Why your help center keeps getting worse, and what we do to fix it

Most Help Centers I look at have the opposite problem their owners think they have. Leaders assume the fix is more articles. Usually the fix is fewer.

A help center stuffed with outdated, redundant, or barely relevant articles doesn't help customers find answers faster. It hides the answer that would have actually worked behind eleven that won't.

#Subtract before you add

Before writing anything new, audit what's already there. Pull usage data and archive anything nobody's opened in the last quarter. If an article was written for a feature you don't sell anymore, it's not neutral clutter, it's actively making the real answer harder to find.

#What actually moves the needle

Write for someone skimming, not reading. If a customer can't find their answer in the time it takes to scroll past the first screen, the format has already failed them, regardless of how accurate the content is.

Measure whether the article actually resolved the issue, not how many people viewed it. High views and a ticket filed five minutes later means the article isn't working, no matter how good the traffic number looks.

Put help where the friction actually happens. A tooltip inside the product beats a perfect article three clicks away in a separate help center.

Treat a low helpfulness score the same way you'd treat a bug report. It's telling you something specific is broken, not that customers are impatient.

Don't hide the way to reach a person. If self-service fails, make it obvious how to escalate. Burying the contact option to inflate deflection numbers just pushes frustrated customers into your highest-effort channel instead of your fastest one.

#Where to start

Pull your help center's usage report this week and archive anything with near-zero views over the last 90 days. Then pick your five highest-traffic articles with the worst helpfulness scores and fix those first. That's a better use of a week than writing new content nobody's asked for yet.

This kind of pruning is part of what we handle inside Operate, keeping self-service content honest instead of letting it quietly bloat.

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Founded by Ty Givens, CX Collective becomes the support operations partner growing companies wish they could hire full time. With 25+ years running support, workforce management, and QA programs from scratch, Ty brings what she's actually built and run, not theory, to every engagement.