Zendesk Launches A Help Center That Combines Self-Service With Design Themes Reminiscent Of Tumblr

Started by TechCrunch, Aug 22, 2013, 01:31 PM

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Zendesk has unveiled Help Center, a business app that resembles standard WordPress or Tumblr themes and serves as a knowledge base in a format similar to Quora: It becomes more refined as people add comments.

According to its own benchmark data of 16,000 customers, Zendesk customers are four times more likely to use self-service systems than calling a customer-service desk. Zendesk used that data as the genesis for Help Center.

Customers build their Help Centers on the concept of design themes that are common on website-creation and blogging platforms. By applying a theme, companies create their own pages that customers can use to get their answers.

Vice President of Product Marketing Amanda Kleha writes in an email that Help Center is meant as an addition to its platform, which is designed to encompass a company's customer service environment. She said Zendesk built Help Center from the ground up using Ruby on Rails and "a lot" of JavaScript.

The concept of knowledge bases has been around for a long time but only recently have they proven themselves as better ways to get quick answers to questions. To make them truly robust, companies like MindTouch are building services that use the interaction data to weight answers based on what is most helpful. In turn, the answers serve as insights for customers to make purchasing decisions.



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