ITHAKA Help Centers

An Empire of Documentation

In my years at ITHAKA (an education technology nonprofit), I went from managing one help center for JSTOR to managing 4. Through migrations, design overhauls, and building knowledge centers from scratch, I was the lead on all strategy pertaining to the organization's customer support help centers as our organization grew and acquired new products and areas of support.

With all of these sites, I worked with PMs in a Lean/Agile environment to have documentation ready alongside sprint releases.

There's too much to capture on just one page, but I've done my best to hit the high notes here.

The Flagship Site: Before and After

Scroll through the images to see some of the biggest impacts for our end users. But that's just the beginning. You can also see the other sites I took a strategic lead on. These sites are unchanged since I left, but you can use the Wayback Machine to see what the sites looked like on my last day, August 14, 2020. Did you catch it on my resume? After implementing my recommendations, CSAT improved from -491 to +217, a conversion of 708 total votes, over two comparable 90 day periods. I also improved the self-service score of our highest-trafficked site from 1:35 to 1:47.

Before

Visit the site as it looked like before my interventions on the Wayback Machine.

After

This is just the surface of the changes implemented. This change required me to establish transparent deadlines, identify and include stakeholders, and assemble the people who had the skills we needed to implement changes for our users and support teams.

Visit and Learn

Click each of the links below to visit the sites I shepherded through and towards organizational change: products launched, departments merged, branding aligned.

JSTOR

I inherited this user-facing, thorough knowledge base and made it more effective for our end users by aligning brand, updating code, improving readability. CSAT as well as the self-service score improved dramatically after these changes. Integrating the help center into the ticketing system also drove awareness and traffic to the site.

Artstor

I inherited this site after improving the performance of the JSTOR site. I immediately installed tracking and measurement tools so that we could compare performances. I also migrated this site off of Wordpress and into Zendesk, the ticketing system used by our support team. An audit removed duplicate, out-of-date, and underperforming content. I also used documentation to facilitate communications with end users about the sunsetting of a former Artstor product.

JSTOR Forum

I both inherited and migrated this site as well, when the support team for this product merged into a company-wide team. In order to meet the needs of this change, I had to make sure the site was not only aligned by code, integration, and measurement, but was ready to teach the new support team about this complex database cataloging tool. This required an audit and consultation with many subject-matter-experts to ensure accuracy.

Publishers at JSTOR

Unlike the other 3 sites, this site is B2B, and I build this one from scratch by interviewing the team that provided support to publishing partners, asking for any copies of emails, floating files, etc. that would address "repeat" questions or communications. I turned that documentation into an organized system for self-service, so that the publisher relations team could have more time for white-glove service. My deadline (which I met a few weeks in advance!) was pretty firm, since I had to get this site live, functioning, and integrated by the time I went on maternity leave.