Troubleshooting is a complex process of problem-solving. Although every business would like its systems and processes to run smoothly without any glitches, there will be instances when even its customer support teams will need well-documented guides to fall back on. However, long instruction manuals and boring static guides are a thing of the past. An accessible troubleshooting guide with a structured set of guidelines is no longer a good-to-have tool but a must-have.
The advantage of having a detailed, easy-to-navigate troubleshooting guide in place is two-pronged. The first is it lets customer support agents be more efficient in resolving complex issues quickly. The second is customer satisfaction resulting from quick and effective query resolution. It’s a win-win situation.
Why do you need to make your troubleshooting guide more interactive?
Now that we’ve established the importance of a well-written troubleshooting guide, let’s move on to why it should be interactive. Even the most well-intentioned of troubleshooting guides can fail to serve their purpose if they’re not interactive. Why? The primary reason is complexity. A troubleshooting guide’s large amount of data can easily overwhelm anyone, including trained support staff and customers.
There are four benefits of building an interactive troubleshooting guide.
1. Better adoption rate of your product or service:
Many users abandon a product/service when they don’t completely understand how it works. A difficult-to-understand guide with an overload of text doesn’t help the situation either. An interactive troubleshooting guide can take the edge off the complexity of your product or service, and it helps your users understand the content better and faster. The result is lesser troubleshooting time and more engaged customers.
2. Better user engagement:
Who doesn’t love a little bit of fun while resolving their issues? The same holds for user onboarding too. Having an interactive troubleshooting guide in place for onboarding your customers or training your internal teams makes the learning process less tedious and their experience of engaging with your knowledge articles more enjoyable.
3. Higher customer retention, less churn:
The hard truth is frustrated customers hardly come back to a platform. An engaging, self-serve troubleshooting guide saves customers time without making the additional effort to wait for a customer service agent to assist them.
4. Higher profits in the long run:
Lower troubleshooting time, better user engagement, a better adoption rate for your product or service, higher customer retention, and less customer churn add up to higher profits for your business over time.
Read, further: 10 reasons why interactive knowledge articles boost CX
How to create an interactive troubleshooting guide for your website?
Creating and managing an interactive troubleshooting guide is easy with DeepConverse AI. Sign up and log in to your DeepConverse account to start building your guides. Then, follow these simple steps for installing, deploying, and testing a good-looking, compelling troubleshooting guide for your website.
Installation: Create the guide flow
Step 1: From the guide builder tab on your dashboard, drag and drop the guide step node onto the canvas and click on it. This node contains four subsections: content, media, next steps, and additional settings.
Step 2: Click the add button under the content section. Here you can add or edit a title, a subtitle, and the questions you want to include in the guide, followed by relevant content answering those questions.
Step 3: Click the add button under the media section to upload pictures, videos, or both, that visually support or elevate the guide you’re creating.
Step 4: How would you like to move the flow forward? Add the necessary actions or options for your guide flow in the next steps section.
Step 5: Tweak the guide step to your liking in the additional settings section and save the flow.
Deployment: Add your guide wherever you like on your website
You can add a guide to your website using one of two simple methods: embed it directly on a webpage or make it open as a popup on the page. To embed a guide to a webpage, add its unique URL as an IFrame on the page. You can find the IFrame code snippet in the deployment section under the advanced tab in the dashboard. This section also displays the code and relevant instructions to deploy the guide in a modal popup, thus giving you the flexibility to choose how your users engage with it. DeepConverse AI also allows you to copy your guide flows across sites (if you’re using our multi-site feature).
Testing: Check how it looks
Once you’ve built your interactive troubleshooting guide, test it to see if this is the version you’ll like your users to see. To be continued.
How to make a troubleshooting guide more interactive with personalization
An interactive troubleshooting guide lets you capture expert knowledge while elevating user experience. Adding personalization also takes its interactiveness quotient up a notch. Personalization can be done in two ways: by personalizing the guide for your brand and by personalizing it based on user behavior.
Personalizing through branding and customization:
To make your troubleshooting guide a true reflection of your business or brand, customize its UI. You can create a custom theme for your guide on the DeepConverse dashboard by choosing from a wide range of colors and adding your brand logo in the size you prefer.
Adding images and videos:
A plain-text troubleshooting guide is a deal breaker. It’s hard to read and can drive users away. Adding multimedia is the easiest way to weave magic into your troubleshooting guide and make it more interesting. To make a troubleshooting guide more interactive, add attractive images or infographics to simplify or support the content. Add engaging how-to-videos wherever possible to help users resolve their queries quickly.
Offering a history of actions:
Enabling the history feature on your dashboard makes it convenient for the users to see the trail of steps they’ve taken through the guide. They can toggle between the nodes in their history and see where they are on the guide.
Using analytics:
Understanding users and mapping their journey can help you customize your guide flows for the best results. Your DeepConverse account lets you analyze guide transcripts, users’ actions, and metadata about their device, browser, and approximate location. These stats offer great insights for future changes to the guides themselves or their UI.
Conclusion
The value of a good troubleshooting guide is underrated. An investment in creating an interactive troubleshooting guide can pay off in the form of more efficient customer support agents and happier customers. Isn’t that what every business strives to achieve? If you need help with creating an interactive troubleshooting guide, get in touch with us.