significant savings for the business in terms of content creation, maintenance, and publishing.

We’ve talked about the benefits of integrating your Help Center with Paligo CCMS; now, let’s look at three specific Help Center integrations that Paligo offers to popular systems (you can find the full list of Help Center integrations here).

Zendesk provides customer service solutions, including support ticket management and help centers. By integrating with the Paligo CCMS, Zendesk customers can support large-scale content authoring and more efficiently manage content across all support channels, by single-sourcing technical content.

Paligo offers the best-in-class Zendesk Guide integration for technical documentation. People working on documentation can collaborate on multi-brand content in an intuitive authoring environment built for content reuse. The built-in streamlined workflows and flexible publishing options ensure content is always up-to-date and accurate, everywhere it’s needed. This enables organizations to provide consistent and up-to-date information to customers and support agents in any channel, and in any language.

The integration works by mapping Paligo publications and topics to Zendesk categories, sections, and articles. You can publish content live or as drafts, which can then be reviewed in Zendesk before being published live. Paligo includes layouts that map to article layouts in Zendesk and you can apply filters or profiles to adjust the content for specific audiences. Like ServiceNow, you can also publish translated content from Paligo to Zendesk.

Salesforce Knowledge is Salesforce’s knowledge management solution that provides support articles, FAQs, and documentation for internal teams and customers. It is a centralized repository of support content shared internally and externally within the Salesforce CRM platform. It integrates with Salesforce Service Cloud and self-service portals. This content, including product updates, best practices, how-tos, and support documentation, is managed as individual articles. As a result, effectively managing them in Salesforce is time-consuming and requires significant manual effort.

Paligo provides topic-based authoring and smart content reuse, enabling you to deliver accurate and consistent content faster and more efficiently to Salesforce Knowledge. Update content at the source and see the changes reflected everywhere it’s used, reducing errors.

You map publications and topics in Paligo to articles in the knowledge base, publishing them as either draft or live. Along with text-based content, you can publish videos and SVG assets and leverage filtering and profiles to tailor content for certain audiences or locales. Another nice feature is the ability to publish content with data categories that align with the classification and access control settings in Salesforce.

ServiceNow provides a cloud-based platform that automates IT service management (ITSM), customer service, HR, and other business workflows to improve efficiency and digital transformation. It includes one or more Knowledge Bases that enable organizations to manage and share support articles, FAQs, and troubleshooting guides, allowing employees and customers to find information on their own and reduce the workload on support teams.

Paligo provides smart single-sourcing, and content reuse, giving ServiceNow customers the tools they need to ensure their support content is always accurate, consistent, and up to date. Transparency and visibility in the content lifecycle with comprehensive versioning and revision history ensures quality and control. This enables a more efficient content management process so customers and support teams always have the right information.

When you integrate Paligo and ServiceNow, you create and map Paligo topics to articles in ServiceNow’s Studio IDE Knowledgebase, publishing topics to a category in ServiceNow or to the root of the knowledgebase. Paligo offers predefined article layouts or you can create a custom one. You can also apply filters or profiles when publishing content for specific audiences or products, and publish content in multiple languages.

Integrating your Help Center with Paligo CCMS can help your support team create exceptional customer experiences by providing accurate, consistent, and readily available information. By streamlining content creation, simplifying updates, and fostering seamless collaboration, Paligo helps you transform your Help Center from a cost center into a powerful driver of customer loyalty and business growth. 

Ready to take your Help Center to the next level? Explore Paligo’s integrations today and discover the future of customer support.