Recent studies concluded by Greenfield Online, Datamonitor, Ovum analysts and Genesys, concluded that companies in the United States lose about $83 billion annually in product abandonment, customer churn and defections due to customer support failures. Globally, across the 16 largest economies, the total loss to support failure was $338 billion annually. The main reason these losses continue is a lack of actionable insight to the consumers’ support expectations and the real customer experience with products. Companies using twenty year old static support architecture, commonly referred to as Help 1.0 environments, are virtually blind to their customers’ sense of product and support fulfillment and are considered by support industry experts to be particularly vulnerable to support failures.
Many companies operating these Help 1.0 environments today are managing their help documentation through CMS platforms like IXIAsoft, SDL TriSoft, SDL LiveContent, DocZone, Astoria, Componize and other DITA XML based products. Though these are powerful tools, and represent a significant investment in document and knowledgebase asset management, they have fallen short of their full ability to empower support leaders with insight because they’re typically tasked to publish to static Help 1.0 dead end publishing points like PDFs, CD-ROMs, and HTML.
However, customer expectations for support have evolved far and away beyond the limited capabilities of the Help 1.0 environment and increasingly over the last couple of years, thought leaders in support have been struggling with ever increasing demands to meet the evolving support expectations of their customers while adapting to fast-paced changes in the product environment. Help 1.0 environments do little to nothing to inform content strategists, support or product executives of impending support failures, much less growing hot-spots. This absence of insight has had sudden and catastrophic impacts on several companies across all industries, but none seem to feel it more than the technologies, software, dot-coms, and web based services.
In these sectors, among companies entrenched in Help 1.0 environments, leadership remained sales driven, pushing forward without having the customers’ needs in focus. For many, support failures were inevitable and consequences often expanded outside the companies’ firewalls which made recovery extremely long, painful, and costly, especially in the following terms:
- Their customers incurred unanticipated costs.
- User dis-satisfaction exploded onto forums, review sites and in some instances, the press.
- Partner, employee, executive and investor confidence declined sharply.
- Product abandonment rates escalated off scale as customers flocked to competitors.
- “Loss of reputation” translated heavily into losses in revenue and opportunities;
- and high costs in reputation recovery modalities (PR, advertising, recovery pricing, remedial actions, ect.)
Surprisingly, there are more companies than you’d think that still choose to operate in the murky and risk prone Help 1.0 paradigm.
However, thousands of other companies have found the perfect way to augment their CCMS investment by using MindTouch as a publishing end point to offer their customers an engaging social, collaborative and analytics rich environment for end users; which not only presents an ideal, user friendly place for customers to easily access and navigate highly relevant and easy to understand information; but also allows support and product executives to gain extraordinary insight into their customers’ sense of support satisfaction and product fulfillment by measuring behaviors around their documentation.
For these MindTouch users the impact was immediate and clear. It became possible to significantly enhance the support experience and to measure and understand the business impact of support quality via documentation and knowledge assets. The results of simply layering MindTouch on top of a CCMS investment were simply incredible:
- Increased product satisfaction by as much as 77%
- Increased user adoption and add-on sales by as much as 89%
- Transformed simple users into product experts and advocates in the workplace and the social marketplace.
- Gained actionable insight into their user’s total sense of product fulfillment.
- Significantly increased sales, cross-sells and upgrades.
Furthermore, from a purely support point of view, implementing a MindTouch powered social support environment also leveraged the following benefits out of previously dormant document and knowledge assets:
- Increased support satisfaction by as much as 88%;
- Reduced support outreach by as much as 96%;
- Reduced support costs from an average $155.00 per ticket to 5 cents per ticket.
With results like these, it’s clear that MindTouch not only defends revenues by bridging the gap between the customers’ support expectations and their actual experience, and thus preventing costly support failures; they’ve innovated smartly from within the gap to create new revenue and opportunity streams and reduce costs by giving document and knowledge assets a life on the web.
MindTouch collaborated with the Gilbane Group, the Society for Technical Communicators (STC), customers and several industry experts to develop a toolkit that provides a “how-to” for re-purposing Componentized Content Management Systems (CCMS’s like SDL Trisoft, SDL LiveContent, IXIAsoft, DocZone, Compenize, Astoria software, etc) by adding a social publishing layer. This benefits your users in profound and measurable ways. If you use a CCMS and care about your users, you will want this toolkit. Download the Socializing your support and techcomm toolkit.
