Controlling your customers' support experience with brands

Brands tie together all of the customer-facing elements of the Kayako support experience. Although brands do most of their work behind the scenes – particularly if your team only uses a single brand – it's important to understand how all of the different elements fit together, so you can customize them effectively. 

In this article, we'll give you an overview of how brands work in Kayako, and point you to resources that will help you customize each aspect of a brand. 

Understanding how brands work in Kayako

When you're getting started, you'll have a single, default brand defined. That brand governs all the elements of Kayako that form your customers'  support experience. 

In Kayako, a brand is linked with your:

• Help Center domain
• self-service content
• support channels
• email templates 
• default language

Many teams only ever use a single brand. If that's true for you, the main thing to understand is that if you want to use a custom domain for your Help Center, or make changes your team's email templates, you'll do that by editing your brand in the admin area.

The real power of brands, though, comes in when your team needs to support several distinct audiences. If you're on Kayako's Growth plan or higher, you can create a brand for each audience you serve. With multiple brands, you can tailor several distinct support experiences for your customers, while still managing all of your conversations from a single support queue.

So now that you've got a grasp on the role that brands play in Kayako, we'll look at some common steps involved in customizing them to suit your customers' needs.

Building a branded customer experience

Whether your have one brand or many, the tasks involved in customizing your customers' support experience are the same. For each brand in Kayako, you can:

• Customize its domain – You can use a default Kayako domain each for each brand you support, or you can tell Kayako to use a custom subdomain. In other words, you can host a brand's Help Center at 'support.[yourcompany].com' instead of sticking with your default '[yourcompany].kayako.com' URL.
  
  Learn more in our article about adding custom domains.
  
  
• Populate the Help Center – Each brand has its own Help Center, where you can host brand-specific self-service content. You can use Kayako's customization features to make sure each Help Center is in line with the style of the brand it's supporting.
  
  Learn more in our our article about modifying the appearance of your Help Center.
  
  
• Tailor your email templates – Your email templates control the structure and format of your messages with your customers. If you're managing multiple brands, you can edit each set of templates to conform with the appropriate branding.
  
  Learn more in our article about customizing your templates.
  
  
• Configure brand-specific support channels – Once you have more than one brand defined, you can add additional support channels that are tied to a specific brand. Conversations that come in via those channels will then be automatically associated with that brand..
  
  Learn more in our articles on adding email, Messenger, Twitter, and Facebook support channels.
  
  
• Build out brand-based workflows – Your team's workflows may vary from brand to brand. You can manage that complexity by building views, SLAs, and automations that are targeted at conversations within a particular brand.
  
  Learn more in our articles on views, SLAs and automations.