Managing themes in Zendesk should not be underestimated. On day one of a new Zendesk environment at a small business, it might seem as simple as updating a logo and tweaking some brand colors. Most Zendesk admins, however, know that there’s so much more to it than that. A much more customized and considered approach is required..

New article layouts, fresh brand colors, device compatibility testing, inserting script and building custom forms - these are all common updates for Guide themes and, if not done properly, can create quite a headache!

Whether you’re lucky enough to have sourced your Guide theme from your in-house team or a contracted developer or, on the other hand, you’ve bought an off-the-shelf theme from Zendesk Marketplace, having a solid change management process is essential.

Let’s take a look at the best practices to keep your Zendesk Guide not only looking sharp, but running quickly on all devices, and without ever causing you unnecessary stress when rolling out changes.

Requirement Gathering and Sign-off

Although this should be obvious, you’d be surprised how many Zendesk Guide instances I’ve been asked to come in and fix because an over-zealous Zendesk Admin or CS Lead went ahead and made Guide changes without getting buy-in from essential stakeholders. This is even worse when there is then a major issue with the updates.

To kick things off, make sure you know who your stakeholders are. Ask yourself who might care or notice if you make changes to the theme. Getting input from stakeholders is one of the best (and simplest) ways to ensure that you not only land on the best outcome in terms of your theme changes, but it will also help you get buy-in more easily.

So many people want to skip this step as they have a “great idea” and just want to implement it. Trust me, it’s not worth it! Apart from ensuring any theme changes are aligned with your customers’ needs, getting buy-in means that if something does go wrong, your colleagues will be less mad at you than if you’d gone and done it without getting their approval first.

Sandbox, Sandbox, Sandbox

Whether you’re using a custom theme or a purchased theme, testing it out in the Zendesk Sandbox first is probably the most sensible thing you could ever do! Checking/building your theme in the sandbox allows you to:

• Identify bugs: It’s not uncommon for new themes to work differently than expected. Seeing how they work in a test environment, rather than your live environment, can save you a lot of gray hairs!
  
• Test user (and stakeholder) acceptance: Granted, only the largest of organizations will have the means to test a new/updated Guide theme with its own users before deployment, but don’t forget about those stakeholders from the last stage! Bringing your stakeholders on the journey as progress to your theme is made is an excellent way to ensure there are no nasty surprises (and thus rollbacks) on deployment day.
  
• Test performance: Even if your theme is seemingly undergoing only the smallest change, performance testing is a must. All it takes is one rogue line of javascript, or an image that hasn’t been compressed properly, and your help center can go from  a fast and user-friendly experience to your customers’ reason to fall out of love with your brand.
  
• Test compatibility: Again, this is such a tempting one to skip, but you’d be surprised how often a theme looks great on Chrome but wreaks havoc in Safari. Ensure you test across multiple devices, browsers and versions. This is the only way to know that you’ve seen your Guide as your customers will see it. Pro-tip: rather than trying to find an old Macbook, an iPhone 3, as well as a Windows tablet to test your theme on, search online for “test website multiple browsers” and you’ll find a plethora of sites that’ll instantly show you what your updated Guide theme will look like on your users’ diverse range of devices.

Stakeholder sign-off

Once you’ve done all of the above, you’re ready to get the greenlight. Sticking to those best practices means no nasty surprises when you sit down with your stakeholders and show them the final version, ready for deployment. Although this step can seem like a pain, it often takes someone who’s worked less closely on the theme updates to spot something obvious that might have been missed.

Rollback plan

You’ve tested your updated theme extensively, got stakeholder sign-off and are now ready to go. The next step then is to deploy, right? Well, not quite! Despite testing in the sandbox, things can still go awry when replicated into production. Save yourself a ton of stress (in the event of something going wrong) and spend just 15 minutes working out how you’ll roll back to your stable version of your Guide theme if you need to.

It’s also worth discussing with your stakeholders how big a problem you’re all willing to put up with and fix in production (without rolling back), versus those major problems that require urgent rollback. This decision could be based on time required to fix the issue in production (depending on when you’ve deployed, see the next section), or how likely the issue is to cause problems for your customers.

Either way, you’ll want to know how you’ll roll back if you really need to!

Deployment

With a rollback plan in hand, the final step is to deploy. This one’s a personal preference, but I suggest deploying at a quiet time in terms of user numbers. This way, if anything does land differently in production than in your sandbox, it will impact the smallest number of users and cause you less stress in trying to remedy it.

Of course, you have to weigh up whether staying up until 4am is a necessary mitigation, or whether something as reasonable as 7am is the best of both worlds; reduced user numbers but without ruining your sleep cycle!

Monitoring

Even if everything seems like it’s fine and dandy with your deployed Guide theme, I recommend keeping your ear to the ground in case you pick up on any small but important issues with it. This could come from customer complaints, agent comments or your own observations. Although your job is largely done, the job of a Zendesk admin is never truly finished, so don’t switch off at this final crucial stage!

Summary

That’s it - you’ve just led and executed a controlled, collaborative deployment of your Zendesk Guide theme, nice work!

To summarize, although updating and deploying Zendesk Guide themes can be a fun and creative experience, taking the time to be diligent, get stakeholder buy-in at all stages, test thoroughly and come up with a robust plan for deployment (and potentially rolling back) is the only way to ensure your shiny new Guide theme deploys without a hitch. Happy theme building!

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