Modern Retail uses Zendesk for our support and ticketing system. Zendesk allows our clients to create and track the progress of support-related items. It also allows us to document all key learnings in our Help & Resource Center. However, there are a few things we wish Zendesk would improve, so we thought we'd document them so they don't get lost.
- Zendesk SEO Crusade
Modern Retail is trying desperately to rally some community support to get Zendesk to make some SEO improvements to their Help Center. If you're a Zendesk customer, please click the following link below to cast your vote.
Zendesk Product Feedback - Sitemaps
Zendesk does not create sitemaps for all the content we write in the Help Center. This is a huge oversight given how important SEO is to a business.
Zendesk Forum Discussion - 301 Redirects
All the content in the new Help Center "lives" in two locations. For example, the following two pages are the same: (1) https://modernretail.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201108557-Flipboard-Shopping and (2) https://support.modernretail.com/hc/en-us/articles/201108557-Flipboard-Shopping. This is not ideal from an SEO perspective because Google could see it as "duplicate content". We would like 301 Redirects created so all content from modernretail.zendesk.com gets redirected to support.modernretail.com.
Zendesk Forum Discussion - Canonical URLs
The URLs in the new Help Center are not Canonical. Again, a very important feature for SEO.
Zendesk Forum Discussion - Ideas & Suggestions
We would like an easier method where our clients can submit ideas and suggestions via Zendesk. The old "Idea Forum" is no longer available in the new Help Center so this might be an opportunity to start from scratch. IMO a good model here is a solution from UserVoice which allows users to "vote" on enhancements using a specific amount of allowable votes. Users can allocate all votes to one enhancement, which increases the importance of that enhancement to them, or spread their votes across multiple enhancements. We love this implementation by UserVoice and hope Zendesk does something similar!
Zendesk Forum Discussion - Auto-Arranging Articles
The new Help Center cannot arrange Articles like the old Forums. The old Forums used to allow you to arrange the Articles based on a bunch of criteria. You can sort them in any order you want but this is a manual process instead of dynamically based on what the community thinks. Here's how the old Forums allowed you to arrange articles on the site:
Zendesk Forum Discussion - Hyperlinking Images
We need the ability to add hyperlinks to images. This was a feature with the old Forums, which is no longer available in the new Help Center.
- Spell Checking
"In-Browser" spell checking is no longer working within the HTML Editor in the new Help Center. It is working on Tickets and within the old Forums, but not the new Help Center.
Zendesk Forum Discussion - Related Articles
We'd like to be able to tweak how Related Articles is populated and even assign what Articles show up here. The "formula" that's being used now seems to provide only mediocre results.
Zendesk Forum Discussion
The above forum provides the business logic behind how Zendesk determines the links under Related Articles. - Resize Editor Window
While not a major deal, the new Help Center editor does not allow you to resize the window, making it a bit harder to compose Articles.
Date Created: 01/06/14