Zendesk Guide Customization: What Option Is Right for You?
One-size doesn’t fit all when it comes to your business’s customer support needs. Zendesk Guide is a great way to allow customers to help themselves to support articles and get the answers to the questions they have while taking the burden off of your support team. But what is the right level of customization to fit your needs? The size of your business, products and services, business model, and goals all play a role in determining what your company requires in terms of customer support and deflection.
Read further to understand the different levels of customization design and project sizes available for Zendesk Guide. Don’t forget to take our quiz to find out which is the best fit for your company!
Then, we’ll show how to transform your business by giving it a fresh, engaging online presence that blows away the competition.
Customers’ Expectations for Customer Support
Exceptional customer service is the difference between a customer who will return and share positive reviews with family and friends and a former customer happy to share their negative experience with everyone they know. Customers expect timely responses to their questions and concerns.
The type of support expected varies from customer to customer and depends on their persona. Some would prefer a traditional phone call or email while more tech-savvy individuals will want self-service and live chats. It is important to be able to provide excellent customer service to all of your buyer personas.
Zendesk Guide is a powerful management tool that allows you to provide state-of-the-art customer support to your customers while allowing your customer support team to tackle the difficult tickets.
Zendesk Guide Allows for Different Levels of Customization
Zendesk Guide is designed to allow for versatile customization with an understanding that every business will need and benefit from different features. Here at 729, we generally see customer needs for Zendesk Guide fall into 3 levels of complexity. We refer to them as T-Shirt sizes – small, medium and large. We can help you determine what the best fit is for your company right now, while planning for your future business goals.
YOUR PROJECT T-SHIRT SIZE IS: SMALL!
Small project sizes looking for basic customization capabilities for their Zendesk Guide implementation will have their needs met with Zendesk’s out-of-the-box theme or a reasonably priced custom theme from Zendesk partners.
Companies who fall into this category, typically have the following characteristics:
Have a low budget of less than $20k
Receive a low volume of customers and/or customer support requests
Tight timeline
Have a simple and straightforward content structure
They need to make only minor changes to the Copenhagen theme in order to adapt it to their needs. These changes could include logo, color, and font.
Have a goal to increase customer ticket deflection in order to take the stress off of their agents
Small project sizes typically use this as a starting point with plans to make improvements and enhance customization in the future as their company grows and scales. Many businesses in this category are either just starting out and have a low budget to put towards customer support improvements or need a quick solution to an immediate problem.
No matter the reason for falling into this category, you can rest assured that you can easily build-upon the basics when the time comes. Our custom themes offer advanced customization abilities versus the out-of-the-box Copenhagen theme.
YOUR PROJECT T-SHIRT SIZE IS: MEDIUM!
Companies in the Medium size category need a little more than basic customizations. Many companies that fit into this project size need solutions that integrate seamlessly with their website by offering single sign-on. Additional features, such as the ability to modify structural elements of the page templates, add icons into the design, or even change what viewers see on the sidebar of articles means that extensive customizations can be made to an existing theme.
Companies with medium size project needs have the following characteristics:
A modest budget of $20k – 70k
Robust brand identity requirements and goals
Moderately complex content requirements
Limited customer support resources
Companies in this category are often ones who are experiencing growth and potentially migrating off of another customer support tool in order to take advantage of the state-of-the-art features of Zendesk Guide.
YOUR PROJECT T-SHIRT SIZE IS: LARGE!
Companies that do not fit in either the small or the medium category often find that an out-of-the-box or pre-built theme solution does not meet their customer support needs. It could be that they want to integrate with third-party tools, provide a separate UX for different user types or want to modify the Zendesk platform for another purpose. This could be for account statuses, subscription services, etc.
These customers need a custom solution to fit the very unique needs of their business. Companies that need a high level of customization typically possess the following characteristics:
A very large budget of more than $70k
Demanding and extensive brand identity requirements
Highly complex content requirements
The need to integrate with various tools and systems for both customer service and internal business processes
Receive a high volume of customer support requests and/or a high customer volume
Companies in this category are often ones who are experiencing
Is this result unexpected?? If your requirements are pretty simple overall, but you got this result, it’s likely that you checked one or two things that would bump you up into this category. Tell us more about your project and we can help you determine your true needs.
Not Sure What T-shirt Size Your Project Is? Take Our Quiz!
What do your results mean?
YOUR PROJECT T-SHIRT SIZE IS: SMALL!
Your company can probably get away with the free Copenhagen theme, at least for a little while, or invest in a low-cost theme from the Marketplace. The Copenhagen theme allows you to customize your logo, favicon, brand images, and choose from a variety of fonts. Some of the low-cost themes will allow you to swap out icons and featured images.
If you want a pre-built Zendesk Guide Theme that is different from the themes you typically find, which are most often just another version of Copenhagen, then check out what 729 Solutions has to offer. Our theme layouts are designed to clean up and streamline the elements that are most important and move away from what users have begun to identify as the ‘standard’ help center layout.
YOUR PROJECT T-SHIRT SIZE IS: MEDIUM!
If the scope of your company’s needs fits in this category, you will most likely need additional features such as Chat, Talk, Explore, Answer Bots, Web Widget, and much more! You will also want access to the App store to determine if any of the OOB integrations will be useful to your business.
Enhance your customers’ experience without breaking the bank by contacting 729 Solutions to schedule a free consultation with one of our specialists to discuss simple yet impactful customizations that can be made to the theme of your choice.
YOUR PROJECT T-SHIRT SIZE IS: LARGE!
Your company needs a custom solution with all the bells and whistles! More than likely you will want extensive third-party integrations with your existing applications, tools, and systems as well as implement self-service capabilities for your customers’ accounts.
A custom Zendesk Guide solution will increase customer satisfaction while simultaneously decreasing the workload of your customer support team by allowing customers to help themselves and allowing agents to resolve the complex issues. Let’s talk about customizing a Zendesk Guide theme to fit your company’s unique needs.
Reach out today for a free consultation!
HOW DO YOU KNOW ITS TIME TO BRING IN THE EXPERTS?
If your team lacks the available time and know-how it’s time to save yourself money, time, and the hassle. Bring in the experts! When your company’s needs are extensive and complex, you need professionals who have the knowledge and experience to customize, deploy, and maintain your Zendesk Guide system.
729 Solutions is a proud partner of Zendesk with years of experience under their belt. Our specialists understand the Zendesk code language and can create custom solutions to fit your specific needs and requirements. Your goals are achieved more quickly because our knowledgeable team can skip over the trial and error stage and dive right into delivering your company results.
We are one of the few Master Zendesk partners with this high of a level of training and expertise with over 120 projects in our portfolio. Our streamline process of design, development, and deployment alongside our experience with integrating third-party systems makes us the go-to for all of your Zendesk solutions.
729 is a team of hard-working designers, developers, project managers, and solutions architects. We are problem solvers who come up with new ways to make technology faster, safer, and easier. We are builders who create experiences and products that people love. We integrate complex systems in the simplest ways possible. We help fast-growing companies and their customers do more.
We’ve been engineering amazing technology for 15 years and we want to do it for you.
Then, we’ll show how to transform your business by giving it a fresh, engaging online presence that blows away the competition.
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