Help customers from your website
People visit your website for numerous reasons. To gather information, to learn about a subject matter more deeply, or compare you to your competitors and make a decision. But sometimes people are not going to get all the information they need from your website alone.
They need to read more about a specific topic in FAQ or knowledge base format. That allows those who do need more information or have specific questions to get them answered by easily searching for the question. Questions that can be answered by a quick search and not by them reaching out to your team.
Tools In Help Scout
Help Scout has two different tools you can use to give your website visitors extra help from anywhere on your site, and get them that help right in the moment where they need it the most. First is a knowledge base tool, which we call Docs, that you can use to create a site to host your help articles. Deeper details you don't want to put on your website, FAQ's that your team has received in the past and you are making easier for people to find, extra content that can help anyone answer their own questions.
The second tool is called Beacon, which is an embeddable widget you can add to your website. And while it can also be used as a contact form or to offer live chat on your site, it can also be connected Docs site so that people can search for a little extra help no matter what page of your website they might be on.
Knowledge Base
If you are answering emails from your customers, you probably have a good idea of what is confusing to people, the questions they ask the most. That is a great starting place for articles to create for your Docs site, write one article for each of those frequently asked questions you get. They can even be grouped together by subject matter on your Docs site as well.
Once you have published a few help articles within Help Scout, you can then add a Beacon to your website and very easily display those articles anywhere on your site. As people browse your website, the Beacon will also be with them, and they can open it at any time to get a little extra help as they need it.
Beacon
With a Beacon on your website, you can choose exactly how you would like customers to interact with it. Want to put them down a more self service path so that they have to search for an answer before they can reach out to you? Or would you rather show them contact options right away so that they can reach out to you first?
Working with Beacon modes, you can decide exactly how you would like customers to interact. The example you see above is a Beacon in self service mode, which means visitors to your website do not see any contact options within the Beacon until they have viewed at least one article or had a failed search. This is a great way to have customers help themselves, but you can also have the Beacon show contact options as soon as it is opened should you rather give people the option to immediately reach out to you.
And if you want to prompt people to get a little extra help proactively, check out Messages, a feature of Beacon that lets you push extra bits of information right out on your website. Explore proactive messages a bit deeper here.