We Removed Our Help Center And Improved Customer Satisfaction Over 15%

By Neal - 7/19/2021

We believed that having a help center would streamline our operations, or reduce the amount of support tickets we received daily. However, we soon had to rethink our strategy, as our help center did not solve all our customer complaints.

In many instances, users commonly do not find their answer that easily. Our setup, we discovered, needed revamping, as it lacked a human connection potentially leaving our users alienated.

We hypothesized that it does not matter whether a customer uses email, chat, or the phone to connect with a human, they just need to feel that someone is there to resolve a complaint or answer a question.

To test this, we removed the help center from our site and replaced it with a customer support service - one that focused on the following:

*Questions about subscriptions and how to cancel them.

  • Issues or glitches in our Spider Solitaire game
  • Questions about adding more games to our site.

Responding to Customer Inquiries - Why We Learn It Counts!

Because we used live customer support instead of a help center, we were able to:

  1. Respond to customer requests, on average, within 48 hours
  2. Increase our customer satisfaction score, or CSAT, from 65% to 73%.

That was truly remarkable. However, when we tested further improvements, we found we could do even better!

  1. By responding in 24 hours, our CSAT score jumped to 78%.
  2. When our customer reps replied in lightning fast times, or within 2 hours, the score spiked even further - up to 82%.
  3. Including customer chat caused our score to shoot up to almost 90%!

Anyone playing Spider Solitaire, in this case, continued to enjoy the game, as they knew they could count on our customer service department to help them with any challenges they faced.

When we began interacting with customers, one-on-one, we found out why users canceled subscriptions as well. They:

  1. Found it difficult to access games
  2. Did not understand some of the features
  3. Did not know certain glitches were preventing them from playing the game.

By placing an emphasis on customer support and foregoing the reliance on a Help Center, we increased our retention rate among our subscribers.

Why We Now Know a Help Center Is Not Enough

So, what is the best strategy for keeping customers happy?

We found that adding a help center to answer simple and basic questions is okay - that is, as long as you feature a contact page and chat system to field inquiries when customers can’t find a solution.

Because we have a subscription service, we also provide a cancellation page to make cancellations self-serve, and where we can ask customers why they cancelled or stopped using our product or service.

Just remember, TALK is not always cheap. You have to invest in providing live help services. We ended up settling on a help center to help navigate simple issues, but we make our contact us page readily available if someone wants to get in touch with us.