Why brand consistency is key to an excellent help center experience
Brand consistency is a crucial element of any company’s success. Having an instantly recognizable brand helps companies to nurture trust, loyalty, and retention among their customers – and ensure a seamless customer experience.
Most companies appreciate the need for brand consistency in sales and marketing, across channels and customer-facing assets like the website, social media, and enablement materials. But this consistency can often be overlooked when it comes to a company’s customer support offering.
What is brand consistency?
Brand consistency means that your company shows up in the same way across every channel and resource your prospects and customers see, every time they seek them out. It spans your brand’s colors, logo, frequently used images, fonts, and tone of voice – anything that helps your audience to immediately recognize your company, and reassures your customers that they’re in safe hands.
“Brand consistency shouldn’t stop after a prospect becomes a customer”
Research shows that brands that maintain consistency across all channels are more likely to experience growth than brands that don’t. In fact, a 2021 survey revealed that 33% of 452 professionals from various industries claim brand consistency has substantially increased their company’s revenue, proving LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman correct when he says “trust equals consistency over time.”
But how can your company achieve a smooth, consistent brand experience across every prospect and customer touchpoint?
Consistency throughout the customer journey
Brand consistency remains just as important after a prospect becomes a customer. In fact, one of the most crucial elements of a stellar customer experience is a company’s support offering. To maximize customer experience, loyalty, and retention, the transition between each stage of the customer journey should be as seamless as possible – meaning brand consistency in a company’s support center is key, whether you’re talking about self-serve support via your help center or the way your reps engage with your customers.
“If you want to create a truly seamless brand experience for your customers as they journey from touchpoint to touchpoint, take a closer look at your help center’s capabilities”
Creating a modern help center that incorporates your brand
Injecting your brand into your help center can be tricky. Often, company help centers are hosted on different platforms than the rest of the website, and their capabilities are focused more on storing searchable, helpful information than aesthetics.
The Galxe help center (old and new designs above) demonstrates the value of distinctive branding
If you want to create a truly seamless brand experience for your customers as they journey from touchpoint to touchpoint, take a closer look at your help center’s capabilities. Does it offer most, or all, of the following?
Customizability
This means not only having the ability to decide the exact layout that works for your help content, but also having the flexibility to add your brand’s colors, logo, fonts, and images to your help center to truly capture its personality and make your customers feel at home with a seamless brand experience as they self-serve answers to their queries.
The Funraise help center (old and new designs above) shows how customizability can make a difference.
Multi-brand
For companies with more than one brand, having a simple way to create and manage multiple help centers – while keeping their customers’ experiences consistent – is a must. But to achieve this, many help centers require support teams to operate across multiple workspaces and languages, increasing complexity and cost.
At Intercom, we understand that the ability to seamlessly manage multiple brands and speak to customers in the language they prefer within a single workspace is key to an excellent customer – and team – experience.
“As customer service teams are asked to do more and more with fewer resources, responsibilities like brand consistency can fall by the wayside”
Cross-channel consistency
Today, no support center is an island. Most support teams are making their help center content available across multiple channels to ensure ease of access and convenience for their customers.
The challenge is making sure that the customer experience stays consistent across each of these many channels, whether your customers are accessing your articles via your messenger, within your product, or just searching for help on Google. But a consistent experience doesn’t necessarily mean receiving the same treatment across every channel – it’s about catering to your customer’s context and tailoring the content your customer receives based on the type of customer they are or where they access your help center from so they get the right information every time.
Ease of use
Adding coding to a support team’s long to-do list leaves teammates with less time to do what they do best – optimize their customers’ experiences. Not only that, but as customer service teams are asked to do more and more with fewer resources, responsibilities like brand consistency can fall by the wayside.
“Your marketing team will be laser-focused on your brand presence – your support team should be too”
Securing engineering resources to update the help center with every brand revision is inconvenient at best, and impossible at worst. That’s why CS teams need a no-code solution that allows them to effortlessly update all the major elements of a help center in a matter of minutes – giving them the control and autonomy they need to prioritize brand consistency.
Discoverability
Your marketing team will be laser-focused on your brand presence – your support team should be too. Tools that help you to prioritize search engine optimization when creating help center articles make it more likely that your content will be the first thing your customers find when they’re looking for help. Not only that, but prospects will be more likely to find your articles when searching for a solution to problems with their current tool.
Coda’s help center (old and new designs above) boasts high discoverability
Next-gen reporting
High-performing support teams are constantly improving and iterating on their support content, and they need granular reporting to reveal the areas that need updates, fresh content, or alignment with the company’s brand as it evolves. Dive into your help center content’s performance by examining metrics like content views and conversational insights to see how much your content is helping your customers, and how they’re feeling about their interactions with your business.
A help center that’s an extension of your brand
If your help center doesn’t offer the above features, it may be affecting your brand consistency – and your customer experience, as a result. Improving your customers’ trust, loyalty, and retention means incorporating consistent branding across every aspect of your customer experience offering, including support.
At Intercom, we’ve been talking to countless customers and working tirelessly to make sure our help center serves the needs of a modern support team and exceeds rising customer expectations. Is it time to consider modernizing your support tool?
