Pipefy’s Help Center Strategy
Spoiler alert: it is based on the user’s journey.
You may already know this, but when talking about marketing, a well-structured content strategy keeps people closer to your brand.
The message has to be precise. Otherwise, you will waste resources and miss opportunities.
It’s not different when we talk about Customer Education: if we want to empower people to solve their own issues while using a digital product, we have to offer the right content at the right spot.
This is why a customer education strategy influences user retention and can even help us decrease Support costs.
Well, how can we put this into practice?
I will share my experience in Pipefy building a content strategy for our Help Center.
Everything starts with research
I love UX discoveries because knowing users’ behavior and motivations will guide us toward better decisions.
In this case, we started by getting to know the most relevant articles to the first-time users, how satisfied they were with them, and, when accessing Pipefy’s Help Center, whether they could find the information they were looking for.
To answer these and other questions, we divided this investigation into 2 parts:
- Analyze the number of accesses and positive or bad reactions (quantitative data)
- Collect users’ feedback with a survey (qualitative data)
When we later crossed this information, we realized exciting things.
For example:
One of the most used features is also one of the most they struggle with. However, the help articles that give users instructions about these features have few views.
Why is this happening? Are users being able to find this info when they need it?
Another feature, also heavily used, appears within the most viewed articles, but they received a lot of bad reactions.
Why are users not happy? Is there any information we need to include in these tutorials? What can we improve?
As happens in many Discovery processes, this initial research has multiplied into secondary and minor researches. Matters that, until now, we had no idea or visibility of.
At this moment, we are working on them.
User Journey
To understand exactly where it hurts, we created a board and distributed all help articles along the users’ journey. With different colors, we identified the following:
- The most viewed
- The less viewed
- Well rated ones
- Bad rated ones
We also tagged those that are:
- Used by our bot
- Linked in Pipefy’s Academy
- Part of email marketing cadencies
- Inside the product, as help links
There it was! This overview gave us exactly what we wanted.
For example, we found an issue right at the beginning of the user’s journey and another related to one of the most used features.
Now, we had a direction. We knew what to prioritize and where to increase users’ perception of value faster.
Content audit
As we currently have more than 300 published articles, evaluating them one by one would be insane! So, we focused on the most viewed ones, especially those with bad ratings.
If you are unfamiliar with content audits, it means verifying if the content matches its goals, if it’s well structured, and what needs improvement.
In a spreadsheet, we keep a record of:
- Article’s goal: to explain the feature, or share instructions about it.
- Issues: outdated images, confusing explanations, broken links, etc.
- What to do with the content: keep, update, or unpublish.
- Presence in other materials: email marketing cadencies or chatbot so we can notify other teams if we change anything.
A plan is not a strategy
At this point, we know what to do, but what do we want to accomplish? What is going to happen once we get there? And how will we know if we are helping users or not?
Planning the next steps is tempting, but it is only worth something if you have an idea of where you want to go.
A strategy is made of choices — and also a series of renounces. It’s the path we believe is ideal for achieving what we wish.
We build this path on hypothesis, which in this case were:
- Considering that users have questions about features X and Y,
- the help articles related to them are inefficient,
- and these features are directly related to education OKRs (increase retention, ticket deflection),
- by focusing on these two topics, we believe we will contribute to the company’s goals.
More than simply defining what we are supposed to do, a strategy defines:
- Why are we doing it
- To whom
- Necessary resources
- Who else is involved and how much (is this person a decision maker or just needs to be informed?)
- What are the success criteria
- And what we hope to achieve
Roger Martin explains these items in this video from Harvard Business Review.
Tactical
Now, let’s get our hands on the hard work!
For this project, I tried a different presentation: I divided each step of the action plan into groups. These steps were divided into smaller tasks and we listed its assignees, stakeholders, and a due date, organized into a roadmap.
The stages are:
- Research: things that came out in the initial discovery and needed further investigation
- Unpublish and replace: articles to say goodbye to and change for others
- Update: pieces that need special attention and a makeover
- Create: brand-new content
- Test: new formats and approaches
- Monitor: what we should keep an eye on
Right now, we are working on these items, and I’m pleased to contribute to this project because I believe that educational content should also meet users’ needs, just like marketing and product.
Special thanks:
Ian Castelli, Isabela Saciotti, Eduardo Kano, Douglas Aliot, and Mariana Miecznikowski for their assistance and guidance. And also to Pipefy for offering the autonomy I needed to bring this initiative to life.
