Differentiate your brands with unique help centre experiences

Brands that fall under the same parent company have unique customer bases, branding and personalities. Why should their help centres be any different?

Plenty of companies have taken the self-service leap, providing a dynamic knowledge base that helps customers and agents alike. As smart self-service principles become an established best business practice, companies find that the help-centre dream state is more difficult to achieve if they have multiple products or services—or plan to in the future.

Support leaders at multi-brand, multi-product or multi-service companies confirm that a differentiated help centre is a key component of the landscape. There are plenty of knowledge base solutions available, but customers are raising their expectations every day. Far more than simply a tweak on colours and logos, the ability to split help centres by brand, speaking to the different products and audiences they serve , and the unique issues each might have, underlines a customer-centric approach to self-service.

If you’re a customer looking for assistance with a well-known clothing label, for example, you’d expect to find a distinct experience for that brand in an online help centre, even if it’s just one of many brands that the parent company owns. If the help centre isn’t differentiated by brand, your experience suffers—especially if there are dozens or hundreds of brands or products to choose from. Or, if you’re immersed in the virtual world of an online video game, it can be jarring to search for help within the stark reality of a corporate knowledge base. But a multi-brand help centre can improve these scenarios by giving customers the experience they want while supporting a large or growing business. Here’s how:

Ebates

Implementing Zendesk Guide gave the Ebates help centre a search function for the first time, and the Multi-brand feature enabled members to more easily locate articles within help centres differentiated by brand.

“Using Guide’s Multi-brand feature, we’ve been able to scale help centres by providing content and customer service experiences tailored to our specific brands—Ebates Canada, Ebates Korea, Fat Wallet and so on,” says Dylan Campopiano, Member Services VP at Ebates. “It’s a great option that’s worked beyond our expectations, and we can easily add a brand to the ecosystem and be confident it will work from day one.”

Cotton On: Breaking down silos before they even exist

Multi-brand functionality has been key in helping to avoid the creation of new customer service silos for The Cotton On Group, an Australian retailer. The company currently has seven help centres, all using the same template, yet customised for each brand.

Multi-brand provides significant behind-the-scenes benefits for the company as it streamlines operations. From the customer’s perspective, each brand maintains autonomy. Internally, the team can manage multiple brands through a single instance, ensuring a more uniform customer experience.

Fossil

As a relatively new line of business, the wearables division of Fossil Group, another retail company, offers more than 300 products. Supporting wearables customers is a team of more than 150 agents, under the leadership of Bernie Gessner, Vice President of Global Customer Care & Retail Operations at Fossil.

The Multi-brand feature within Zendesk Support allowed the team to separate workflows by brand. Multiple help centres, included as part of the Guide Enterprise plan, extends this idea and functionality to a self-service platform. Support and content teams can customise a help centre tailored to each brand or product’s unique customer base and challenges.

Online games: Scaling help centres alongside a growing audience

In the case of online games, it’s even more important to have a help experience that is part of that world—not a part of the parent company’s website or a different game’s environment, but a part of that world. Some gaming companies have already made inroads into their own help centre dream states. Take Nexon, makers of LawBreakers and Maple Story. With multiple game titles available to the public, they made sure that their out-of-game help centres were custom branded to each title.

Each of Big Fish Games’ 29 brands has its own help centre, allowing the support team to create a consistent but unique experience for each game, according to Jeremy Fair, Senior Manager of Operations Business Systems.

For scaling businesses, from a variety of perspectives and industries, different brands mean different experiences—and that means help centres as unique as they are.

Learn more about the multi-brand help centre functionality, among other cool new features, in Guide Enterprise.