Today, Sugar CRM Launches their MindTouch Powered Support Center

April 5th, 2012 | | Featured Post, News
sugarlogo

Sugar CRM, the well known customer relationship management (CRM) platform which is “designed to help your business communicate with prospects, share sales information, close deals and keep customers happy” now uses MindTouch to power their comprehensive support center.

 

Sugar CRM brands itself as the “CRM Made Simple” and their new support site subscribes to this value.

Sugar has done an excellent job organizing support features into easy to navigate categories right on the home page.

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Customers looking for forums, how-to steps, embedded media tutorials or documentation can quickly and easily navigate to the correct page and find more specific information within Sugar’s effectively organized hierarchies.  Now that’s simple.

Check out Sugar CRM’s new support center for yourself at: http://support.sugarcrm.com/

6 Ways to Help Your Users Help Themselves with Contextual Help

March 30th, 2012 | | Customer, MindTouch, Product
Helping Hand (flicker.com/johnnyalive)

Wading through product documentation can be intimidating and downright boring, so users will often ask questions of your support team so they don’t have to deal with the mounds of information which may or may not solve their problem. However, you can turn that trend around by utilizing a contextual help system that makes finding answers easier. Below, we provide six simple ways that you can help your users help themselves by accessing contextual help.

1. Don’t Tell Your Users, Show Them

Rather than replying to user support tickets with detailed answers, send them a direct link to the appropriate page in your product help system where they can find detailed, straightforward and get this – helpful – answers to their questions. It’s also important to make sure that the page you send them to features related content so that they can continue exploring, which bring us to…

Direct users to related content2. Direct Users to Related Content

Each page in your contextual help system should link out to another page that has related articles, tutorials, videos, etc. This ensures that users continue to click through your product help as they search for and learn about particular features, helping them to discover more information on the things they want to know about.

3. Provide In-Product Help

Picture this: one of your product users completely lost trying to figure out what a feature in your software does. Or maybe they don’t know how to populate a field. Perhaps they just want to ensure they did something right..

Read more…

Contextual Help (In-product) as Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

March 26th, 2012 | | Editorial
credit: Flicker.com @cayusa

Driving renewals and growing the customer base are crucial for successful companies.  Customers throw a major wrench in the mix they don’t buy or don’t renew because they think you don’t have the features they want- and you do! We’ve noticed our email automation and marketing automation customers are especially susceptible to this problem. Proper customer relationship management is something that many email service providers overlook and cause them to lose customers. If you don’t want to be one of those companies, updating product documentation and providing exceptional self-service will significantly benefit your customer relationship management and drive the renewals and new customers your company needs for growth.

Make it Effortless for Customers to Find What they Need


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flicker.com/calpolkid
When a customer looks for a particular feature in your email service platform and can’t find it right away, they’re more than likely to assume that you just don’t have that feature. Forcing your customers to dig through your service to find what they they need sure to disappoint and drive them to your competitors.

Read more…

Increase Web Site Traffic with Qualified Buyers. How? Product Documentation, of Course.

March 22nd, 2012 | | content strategy, Tech Comm
Increase Traffic

It should come as no surprise that buyers of your products are using search engines to learn more about your products. They may be researching your space to make a purchasing decision or trying to figure out how to better use a competing product. You can actually use your product help to drive prospective buyers to your site. Indeed, search engines reward you for publishing product, technical and help content by increasing your search engine rankings.

If you’re only providing your help center as a service to existing customers, then you’re not getting the full benefit out of what could be your most important marketing tool for lead generation. So, how effectively are you using your product documentation in your marketing efforts?

Read more…

Take Self-Service to New Heights with Behavioral and Search Analytics

March 15th, 2012 | | Product
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Thanks to our instant-gratification culture, self-service is the easiest way to maximize customer happiness and support efficiency. In fact, nearly half  of all customers prefer finding their own answers to talking to a support agent. But how do you measure ticket deflection? How do you know what content users want? We’ve been trying to make it easy for our customers to answer these questions and know the real value of their self-service. MindTouch solves these problems with their advanced behavioral analytics which allow you see exactly what content users like, don’t like and what they want. It’s the perfect way to satisfy your users and keep ensuring you’re promoting customer success. Self-service hasn’t been this easy since the invention of self-service frozen yogurt.

Drive Customer Success with Self-Service  Search Analytics

The intuitive nature of MindTouch enables users to effortlessly locate answers with minimal support department resources. The advantages of providing customers with self-service resources can’t be ignored. Customers no longer need to tie up customer support lines with questions they could more quickly discover themselves. Even the best support departments have limits and cutting down on the amount of simple, repetitive questions allows the department to focus on more complicated, infrequent issues.

Glean Powerful Insights from Your Reporting Dashboard

MindTouch Behavioral analytics allow you to identify missing and low quality content, boost SEO and focus in on specific resources with pin-point precision. Don’t wonder if users have found the information they’re looking for- Know. The following tools aid in ensuring customer success:

  • Search analytics
  • In-search promoted content
  • Community scoring analytics
  • Content aging analytics
  • User activity reporting
  • User Feedback

You can find more about this in the product documentation on this topic at the MindTouch Help Center.

 

3 Secrets to a Healthy Customer Relationship: Give, Take and Share

March 13th, 2012 | | CCMS, content strategy, Customer, ESP/SMA, Tech Comm
Give your customers what they want

Every day at MindTouch we see companies come through our doors who find themselves with unhappy customers, low renewals and high support costs.

We’ve deduced the source of these problems to stem from poor relationship management. A relationship is a two-way street where the parties involved are happiest when all benefit. In the end, a social product help system resolves the relationship issues these companies experience and we want to share with you the secret to a healthy customer relationship: Give, Take, Share.

1.) Give:

What should you give your customers? In a customer relationship, what you ‘give’ can either be extremely influential in pushing renewals, or completely useless. The key is to give the customer what they want- not what you think they want. 

To begin, put a support platform in place that will facilitate your ‘giving’ goals. An online social help site is an excellent way to ensure your customers get the information and attention they want. It’s crucial that your online support site include a comprehensive knowledgebase that stores every technical document and media item that could possibly relate to your product. This process is much easier and painless when you get a knowledgebase with in-context WYSIWYG editing, collaborative authoring, versioning, permissions, staging and development of draft/approval workflow.

Just because you have all your content in one place does not mean you’ve given your customers something they want. It is crucial to organize your content into rational hierarchies with every document linking to related content. There should be no dead ends or dead links. This knowledge base must be dynamic and easily navigable otherwise you give the customer an unusable mess that will only result in more frustration, anger and fallout. Once you’ve done your best to give users the tools you think they need, you must keep tabs on what they’re ‘taking’ in order to understand if you have actually given them what they want.

2.) Take:

When users come onto a support platform, their goal is to ‘take.’ They might have never thought of their support usage in this way, but essentially their goals are to go onto the site, find answers to their questions and take away the knowledge to apply to their product usage. In this sense, ‘take’ is a wonderful thing because it means the user has found information they consider valuable enough to ingest.

There are ways to measure the ‘take’ on your social help site. In-site analytics provide an immediate and accurate report of customer interaction with your content. You can also use search analytics to view which articles are most frequently clicked on from a set of search terms and update your documentation accordingly.

Read more…

“AUSTIN” Interactive Conference Pass and Amazon GC Giveaway: and the Winner Is…

February 27th, 2012 | | Contest
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Thank you to everyone who participated in this contest. The response was overwhelming and we really appreciate all the support out there for MindTouch! We randomly selected the winners below and are pleased to announce:

The winner of our extra “AUSTIN” Interactive Conference ticket is Neal Kaplan from Zuora

Neal Kaplan, Zuora
Neal Kaplan from Zuora explained how their subscription billing system dramatically benefits from their improved social help system. Neal explains, “Now I have a site that other people can contribute to (both internally and externally), that offers great features that enable user engagement, and that gives me valuable data about page views and user searches.” We are so happy that MindTouch has helped improve collaboration, user engagement and help data. We’re also very pleased to hear how Neal experienced benefits of MindTouch on a personal level. When we spoke with Neal, he explained to us the online doc site he manages grew from 400 topics to over 1000 topics in two months. He notes that the improved communication MindTouch facilitated between departments helped expedite the breadth and ensure the quality of content that developed. We’re excited Zuora has seen such positive results using MindTouch in such a short amount of time and very proud to be a part of Zuora’s mission to ensure their customer’s success with their product.

The winners of the $50 Amazon gift cards are:
Read more…

The Eighty Year Old Technology that will Change How You Support Your Customers

February 7th, 2012 | | ESP/SMA
Vannevar Bush portrait

frustrated baby via Flickr by Niklas HellerstedtI recently had an abject lesson in how end user success is strongly correlated to a company’s success when I won a telescope from a holiday drawing. I’m not a telescope kind of person per se. I’ve never used a telescope and the extent of my constellation knowledge is Orion’s Belt and maybe the Big Dipper – or is it the Little Dipper? But after I got home from the party I was so excited to open the box and get it up and running.

Unfortunately, the telescope company didn’t particularly care whether I used the telescope or not. I say this because as soon as I opened the box, I saw a telescope in little pieces that needed assembly. Usually assembling things doesn’t freak me out, but when I took a look at what they called ‘instructions’ I was far from excited.

More doesn’t mean ‘better’

Included in the box was not one, but two instructional guides and a DVD. Let’s just say more is not always better. The documentation was like a puzzle where I had to hop from one PDF manual to another and then jump on my computer to download a CD which was full of more PDFs that were supposed to supplement the first two manuals. It was not fun, not pretty and by the time I had halfway assembled the telescope I just gave up. I put the pieces back in the box and went online to return it.

It’s called hypermedia and it’s been around 80 years now

This isn’t just about me getting frustrated when I was putting together a telescope, there is a much more important lesson here. We are now in the age of computers. And guess what–these complex machines allow me to connect to the Internet and interact with hypermedia (that’s what we now call interactive web pages), which Vannevar Bush designed way back in 1930 (see Memex) as a way to foster and accelerate learning and information transfer. Today we’ve taken the hypermedia concept even further by baking “social” into the fabric of the web. With this in mind, why would any company today feel it is appropriate to give it’s user a PDF- literally pictures of paper- and pretend it’s sufficient. Read more…

A Conversation with Corey Ganser: TechWhirl Interview at LavaCon

January 23rd, 2012 | | Awards and Press, Community News, Conferences

One of our own, Corey Ganser, presented “Who Cares about Your Content?” at LavaCon this year. An interview with Corey was recently published on TechWhirl. In it, he stresses the steps content strategists and technical communicators must take in order to prove their worth and get the recognition they deserve.  Here’s an excerpt from Corey’s TechWhirl interview: “Building the Business Case for Technical Communicators by Leveraging Talent, Skills and Passion”

Use Analytic Data of Content to Prove your Worth

Demonstrating value is crucial in the field of technical documentation. Corey suggests Tech communicators push project managers to include a content plan alongside their technology plan, financial plan, and product development plan… Backed by the data, “technical communicators can sit at the big table with the managers,” Corey says, and prove themselves as valuable resources for the company. As a result, a technical communicator can quantify the value of wearing multiple hats, and demonstrate how that their time, money, and energy are effectively being spent to benefit the company’s bottom line.

Corey continued by recommending that technical communicators prove their value to the company in various aspects. “People need to re-define their contribution to a company as a technical communicator. For example [technical communicators] often get caught up with buzzwords and instead need to think strategically as a content strategist about how users can interact with the company who produces the product.”

Documentation Should Help, Not Function as an Afterthought

In our interview, Corey focused on how documentation is often perceived as an afterthought. Read more…