No one likes to call a support line. And not surprisingly, support agents would rather not talk to angry customers.

Customers needed to find product information on 8×8’s knowledge base and find that information satisfactory – without needing to call.

Fewer calls to their support agents meant valuable time and money saved. For 8×8’s Support Center, we devised a plan to increase call deflection, organic growth, and backlinks.

Unconventional Challenges

Optimizing 8×8’s knowledge base had some unconventional problems. Their website was run on a different content management site (CMS) than the main site. Also, the website was managed by the support team’s agency web developers – not the internal digital team. Our game plan was to tackle three issues:

Build a relationship between the support team and the digital team:

The support site was run by external devs, managed by the support team. Any changes we made would need to be run by the support team. Everyone involved needed to feel comfortable working with us.

Determine what optimizations needed to be made to the support site:

A standard full web audit to determine the critical weaknesses of the site. Identifying and creating an optimization plan around best SEO and content practices was the main project goal. Additionally, these optimizations needed to build synergy between the support site and the main site.

Educate and empower the support team with frequent reporting on KPIs:

Because the digital team did not own the site, we needed to display the results quarterly to show the results of my work. If they could see what we were doing was working, they would give us more freedom on the project.

Solution

Our solution to this project was a triple-pronged SEO optimization campaign:

Full, end-to-end on-page SEO strategy for the top 150 pages, each quarter:

Optimizing each webpage for optimal titles, headers, and meta descriptions. Each page was analyzed based on user traffic and keyword ranking.

Establishing frequent communication with external devs to provided related link and backlink functionally:

Massively increasing the number of backlinks to the support site from the main site increased the Support site’s authority. Adding associated articles to the support site meant that customers could reach the main site through the support site.

Set up reporting in Google Analytics to provide the results every quarter:

We created an easy-to-read dashboard in Google Analytics to show important KPIs: top pages, bounce rate, session duration, demographics, and more.