Must-haves for a modern help center: Connectivity and customization

With AI and chatbots handling more and more support conversations, it might seem like help centers are becoming obsolete. But don’t be fooled – many consumers still have a strong preference for finding answers on their own instead of interacting with a bot or support agent.

However, when a company’s help center doesn’t work as part of a support team’s range of channels, or the wider company brand, it can affect your support articles’ discoverability, accessibility, and usability – and, as a result, your customer experience. Not only that, but unintuitive, inflexible help center tools can erode your team’s morale and productivity.

It’s crucial that modern, customer-centric businesses offer a range of support channels to meet their customer’s preferences, including a help center that resolves customer queries, aligns with a company’s brand identity, and ensures a seamless user experience for your team.

“Our easy-to-customize help center integrates with the entire Intercom platform – including Fin, our AI chatbot – making Intercom a complete human and AI-powered customer service platform”

Intercom offers the best of both worlds with our easy-to-customize help center that integrates with the entire Intercom platform – including Fin, our AI chatbot – making Intercom a complete human and AI-powered customer service platform. Over the last few months, we’ve launched almost 40 features and improvements across our Help Center and Articles products to help our customers create an unparalleled self-serve offering. Here are some of the highlights.

Sophisticated no-code customization

No more drafting in your engineering team for minor help center customizations every time your brand’s visual guidelines are tweaked. We’ve rolled out a host of advanced customization options, allowing you to create a visually stunning help center that aligns perfectly with your brand’s look and feel – without writing a single line of code. 

Change colors, introduce new fonts, or shake up the layout – our intuitive help center styler makes it easy for anyone on your team to make updates with just a few clicks. Check out how Galxe completely upleveled their help center to create a dynamic help center that’s a true extension of their brand. 

Before

After

Multi-Help Center

Many of our customers have different products or services within their business that require individual help centers. That’s why we’ve introduced multi-help center functionality in Intercom. Now you can create multiple help centers, tailored specifically to each brand, product, or service that you offer, allowing you to provide targeted support content based on individual customer needs – all within a single workspace.

Improved Articles editor with flexible formatting

It doesn’t matter how aligned your articles are with your brand if they’re not informative, engaging, and easy to read. That’s why we’ve enhanced our Articles editor with more flexible formatting options. Whether you want to add a table of contents, images, videos, tables, CTAs, or interactive elements, our improved editor allows you to create visually appealing articles that hold your customers’ attention and offer them the answers they need instead of overwhelming them with a wall of text.

Integrated at its core

Customization is just one essential element of a help center. Having an effective, personalized self-serve support offering means ensuring that your help center is connected and complementary to the rest of your tech stack. That’s Intercom’s speciality; when you publish an article in Intercom, it doesn’t just live on your help center – it shows up across all of our integrated products, maximizing your content’s value and increasing its reach:

• Messenger: Intercom allows end users to effortlessly discover relevant content. By embedding articles within the Messenger you can make them available to users wherever they are. You also have the option to target articles to specific audiences depending on where they are on your website or app so that your customers always have the most relevant information to hand.
• Inbox: Time is a scarce resource for customer support agents. Intercom streamlines workflows by making it incredibly easy to use articles within the inbox. Agents can quickly search and share relevant articles with customers, saving time, improving efficiency, and boosting customer satisfaction.
• Fin, our AI chatbot: Fin pulls from your help center content to curate detailed, informative answers to your customers’ queries, ensuring that your content gets maximum exposure exactly when and where it’s needed. This increases the utility of the support content that customer service teams invest significant time and effort in creating.
• Proactive support: Embedding relevant articles within outbound messages, product tours, tooltips and checklists means you can guide users through your product seamlessly, before they ask for help – whether they’re just getting started, or tackling a more complex feature.

Seamless customer experiences

Offering exceptional customer service means empowering customers to access the information they need in a way that suits their preferences. Whether it’s speaking to an agent, interacting with an AI chatbot, or finding answers on a help center, the goal is to provide a seamless experience with quick resolutions to your customers’ problems. Intercom makes it all possible with our complete customer service solution.

Find out more about Intercom’s Help Center here