Since 2018, I have basked in the glory of knowledge management, and it’s probably one of my favorite things to do in a corporate landscape because it’s vast and inclusive of different skillsets (technical writing, video development, documentation, marketing, and, in general, producing really cool content). As part of my dabbling in knowledge management, I have also built a number of corporate help centers.
20 of them, if I’m being approximate. You kind of lose count after a while. A listing of 17 of them can be found by visiting the Online Customer Support Center for my former company. In total, these help centers have a direct audience of 25,000+ organizations and more than 31,000,000+ total users.
Let’s take a look at one: https://support.vectortrainingeducation.com/s/
This help center was built using Salesforce Digital Experiences (formerly Communities), Salesforce Knowledge, and a whole lot of Adobe Photoshop. When I first started working with Salesforce Digital Experiences in 2019, I was shocked at how lugubrious these “experiences” truly were. I took to Reddit, where someone came up with the ingenious observation that “Salesforce provides 2006 solutions for 2019 problems.” Honestly, I want that phrase engraved on a plaque that I can hang over my bed.
But this is what we had, so I learned how to use it. The top features of this help center (as well as the other 16) includes:
- Graphic navigation icons
- AI chatbot “Vectoria”
- Community functionality where customer questions can be crowdsourced
- Intricate structure on the backend for organizing content
- Multiple options for contacting support
- While I didn’t exclusively create content for this particular product, you can find some of my videos and technical documentation spread out across the site
I think if you can learn Salesforce Digital Experiences, then other knowledge management systems such as Zendesk are a piece of cake. I used Zendesk for a year prior to our migration to Salesforce, and while that first help center was simple, I always appreciated the system’s ease-of-use on the backend as well as the customizable options. Help centers built in Salesforce are a lot harder to customize, they’re extremely expensive, difficult to use, and, oddly, contain features that flat-out don’t do anything. Seriously, there are options to upload images that don’t go anywhere. Even our Salesforce consultant confirmed this and it’s just, like, dude…what?!
Makes the fact that I built 17 of these things over a six month period even more impressive.