Enabling self-support in chat
Offering self-service options like Knowledge Base search allows website visitors to find solutions to problems quickly and enables reps to focus on more important tasks.Product Designer @HubSpot Workshop facilitation, User research, UX and UI design, User testing, DocumentationJuly 2019 - November 2019
Today, HubSpot customers are leveraging tools like live chat, tickets and knowledge base to create a quality HelpDesk experience for their customers. A big problem for our customers with small supports teams is they have high chat volume with a lot of repetitive questions. Reps waste time answering repetitive questions that could be handled with automation and self service. Customers wanted a solution that would help deflect chat tickets and improve the efficiency of their support teams. Partnering with the Knowledge base team at HubSpot, we set out to develop a self-service solution in the chat widget that customers could leverage to deflect tickets so they could focus their energy on more important things, like producing more support content. 
Research
The first step to kicking off this project was meeting the Knowledge base team who are all based out of HubSpot’s Dublin office. We decided that having the Knowledge base team come to Cambridge to kick this project off was the best first step. Both teams had a lot of data and information to share, so kicking this project off in the same location was important to both teams. With flights booked, the product designer of the Knowledge base team and I began designing a workshop for both teams.
The goal of the workshop was to make sure that both teams were aligned on what persona we were building this feature for along with how a customer would navigate moving between the Knowledge Base editor and the chatflows editor. Additionally, we also walked through what the website visitor’s journey would be when they interacted with search in chat.
Research alignment
We all left the workshop feeling excited and aligned. We had research goals & next steps:
Identify who is responsible for setting up Knowledge base & chat
Identify how customers would leverage this, if at all.
Identify where customers would expect to set up a self-service experience like search in chat.
I interviewed 8 participants, a mix of participants who had both knowledge base and chat set up, some who were using competitor tools, and some who only had either knowledge base or chat set up.
Research Insights
From the research I conducted, there were several key trends that were uncovere. Users expected to configure their Knowledge Base search bar chat experience in chatflows, (chat campaign tool)
Users expected to choose when the Knowledge Base search bar appeared in the chat widget and when it didn’t.
The user who configured chatflows was usually the same person who managed Knowledge Base
Users main goal for using Knowlege Base search in chat was to deflect as many redundant chat conversations as possible.
Design Exploration and iteration
With the research insights in mind, I began working on both the website visitor experience interacting with search within the chat widget and the HubSpot user’s experience configuring the Knowledge Base search in chat.
Takeaways
Since the implementation of Knowledge Base search in chat, we’ve seen that 69% of visitors who interact with a chat widget that has KB search enabled to find an answer to their problem without starting a chat or ticket. We’ve received positive feedback about the Knowledge base experience and are currently working on implementing additional self-service experiences into the chat widget.