Zendesk Guide - everyone knows it’s a handy knowledge base, but did you know that it’s really the one Zendesk feature around which you should be building your entire Zendesk environment? Let me explain.

When most people think of Zendesk Guide, they think of that handy tool that hopefully, and it’s normally nothing more than hopefully, allows customers to self-serve without requiring your CS team’s time. Whilst this is an incredibly important benefit of a thorough Zendesk Guide, it’s only the tip of the iceberg in terms of how Zendesk administrators and CS leads should think about the Guide.

In this article, I’ll detail the myriad reasons any CS lead worth their salt should place a robust Zendesk Guide at the core of everything their department does or sets out to achieve on Zendesk.

Self service

Let’s kick off with the obvious. A well written and clearly presented Zendesk Guide allows your customers to find the answers they need quickly, on their own time, without ever having to pick up the phone or draft an email, all the while reserving your team’s finite resources for more complex queries or irate customers that need some of that personal touch.

It’s not enough to simply dump all the data in hard-to-read technical articles. Your Guide needs to not only have well formatted articles, but also a clear article indexing structure. This means considering which Categories and Sections in which to nest your articles, so that a user who arrives on your Guide landing page can easily find the topics they need without even having to use the search function.

Creating a well thought-through Guide experience is the only way to ensure that self-service rates actually increase. The other possibility is a poorly constructed Guide that not only consumes time in creating it, but doesn’t pay that time back by deflecting next to none of your customer queries away from your team.

Guide as your source of truth

Just about every fast-growing company has the same dilemma; how to keep your fast-growing team updated with all the latest knowledge and SOPs when they seem to evolve almost every week. 

Some organizations opt for an optimistic SOP Google Sheet that inevitably gets surpassed by a V2 (and then a V3, and so on)  once it gets too messy to maintain.

Riskier still, some businesses encourage agents to keep up to date with all SOPs simply by keeping an ear out for changes pushed via JIRA or mentioned on Slack or Teams. This is a surefire to ensure an inconsistent customer experience as each agent delivers a slightly different answer to the same question.

Indeed, I was quite shocked when, on a visit to an outsourced call-center in the Philippines last year, I saw that not only where the agents ignoring the Google Sheet they’d been asked to follow but, instead, they all were keeping their own interpretations of the company’s SOPs in a Notepad file stored on their individual desktops, spelling mistakes and all.

For many companies, compliance risks like these simply aren’t tolerable. The solution then is to have a source of truth that is not only kept up to date but is always present in the very space that agents need it; Zendesk Support, of course.

With a well populated Guide, the sidebar in Zendesk Support, visible the exact moment agents need to respond to a query, will suggest articles that can inform them as to the proper SOP or instructions.

The more articles you have in your Guide, the more likely it is that the Knowledge bar will be able to suggest an accurate and helpful article to help your team.

What’s even more handy is that, once the agent has found the relevant article, agents can copy individual lines straight into their ticket response, directly using the Zendesk UI.

And what about ensuring your ever-changing SOPs are reflected in your Guide articles, given how easy it is to forget to update an article in a fast-moving ops department? Well, Zendesk has a handy feature for that too, allowing article contributors to set automatic article review reminders every month or two, ensuring your articles never drop out of date.

No Guide, No Answer Bot

As demonstrated by the Knowledge bar, the better set up your Zendesk Guide, the more Zendesk’s many features can rely on it to deliver time-saving solutions for your customers and agents.

Answer Bot is no different. In fact, the vast majority of Answer Bot functionalities are impossible without a robust article library in your Guide. That’s because Answer Bot relies on Guide articles to intelligently look up the answers to customer questions as they come in via the bot.

Although Answer Bot is intelligent enough to reword the language of your articles to make its answer fit the flow of the customer conversation, it’s not intelligent enough (of course) to entirely guess your business SOPs, and so it needs somewhere to look them up. Guide is that repository of knowledge.

Keeping your Guide up to date means keeping your Answer Bot accurate and serving your customers with the right information, saving your team, as well as your customers, time and energy.

Guide Articles can create macros

Just as the Knowledge bar or Answer Bot draw their information from Guide, a thoroughly set up and well appreciated Guide is the easiest and simplest way to create new macros.

If you’ve truly managed to ensure that your Guide is the source of truth for all your business’ operations, then it’ll always be the first place you update as processes change. Thus, team leads can quite easily get into the habit of regularly reviewing new or amended  Guide articles and creating macros using the copy within them.

This saves the need for two separate processes of writing a new Guide article and then also hand-crafting a related macro sometime later. Instead, the processes can sit side by side and, apart from a little tweaking at the start and the end of each macro, can almost be as simple as copying and pasting from your Guide articles into your new macros.

Summary

In conclusion, ensuring your Zendesk Guide is the backbone of your CS operations creates both practical and strategic advantages.

Practically speaking, a Guide-centric CS operation ensures compliance across the board, empowers your AI-based bots and also informs your agents, right when they need the information most.

On a strategic level, as a Zendesk admin, CS lead or supervisor, championing the Guide as the backbone of your CS ops sets the tone across your whole department that working smarter, not harder, is the way to deliver excellent yet scalable customer experience.

This mindset, combined with the practical advantages of utilizing Guide to the max, puts any CS team in pole position to achieve its targets and thrive.