The problem
Retain, our employee retention product, had a help center. It had answers in it. Almost nobody read them.
The articles lived on a separate site that customers had to remember existed, and most of them were written like reference manuals. So when a manager got stuck in the product, they did the reasonable thing and emailed their customer success manager. Multiply that by every customer and every new feature release, and a lot of support time went to answering questions we'd already answered in writing.
My role
As Customer Success Manager for Retain, I rewrote and expanded the help content and recommended the in-app tools that brought it into the product.
What I did
- Rewrote articles for people in a hurry. Every page got a one-line summary under the title, steps that start with a verb, and short callouts like "Keep in mind:" for the spots where people tend to trip up. I added the human context too, like reminding managers that not every employee wants a birthday celebration, so the articles helped people do the job well and not just click the right buttons.
- Put search inside the product. On my recommendation, we added HelpScout's in-app help button. A manager could click the question mark from any screen and search the help center without leaving Retain.
- Showed up with the answer when the product changed. We used Appcues to announce UI and feature updates in the app and link straight to the article explaining them, so customers learned about a change at the moment they ran into it.
- Designed the product to need less explaining. The employee milestone card shows a new hire's survey status (completed, at risk, or skipped) along their first 100 days, so a manager can see who needs a check-in at a glance. The "Manager's Daily Routine" article then turns that into a habit that takes a few minutes a day.
Live examples from the help center:
The result
Traffic to the help center increased by a factor of 8. Over the same 12 months, churn fell from 9% to 3.4% and customer satisfaction went up. Churn has a lot of causes, so I won't claim the help center did that alone, but customers who can get unstuck on their own are a lot more likely to stick around.
What the searches revealed
Getting people to actually search the help center had a side effect I didn't plan for: the searches started showing me what was confusing in the product itself. Years later, when I started moving into the Product Owner role for Retain, that search data pointed me to one of my first tickets. That turned into its own story, The Survey That Wasn't There.