Differentiate your brands with unique help center experiences

Brands that fall under the same parent company have unique customer bases, branding, and personalities. Why should their help centers 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-center dream state is more difficult to achieve if they have multiple products or services—or plan to in the future.

Support leaders at multibrand, multi-product, or multi-service companies confirm that a differentiated help center is a key component of the landscape. There are plenty of knowledge base solutions out there, but customers are raising the bar on their expectations every day. Far more than simply a tweak on colors and logos, the ability to split help centers by brand, speaking to the different products and audiences they serve , and the unique issues each might have, underscores 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 center, even if that’s just one of many brands that the parent company owns. If the help center 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 multibrand help center can improve these scenarios by giving customers the experience they want and expect while supporting a large or growing business; here’s how.

Ebates

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

“Using Guide’s Multibrand feature, we’ve been able to scale help centers 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

Multibrand 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 centers, all using the same template, yet customized for each brand.
Multibrand 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 Multibrand feature within Zendesk Support allowed the team to separate workflows by brand. Multiple help centers, which are included as part of the Guide Enterprise plan, extends this idea and functionality to a self-service platform. Support and content teams can customize a help center tailored to each brand or product’s unique audiences and challenges.

Online games: Scaling help centers 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 center 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 centers were custom branded to each title.

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

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

Learn more about the multibrand help center functionality, among other cool new features, in Guide Enterprise.