Making a help center
As a business grows, so do the phone calls, emails, and chats to your customer service team. Collective Health’s Member Advocate team is made up of highly-trained folks dedicated to solving problems in the nitty-gritty healthcare space—and their time was being taken up by answering basic healthcare and product questions. In conjunction with a few strategic product updates, I drove the creation of Collective Health’s first Help Center, driving an almost 20% reduction in total inquiry volume in the first quarter it was live.
Project goal: Drive down user inquiries to Collective Health’s customer service team by designing a help center to effectively help users self-serve.
Role: Product Owner, Content Strategist
Strategy:
Be content and CX data-lead
Create and test a category-based navigation system to filter users to the answer they need in three clicks
Don’t use the Help Center as a place to fix with words what CH should invest in fixing in their product
Two-year plan:
As the PO for the project, I was responsible for creating the strategy for scaling this product over time, which included:
What metrics were to be tracked
Timing and thresholds for adding new content
Working with design to create potential future states for the Help Center
Locking down a two-year schedule for adding in strategic content (text, video, illustrations) when engineering bandwidth could assist
So, How do you help thousands of people self-serve?
Break down the data
What are people asking? I dove deep into our call data to break the inquiries by category, and then did internal interviews to break that down into individual questions.
WHY are they asking what they’re asking? I wanted to chase down the root problems. Product problems? Comprehension issues? Site navigation?
Get the flow correct
Testing was our friend. With two designers and a user researcher, we tested and iterated on a variety of information architectures until our research subjects were flying to the right answers, and understanding next steps.
Speak in a way that invites comfort
While elsewhere on the Collective Health product a “you” approach was taken (i.e. “To do this, you should do this”). Research showed that in an FAQ setting, people respond more positively to the “I” approach—so I adapted tone shift for this product.
Diversify Q&A mediums
I took time in the exploration phase of this project to do extensive research on how people learn and ingest topics most effectively. V1 of this Help Center needed to be text-centric because of engineering constraints, but I built video and image additions into the 2-year plan.
(example) inquiry volume per 1000 members
Final product
Home level: choose a category
With the help of the design and research team, I grouped question-level data into five top categories. We added an H2 to each tile with key words to help members easily narrow down where their question could be most answered. We also designed a “Most people ask” question section below the tile level that populated with the top six questions coming in to our Member Advocate teams monthly.
Level two: choose a topic
Once a user chooses the category of their question, level two breaks it down into topics for selection.
Level three: find your answer
After selecting a topic, the user can choose from up to 10 top-asked questions. If they still can’t find an answer to their questions, we designed in an easy way to get in contact with Collective Health’s Member Advocate team.
Adding education where relevant
Collective Health’s goal is to create healthcare-savvy members through education, and human language. In keeping with this goal, I made sure to infuse contextual education around the Help Center as well.
