Transforming Frontier’s Help Center
Role: Lead content designer and product owner
Team: Frontier Communications
The challenge
Transform an outdated customer support center into an intuitive self-service hub. Rebuild the navigation, remove outdated content, and develop a content strategy to help customers quickly find answers on their own.
The solution
Developed scalable content templates organized by customer needs. Using call center data and analytics, I prioritized high-volume customer questions and collaborated with subject matter experts to reduce 270 pages to 70 pages — ensuring customers can self-serve and avoid spending time on the phone with customer support.
Context
We were in the middle of a large website migration and a massive brand refresh. I became the product owner for Frontier’s Help Center, a neglected and outdated knowledge base that was difficult for customers to use.
Goals
Customers can complete tasks without engaging the call center or chat.
Customers can quickly find what they need and are happy with the quality of the content.
Measurement
I leveraged Google's HEART framework to align UX success metrics with business goals. The framework has five categories, but I focused on Happiness and Task Success as they best matched our project goals.
Article helpfulness & NPS
Every support page has a customer survey. Customers can tell us if the content was helpful and recommend Frontier on a scale of 1 to 10.
Digital containment
The percentage of visitors to the site who did not visit the contact page at any time during their visit to an article page, click to call a phone number or initiate a chat from the Help Center.
Content audit
Like any good knowledge base update, it all started with a content audit.
My team and I combed through a bloated, outdated maze of more than 270 pages — documenting issues and flagging duplicate or obsolete content.
Analyzing the data
After the audit, I examined call center data to understand the top issues customers were calling about. Next, I compared call center data against our most visited Help Center content.
Finally, I combed through more than 2,500 free-form NPS responses and grouped them by theme, giving us direct customer feedback on improving the Help Center.
Together, the data and audit results confirmed several core pain points:
Customers were struggling to find answers in the Help Center, leading to increased calls.
The content was disorganized and wasn’t aligned with customer or business needs.
Our content was buried up to 7 clicks deep under a complicated hierarchy.
The Help Center was full of broken links and outdated information.
Site search was unhelpful and returned a laundry list of results.
Improving the content hierarchy and navigation
The old Help Center had multiple layers, including the homepage, category pages, category sub-pages, and sub-pages for those sub-pages. It was a navigation nightmare.
To eliminate unnecessary clicks and simplify the navigation, I partnered with UX design leads to construct a simple architecture:
Homepage
Category pages
Article pages
With a new architecture in place, it was time to define the hierarchy for each page.
Homepage and category pages
Our primary goal was to eliminate the need for customers to call customer service or engage with our chatbot. To accomplish this, we built a page hierarchy prioritizing a direct path to tasks and questions that drive the most calls and chat sessions.
Quick links: These are reserved for our top call drivers and most common customer tasks. Customers can take action with a single click. This section also contains a promotional component that dynamically swaps content for authenticated customers. The promotional component supports other business goals like adoption of the app, Auto Pay, and paperless billing.
FAQs: Customers can get answers to the questions that drive the most calls and chat sessions without reading an article.
Articles: Some questions or topics require a guided experience. Articles offer a deeper dive on topics and include step-by-step instructions.
Videos: The old Help Center was text-heavy and lacked video support. This section offers another option for visual learners.
Articles
The old article pages were text heavy, hard to navigate, and lacked visual content. We made the following updates:
Jump links: The original article pages were walls of text with no navigation. Jump links allow customers to navigate to a section of an article that’s most relevant to their task or question.
Images and videos: Embedded videos and images support guided instruction for visual learners.
Stylized components: I worked with UX design leads to develop components that support the needs of content authors and customers. Lists, content blocks, and accordions offer better ways to organize and present information, especially step-by-step instructions.
Related content: The related articles section allows content authors to curate related articles or topics.
Rebuilding the Help Center
Armed with our audit, data, and new content hierarchy and UI, I led subject matter expert interviews for each content category: internet, account, billing, phone, and TV. We presented our findings and walked through the data, sharing our recommendations with each stakeholder:
Remove outdated content.
Ruthlessly consolidate the remaining content to address top support topics identified by page analytics, call driver reporting, and customer feedback.
Reconstruct the content within our new UI to make it easier for customers to find answers to their questions.
Some stakeholders were hesitant to eliminate or consolidate content, but I was able to lean on the audit results and data to make our case. In the end, everyone was on board with the approach.
From there, I documented every page in Figma. I led multiple workshops and content reviews with the SMEs to reconstruct each category and address content gaps. Using the new page templates, I combined and rewrote more than 270 pages, reducing the Help Center to 70 high-quality pages.
Call center data and site analytics determined the order of the quick links, FAQs, articles, and videos. I also used direct customer feedback from our NPS survey to identify content gaps and make decisions on each page.
Before
After
Building the new Help Center
After rigorous reviews with SMEs, brand, legal, and executive leadership, we were ready to build and launch the new Help Center. At Frontier, I lead content design, oversee our CMS, and lead a team of web specialists.
I led the team in building 70 new pages in Sitecore and partnered with our agile squads to launch the new templates in production.
The outcome
In the first two months after launch, we saw increases in nearly all metrics. The big highlights included increased article helpfulness and digital containment, which directly supported our primary goals.
Customers can complete tasks without engaging the call center or chatting.
This was accomplished through a 14% increase in digital containment and a 34% increase in our article helpfulness score.
Customers could quickly find what they need and left happy with the quality of the content
This was accomplished through an increase in our article helpfulness score, an NPS increase of 6 points, and a 2% increase in time on page, indicating deeper engagement with the new content.
