MindTouch Launches Product Experience Platform: Proactively Supports Customer Success

March 28th, 2013 | | Featured Post, Press Release
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New Cloud-based MindTouch Software Drives Product Strategy, Customer Loyalty, Content Strategy and Customer Support by Transforming Product Help

SAN DIEGO, CA. March 28, 2013— MindTouch, today announced a new product experience software application that provides web-based self help, knowledge-as-a-service, user driven machine learning optimization and dynamic content organization with conditional and personalization capabilities.

“What we hear repeatedly is companies want to make the customer experience proactive, not reactive,” said Aaron Fulkerson, founder and CEO of MindTouch.

MindTouch, the company that applies web, social and mobile software innovations to product help, serves a range of Fortune 1000 enterprises and small-to-medium enterprises with software to power product help experiences as a strategic initiative to improve customer support, customer retention programs, inform product strategy and become increasingly effective with content strategy.

“With contextual and personalized product knowledge plugged into all customer channels, you make advocates out of your customers well in advance of them needing reactive help to a specific problem.  We believe MindTouch is the first company to offer product experience software. This is about a proactive customer success experience that stops customer problems before they occur.”


Introducing the MindTouch LightSpeed Content FrameworkThis new MindTouch cloud-based software includes a web based self-service help center, in-product contextual help system, seamless integration with CRM and case management software like Salesforce, SAP OnDemand and Zendesk and with it come powerful performance enhancing features:

With the launch of this MindTouch platform comes the LightSpeed Content Framework, an ultra fast and easy to use, specialized content framework.  Delivering multi-channel product help is now easier, faster and more effective than ever before. Content can be collaboratively authored in a web-based environment that allows subject matter experts from across the organization, or even external partners and customers, to contribute their knowledge seamlessly and rapidly without having to become experts in using an authoring tool. What is more, content within LightSpeed is dynamically organized to maximize discovery. For example, readers can browse linearly, across topics and are presented related knowledge paths to accelerate understanding.

Launching MindTouch HelpRank

MindTouch HelpRank is a collection of new proprietary algorithms that continuously optimize the customer help experience. By analyzing end user and support agent behavior across all customer channels, MindTouch HelpRank dramatically and continuously improves both search results as well as the organization of knowledge within the LightSpeed framework.

Now, for the first time, companies are able to quickly detect trends in customer support, help content, product experience and customer lifecycle and react immediately across all customer channels to improve customer experience.

Industry Perspectives On Growing Importance of Self Service Customer and Product Experience:

  • Growing importance of proactive customer care: 29% of enterprises are currently investing in proactive outbound communications according to the Forrsights Networks And Telecommunications Survey. In its recent report “Customers Expect Proactive Outbound Communication,” Forrester’s Kate Leggett wrote, “We predict that the range of channels for proactive outbound will increase, and will include service alerts, workarounds, customized cross-sell and upsell offers, and new knowledge base content.”
  • Customer Impatience: 71% of customers require help within five minutes (nearly a third demand help immediately) states the LivePerson survey of more than 5,700 consumers in 6 western countries, which then goes on to show that 48% of these survey respondents said if they don’t receive help within 5 minutes, they abandon the web site.
  • Revenue and economic impact: US enterprises lose an estimated $83 billion each year, reports folono, due to poor customer experience resulting in defections and abandoned purchases.
  • Corporate costs of poor social help: A survey of more than 1,400 customer care executives by CustomerServiceInTheCloud.com (a community of customer experience professionals) found that when social help fails, 40% of customers pick up a phone and call a company which costs $15 per call; 15% of customers go to an online chat session which costs $5 and 17% of customers send an email which costs $3.

Additional MindTouch Materials

About MindTouch

MindTouch is revolutionizing the way companies deliver help and product content by applying a decade of innovation from web and social software to make customer support faster, easier and more satisfying. With MindTouch, consumers and support agents get the right answers faster. Collaboratively author or convert existing technical, help and product content into a two-way communication channel that increases self-service support, agent effectiveness and customer happiness. As a cloud delivered product, MindTouch can be deployed in a day and begin delivering value that same week. Millions use MindTouch every day. Great companies like SuccessFactors, Intuit, Paypal, Autodesk, Hewlett-Packard, Palm, HTC, RSA, SAP and EMC rely on MindTouch. Read more at www.MindTouch.com.

Contact:
For MindTouch:
Bret Clement
Clement Communications
303.462.3057
bret.clement AT clementcom.com

Transforming Product Help into a Revenue and Branding Opportunity

February 8th, 2013 | | Uncategorized

How Social Product Help and Knowledge Base Software Boosts Revenues and Busts Churn for Large SaaS Providers Like Zuora, ExactTarget, SuccessFactors and Intuit.

May 18th, 2012 | | content strategy, Editorial, Featured Post, News, Product Help, Uncategorized
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According to a report from market research firm Gartner, spending on SaaS will reach nearly $15 billion this year and will grow to more than $22 billion in 2015.

With SaaS comes a new era in licensing and contracts.  Gone are the cushy days of long term blanket software contracts. Oracle knows this – it recently lost its Federal government contract worth hundreds of millions.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/howlett/feds-nix-oracle-blanket-contract/4067

SaaS providers are becoming the new norm – but they also face a common challenge:  short term contracts that can be year-to-year or even month-to-month.

This leads to a significant challenge: managing customer churn.

SaaS software vendors must constantly prove their worth because if they don’t, they’ll be burned by churn.

David Skok, a five time serial entrepreneur turned VC at Matrix Partners recently hit the nail on the head with his blog “Why Churn is SO critical to success in SaaS” http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/why-churn-is-critical-in-saas/

When you have to fight to keep your customers each and every month, the impact of churn amplifies.  In David’s example, imagine a SaaS provider that starts with an  MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) of zero, books $10k in revenues  the first month and increases $2k every month after that.

Now do the math on a 2.5% churn rate. In a few years, you are losing $64k a month. With a churn rate of 5%, that number is $90k.

Many SaaS Providers are turning to companies like MindTouch to combat churn rates, especially the phenomenon of “latent churn”. “Latent churn” occurs when the product actually performs a necessary function or has the features required by the consumer, but they remain undiscovered and subsequently the product is abandoned in favor of another where success is more easily achieved. As a result, the abandoned product faces somewhat widespread denunciation in social media circles, and suffers a reputational loss regardless of the fact that it would have served consumers’ needs admirably had they been afforded an opportunity to fully understand the product.

MindTouch SaaS customers like Zuora, ExactTarget, SuccessFactors and Intuit have learned that deploying social help systems:

  • Reduce customer churn: Social help systems nuture product knowledge, develop user expertise and creates happier customers by improving the product help experience and naturally builds brand advocates. This reduces churn.
  • Increase revenue with existing customers: Social helps systems build revenues in a number of ways. Most importantly, social help systems enable smart cross-selling of other products when the company is engaged with a customer.  In addition, product managers have a direct line into customer feedback, which improved future product development.

The SaaS world has brought great efficiencies to the IT marketplace. For software vendors to thrive, managing churn is one of the biggest challenges – but it is a challenge easily overcome with social help products like those innovated by MindTouch.

Product Documentation Updates

March 17th, 2012 | | Product
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I’m pleased to share that this week we’ve rolled out some really helpful new documentation at the MindTouch Help Center.

Using the behavioral analytics built into MindTouch I was able to identify the articles most desired by our users. Here are some of these articles that I expect to be popular based on what I found in our behavioral analytics.

Global Variables: MindTouch allows users to setup Global Variables that can be used to control the value of a variable anywhere within your documentation. Global Variables are beneficial in maintaining consistency within your documentation for things like version numbers, product names, dependency information, etc. Using the Global Variables feature within MindTouch you are able to define variables and values where the values will be in a single location so you can easily change the value, but the variables can be used anywhere within your documentation.

Custom PDF Styles: With MindTouch, an article, entire guide or collection of pages can be saved as a print ready PDF and this PDF output can be completely customized to the look and feel your company’s branding.

Customizing MindTouch: New articles on skinning MindTouch with CSS overrides.

Social Integration: New section on social signon and  social sharing.

Let me know what you think. Of course, you already have in a way thanks to MindTouch behavioral analytics, which is how I identified these as important articles to write and improve. Smile

Increasing User Adoption Rates and Lowering Churn

November 30th, 2011 | | ESP/SMA
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Providing top-notch customer service doesn’t have to involve lengthy back-and-forth calls with your users.  It can be much easier. In fact, bad product documentation could be hurting your customer retention. Indeed your help and product documentation is a valuable customer relationship management (CRM) tool that you might be overlooking.  Your documentation increases customer retention and turns your users into product experts whom would never dream of leaving your products. So, it’s more important than ever to seriously consider whether your product documentation is actually proving useful.
Read more…

Leveraging Contextual Help to Increase User Adoption Rates

November 10th, 2011 | | Uncategorized

Providing top-notch customer support doesn’t have to involve lengthy back-and-forth calls with your users.  It can be much easier. In fact, bad product documentation could be hurting your customer retention. Studies show that customers often drop a company if they feel their questions aren’t answered satisfactorily the first time they call support.  So, it’s more important than ever to consider seriously whether your product documentation is actually proving useful.

Documentation to Improve Customer Experience

The experience of trying to find answers to their questions can be incredibly frustrating for users.  Their level of frustration rises when the only product help available doesn’t really answer those questions or if they have to search a variety of sites and sources to find the right answer. If you don’t provide them with proper documentation, you’re essentially telling them that their time is worthless:  they will be forced to jump through hoops to find solutions to their problems.

Contextual_HelpContextual Help, in contrast, takes your documentation straight to your Web applications. allowing your users to access the information they want easily. Instead of relegating them to the call center queue or to messy Q&A forums, your customers find what they need with just the click of a button and solve their problems without leaving the context of your products. Additionally, they can send feedback on the information they received, so you will get quick feedback on whether they found truly helpful answers to their questions.

Read more…