Customizing Zendesk Support: Best practices for UX

In Part 1, we examined how some of our customers customize their Zendesks to encourage self-service through more effective search. This included placing the search bar front and center and utilizing search enhancements.

Sometimes, though, users aren't sure what they're looking for. In some cases, they might prefer to explore support resources for tips, tricks, and other information.

In Part 2 of our Customizing Your Zendesk series, we look at how some of our customers organize, design, and manage their self-service support content to enable users to find what's relevant for them.

Categorizing content into meaningful groups is a great way to guide users to what they want. Distinct categories enable users to find popular content, like getting started guides, new features, and other resources. For example, Artists.MTV organized their support portal by five main product features. Another way to organize support content is by FAQs and hot topics.

Zendesk has built-in forum and search analytics that allow our customers to see what content their users are looking at and the keywords they're searching for. They use these insights to perform optimizations, like adding tags to relevant articles and updating content that's more appropriate for users' needs.

Take a look at how these three Zendesk customers--Foursquare, Artists.MTV, and Causes--have organized and designed their support portals.

Visit the Foursquare help center portal.

Visit the Artists.MTV support portal.

Visit the Causes support portal.

Another tip: For customers enjoying our Enterprise plan, take advantage of the topic boosting feature, which allows you to add relevant search phrases to your topics. Find out what your users are searching for, then add those words and phrases to your topics to push them higher up in the search results.