How to Create Resource Centres for Customer Success?
Table of contents
Resource centers are one of the best ways to provide customers access to the information and resources they need to succeed. These are usually like an online library on a company’s website and are built to empower customers to take control of their queries.
Tutorials, FAQs and knowledge bases, product tours, case studies, helpful blog articles, audio…
This article will discuss how to create effective resource centers for customer success.
We will cover topics such as choosing the right content, designing individual pages, and leveraging content to measure success.
By following these steps, you can ensure that your resource center provides value to your customers and helps them achieve their goals.
Table of Contents
- What are resource centers?
- Why should you care about resource centers?
- Why are resource centers essential for customer success?
- How to Create Resource Centres for Customer Success?
- Final Words
What are resource centers?
Resource centers are educational and informative content collections to help your customers navigate different aspects of your product and company. These centers can be considered a library where different categories make content more accessible – by enabling browsing based on your questions and problems.
Simply put, a resource center is also a learning hub for your customers.
Imagine looking for a book in a library that you frequent. You know where to find novels, where to find autobiographies, where to find research books, etc.
This is what a resource center should be like. Your customers should know where they can find answers to their questions.
You can build a resource center with different types of content, such as articles, videos, tutorials, and infographics.
Why should you care about resource centers?
Per Hiver’s latest State of Customer Support report, 51% of customers believe that getting support via email is time-consuming (and annoying).
Customers often complain of long wait times when they reach out to a company’s support team. What’s even more frustrating is receiving robotic auto-responses that do not answer any questions that customers may have.
If you cannot treat your customers better, they will eventually switch to your competitors.
This is why building a resource center is a good idea. Your resource center helps customers serve themselves quickly.
Let’s check out the 3 main benefits of resource centers:
- Empowers Customers with a Self-Serve Approach
Self-serve customer support empowers customers with the necessary tools and resources to help them solve their problems on their own – without having to ask customer support teams for assistance.
Resource centers are one of the best ways to let customers self-serve.
With just a few clicks,your current or potential customers can find answers in your knowledge base.
Cutting down the time and effort customers spend in figuring out how to use your product will improve their experience. Resource centers give them a sense of achievement and independence.
- Drives Higher Product Adoption Rates
As mentioned above, resource centers are great for nurturing self-serve customer support and adding value to your product.
There is actually a science behind this.
Let me ask you another question: Have you ever bought something from IKEA, put it all together on your own with extreme effort, and loved it more than the pre-assembled furniture?
If your answer is yes, then you basically experienced the IKEA effect. The IKEA effect is a cognitive bias that leads consumers to regard the furniture they built as inherently more valuable than the pre-built ones.
Why? Because they invested time and effort into assembling that furniture. They invested in that object.
Resource centers allow users to invest their time and effort to actively seek information on your website and try your suggested solutions independently. And because they will put in their time and energy, they will start valuing your product more. Therefore, they will return and use it more, driving your product adoption rates up.
- Boosts Authority
Resource centers should be your go-to strategy to boost authority. Customer support teams can prove their expertise in knowledge base articles, product guides, videos, case studies, and more.
Google rolled out a new “helpful content” update back in December 2022. Resource centers gather all the valuable and relevant information for customers in one place, so you will be able to attract more leads. Also, your rank on SERPs (search engine result pages) will increase.
Here’s what Google says: “The helpful content system aims to better reward content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience, while content that doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations won’t perform as well.”
Long story short, Google will show your resource hub more to people if your content is engaging.
To measure engagement, you can check if the time customers spend on your resource center increases or the bounce rate decreases. Adding social share buttons and inserting other relevant content in your hub also helps monitor the quality of your content.
As your customers refer to your resource center more frequently, your authority will increase.
Why are resource centers essential for customer success?
A resource center can be really helpful to onboard new customers, highlight important articles, and boost your authority.
But what does it mean for customer success?
Customer success is a proactive method that anticipates and provides solutions before a problem arises. The content on your resource hub can highlight how features work and help customers reach the desired outcomes as quickly as possible.
In that way, resource centers are the toolboxes your customer needs. You provide them the necessary resources and tools, then the customer takes the necessary steps to tackle the problem.
Therefore, resource centers help decrease the number of support tickets you receive and keep customers satisfied.
How to Create Resource Centres for Customer Success?
- Identify Preferred Mediums to Deliver Information
While it is important to curate the content your customers are looking for, it is also important to ensure that the content is in the form they prefer.
If they love reading blog articles, write them. If they do not enjoy video content, but already have some, turn them into articles. Instead of spreading yourself too thin and creating less effective content, excel at 2 or 3 formats and deliver fresh content that your customers will find helpful.
Make sure you tap into mediums that are popular with your customers. For example, as per an article in Forbes, Gen Z favors voice memos over text messages. So if your customer base comprises more Gen Z users, you might want to tap into the audio format.
Podcasting is expected to be a $4 billion industry in the next two years and the boom in audiobook consumption increased by 25% in 2021.
Find out what customers are demanding and give it to them.
- Create An Individual Page for Your Resource Centre
You cannot just embed your knowledge base, ebooks, videos, etc. into any random pages on your website and call it a day.
To effectively allow customers to self-serve, you must create an exclusive page for your resource center on your website where customers can access it easily.
You can make use of various available tools to build the sections in your resource center. For example, Hiver’s knowledge base tool can help you create and organize your knowledge base articles systematically.
Similarly, you can consider using Audacity to record and edit your audio resources. You can even pin them above your articles, visuals, or videos to ensure you cover all the preferred formats.
- Update Your Resource Hub Regularly
It is a universal and acknowledged truth that we gravitate towards the “new and up-to-date”. It is the same for resource centers. No customer wants to waste their time on outdated and impractical information.
Make sure that customers have access to the latest resources and insights. If you have a new feature to announce, create a new piece of content and share it with your customers! Monitor for any gaps in your content and create new content pieces to address those updates.
Still not convinced to update your resource hub? Knowing this will change your mind: New and updated content is seen as more relevant and valuable to customers, so they attract more traffic to your website and make your pages rank higher on the search engines. Although Google introduced a “fresh results” update back in 2011, it is still relevant today. People want to make decisions based on the information relevant to their experiences today.
- Curate Content Effectively
When gathering content for your resource hub, make sure to categorize every piece,and if you can, combine 2 or 3 of them in a downloadable form. Keep a spreadsheet of your URLs, and decide on your format and categories.
This part of the process is also great for customer success teams to locate and optimize old content.
- Promote Your Resource Centre
You’ve done the hardest part, now it is time to bear the fruits of your labor.
Coordinate with your team and promote your resource center at every chance you get. Providing different access points via social media, websites, collaborations, in-app notifications, and so on will make it easier for customers to access your resource hub.
Adding social share buttons also automates and simplifies this process. It encourages word-of-mouth marketing where customers themselves take on the role of promoting your resource center.
This way, your promotional activities won’t look too self-assertive, and customers will create social proof for your expertise. It’s a win-win!
Final Words
Creating successful customer success stories does not happen overnight, nor do impactful resource centers. Therefore, it is important to educate your customer success professionals before taking on such a multilayered project.
Ensure your employees are on board with your vision for creating a wholesome resource center that is aligned with your buyer persona. Then, you can test different formats to provide helpful resources to your customers and keep updating your hub to increase customer satisfaction and attract more leads.
