In the era of AI and self-serve support, knowledge has become the foundation of customer experience. Good help content enables good support across every channel. It removes obstacles from people’s way with minimal friction, and it moves the needle for businesses by deflecting tickets and allowing support teams to focus on problems that require human intervention.
That’s why we want to shine a spotlight on help content that goes above and beyond for customers.
Our team spent the last few months poring over hundreds of support pages. Now, we’re proud to present the Stonly Help Center Awards for the 40 very best help centers.
Selection process
We evaluated each help center based on:
- Information architecture. How well is it organized? How easy is it to navigate? What are the most prominent elements?
- Discoverability. How well does search perform? How long does it take to find the right answers?
- Content quality. How helpful are the articles and guides? Are they formatted well, do they feature screenshots and/or videos and are they of manageable length?
- Look and feel. Does it match the organization’s branding? Is it aesthetically pleasing?
We selected five winners from each of the eight industry-based categories. The awards aren’t ranked: all 40 help centers are recognized for their excellence equally. On the awards’ website, you will find a brief description highlighting the key qualities of each winner. You can think of it as a Michelin guide to the world’s best help content.
Criteria
There are thousands and thousands of help centers and knowledge bases out there. To be longlisted for the Help Center Awards, they needed to meet certain criteria. We looked at pages that are customer-facing and publicly available: personalization features are fine (worth bonus points, even), but the entire help center couldn’t be behind a login. English needed to be the primary language. And the companies themselves needed to be at least medium-sized and belong to one of the following eight categories.
The categories were based on industries. We divided them this way because a banking app, an automaker and a university campus have very different needs when it comes to help content, and we wanted to avoid comparing apples to oranges. Still, we kept the categories broad so as many help centers as possible could qualify.
The categories were:
- Academia and institutions
- Banking and financial services
- Consumer electronics
- Industry, manufacturing and automotive
- Media and entertainment
- Retail and e-commerce
- SaaS
- Telecom, utilities and services
After initial review, we longlisted 545 help centers and spent months analyzing and deliberating. We narrowed it down to 118 shortlisted nominees that eventually turned into the selection you see below: 40 very best help centers out there.
Congratulations to the winners!