{"id":11263,"date":"2016-12-06T16:19:38","date_gmt":"2016-12-06T16:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.intercom.com\/?p=11263"},"modified":"2020-12-12T20:46:56","modified_gmt":"2020-12-12T20:46:56","slug":"educate-scale-customer-support","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/educate-scale-customer-support\/","title":{"rendered":"Announcing Educate: what a knowledge base should be"},"content":{"rendered":"

Up to now Intercom has focused on making personal, relevant conversations the cornerstone of great support. But often the best route to an answer is through the customer helping themselves.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s better for everyone: your customers get the quick, easy answers they need and your team can concentrate instead on questions that are hard to resolve. This means you\u2019re having the right type of conversations<\/a>. Everybody wins.<\/p>\n

Most support tools offer a static, monolithic knowledge base<\/a> as a way to deflect customers, hoping they find the answer for themselves. These knowledge bases offer an impersonal, out of date, deliberate dead end whose sole purpose is to keep support costs down. They don\u2019t feel like a tool for delivering world class support to customers. So when we looked at building a product for customers to get those fast, easy answers themselves, we knew there had to be a better way.<\/p>\n

Today we\u2019re announcing Educate<\/a>, a brand new Intercom product, which allows you to deliver help content to your customers whenever and wherever they might need it. We focused on four themes:<\/p>\n

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  1. Embedded content:<\/strong> your help content doesn\u2019t just live in a help center, it can be shared directly in conversations with customers.<\/li>\n
  2. Suggested articles:<\/strong> a layer of intelligence powered by machine learning which suggests relevant articles to share with customers.<\/li>\n
  3. Actionable feedback:<\/strong> use what customers tell you to know exactly how to improve and what to write next.<\/li>\n
  4. No dead ends:<\/strong> your customers always have a way to get in touch with a real person.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    \"With<\/p>\n

    Educate’s help center lets your customers find answers on their own, so you can spend time on problems that really need solving.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

    Self-service is more than a help center<\/h2>\n

    Today most people think that customer self-service equals a help center. It\u2019s the place that self-serve happens, right? But no single channel should ever dominate your approach to support. A help center disconnected from the broader support team, and the customer\u2019s support experience, is just a neglected repository of information \u2013 sometimes helpful, often not.<\/p>\n

    We\u2019ve written and spoken before about why cards, not websites, are the future of the web<\/a>; about why you should build a system, not just a static destination<\/a>. That\u2019s what we\u2019ve done with Educate.<\/p>\n

    People increasingly expect they shouldn\u2019t have to go to a single pre-determined location to find the information they want. So why should help content live in a siloed environment? It should be capable of being automatically surfaced when and where it\u2019s needed to help most. Content is the atomic building block of self-serve support<\/a>. The help center is just one vehicle for delivering that content. That\u2019s why we put so much effort into building a content importer<\/a> into Educate, so you can pull in your existing help content from Zendesk, Desk.com, Help Scout and other knowledge base products. Once you have the building blocks, you can quickly see the benefits of a systems approach.<\/p>\n

    Conversations are a natural home for help content<\/h2>\n

    When people think of great customer support they don\u2019t think of processes and channels, they think about experiences and outcomes. Some prefer email, some want to chat, some like to help themselves, but that\u2019s not what makes the experience great. A great customer experience comes from being listened to and having problems solved quickly.<\/p>\n

    The first problem we wanted to solve was how to insert content into the support conversations you are already having with customers.<\/p>\n