12 ways to help customers find the answer in your help center

Most help centers have the answer somewhere. The problem is finding it. These are the changes that make the most difference, roughly in the order we'd make them.

Titles

1. Name articles after the question. People search with their problem, not your feature's name. "Why was my card declined?" reaches more people than "Payment errors".

2. Use your customers' words. Read ten support tickets and note the words people use. If they say "bill" and you say "invoice", use both.

3. Put the important word first. "Export invoices to CSV" scans faster in a list than "How you can get a CSV file of your invoices".

Structure

4. Answer in the first two lines. Then the steps, then the details. Many people stop reading once they have what they came for, and that's fine.

5. Group by task, not by menu. Categories like "Getting paid" and "Working with your team" match how people think. "Settings" and "Advanced" don't.

6. Link the next step. At the end of each article, link the task people usually do next, and the article for when something goes wrong.

Search

7. Read what people search for. Your search log is a list of the articles people wanted. Searches with no results are the first ones to write.

8. Answer the question, not just the keywords. AI search reads the articles and answers the question itself, with a link to the source. It finds "can I bill someone every month?" even when the article is called "Recurring invoices".

9. Put help where the question happens. A help button or widget inside your app, that knows which page the person is on, saves them leaving to search.

Keep it right

10. Show, don't describe. For anything visual, a screenshot with the button marked, or a short video, beats a paragraph.

11. Update articles when the product changes. A wrong article is worse than a missing one. Check the affected articles on every release, or have them flagged for you.

12. Ask "Was this helpful?" and act on it. Each "no" is a to-do. Read the comments every week and fix the top three.

Where to start

If you only do three things: rename your ten most-viewed articles after the question they answer, write articles for the top three searches with no results, and add "check the help center" to your release checklist. Then come back for the rest.