Generation C and the New Rules of Engaement

May 24th, 2013 | | Content in Context, Customer, Customer Experience Strategy
chess

Business owners and customer service strategists often fall back on classification systems to better understand consumer behavior. It makes sense to try to find some commonality within a given market segment, but customers interact with each other so differently these days that the old rules of engagement simply don’t apply.

Altimeter Group’s Brian Solis says characteristics we’ve typically used to define generations X, Y, and Z are too narrow to be applied to today’s customers. Instead, he heads back to the beginning of the alphabet to designate the current flock of consumers “Generation C” — as in “connected.”

“To Gen C, experience is everything. What they feel about your products and services now and over time is shared through these connected networks. They know that other Gen C’ers rely on their shared experiences to find resolution. If you’re not proactively designing the experience they have or defining the journey that they will embark on, you cannot influence the experience that’s shared about your brand.”

Solis suggests you find out how users connect and communicate with each other, then be prepared to meet them everywhere they are. That means stepping out from behind the relative safety of your website and joining conversations on social media, forums, etc.

The goal isn’t to outshout competitors or stick your sales message in the face of every potential customer on the planet. The real purpose is actually twofold:

1. To remind users that you’re an authoritative voice in your industry. When you’re quick to respond to user questions or concerns across multiple channels, you’ll gain a reputation as company that gets involved and stays close it its customers. It’s a great way to build rapport and gain trust, especially if you’re in a very crowded industry.

2. To make sure information shared about your product is correct. The last thing you want is for customers to perceive your product as unreliable or difficult to troubleshoot. Unfortunately, it’s all to easy for well-meaning users to share misinformation while trying to help each other noodle around a problem. Get out there and make sure users are giving each other the right answers and don’t hesitate to gently redirect when they’re not.

“We’re living at a time when attention is the new currency. Those who insert themselves into as many channels as possible look set to capture the most value,” says Mashable’s Pete Cashmore. The expectations of Generation C really up the ante when it comes to delighting users with exceptional customer service. But be glad user are hyper-connected with each other these days. It makes conversations easier to find and a great customer experience easier to provide.

Image: Eugen Anghel

5 Reasons Why E-commerce Systems Need a Social Help System

May 16th, 2013 | | Content in Context, content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy

Social help systems can benefit nearly every type of online business you can think of, but e-commerce is one area where it really shines. Lets take a look at five ways social help improves the customer experience and how some companies are using it to build brand loyalty with their users.

 

irs

1. In-line help for complex forms. The Internal Revenue Service is famous for deluging hapless U.S. citizens with frightening help docs filled with algorithms, charts, and tables. It’s unlikely anyone finds these useful and they’ve probably caused more than one stress-related eating binge. Don’t be like the IRS. Offer users in-line assistance if they run into issues while filling in forms on your site. As a bonus, since in-line support is easier to keep current and updated, it trumps PDFs any day of the week.

 

 

passport

2. Access to why certain information is required.  Though the U.S. government flunks customer service 101 when it comes to complex forms, it got a help feature right on another one of its sites. The State Department requires a lot of confidential information from visitors who are applying for passports online, which can be off-putting for many people. However, clicking on the question mark next to each input field brings up an explanation of why the data is necessary — a particularly useful feature for quelling fears customers sometimes have about sharing personal information online. Snag this idea for reassuring visitors to your website or use it to serve up info on error messages people may stumble upon while they’re there.

 

 

Amazon

3. Offer support and troubleshooting for users to work through without resorting to the company help line.  Don’t assume your customers want to call your toll-free number for support because, frankly, they probably don’t. Instead, take a cue from Amazon. It gives customers seven different ways to get the information they need, with phone contact coming in as a last resort. Users love having a batch of options to choose from and you’ll love that you can cut way down on your trouble tickets and support calls just by implementing this one simple feature.

 

 

htc

4. Provide straightforward answers alongside related topics. One sure way to delight customers is to turn them expert users who can navigate your product with ease. HTC‘s online product documentation strategy includes offering extra product education alongside product support material on its website. Customers can deep-dive into topics related to their question or issue and become product experts. Long-term, these become the loyal customers and brand advocates all companies love to have.

 

PayPal

5. Connect people with a community of users who are working through the same problems and may have identified the answers.  Where do your product experts and brand advocates most often end up? Sharing their knowledge and expertise with others in online community forums. Paypal smartly adds links to its onsite forum and pointers to the hottest discussion topics directly from its support pages along with . That’s a terrific way to encourage users to help each other work through common issues and free up your support team for other projects.

Serve Your Customers Snacks on Twitter and Dinner on Your Website

May 5th, 2013 | | Content in Context, content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post, Product Help
dinner_table

While some of the MindTouch staff was busy attending (and presenting!) at the LavaCon Hands-On Workshop in New Orleans, there was a really interesting conversation happening in San Francisco. During its annual user conference this year, social media marketing software company Lithium opened up a great dialogue about whether customer experience is just a bunch of hype and ways companies that talk the talk can also walk the walk.

Lithium CMO Katy Keim throws down the gauntlet of shame pretty early in the discussion, noting that “95 percent of [Facebook] and 70 percent of Tweets to brands are ignored.” She says something is “broken” and we agree. At a time when social media engagement is crucial to your brand’s success, those statistics are completely mind-boggling.

So what’s going on here? Where is the disconnect between creating a good customer experience strategy and its execution? We’d better collectively figure it out quickly because Gartner analyst Jenny Sussin says social media platforms may soon become a primary channel of customer support.

Researchers over at Forrester are drawing the same conclusions. As analyst Kate Leggett succinctly puts it,

“Social channels are increasingly important. Online communities and Twitter have seen increases in usage rates in the past three years. However, satisfaction remains low for these channels, as companies have not invested in best practices for managing interactions on these channels.”

In summary, customers want to engage with companies on Twitter and Facebook so they take their issues and compliments to those platforms. Companies apparently know this but haven’t come up with ways to effectively manage these conversations, so comments from customers (and potential customers) are largely ignored.

This is not a good plan and nobody wins here.

Products that help businesses harness and manage conversations across multiple microblogging platforms are part of the solution, but a comprehensive strategy doesn’t end there. Twitter and Facebook interactions alone are far too limiting to take customer support to the level it needs in order to be effective. You need more.

Authoritative branded content and a deeply curated knowledge base on your website give you the building blocks you need to power official responses you offer in places other than your website. This will help you accomplish two important things.

Provide consistent and correct information. Nothing turns away a customer faster than seeing different answers to the same question. While troubleshooting product issues, it’s annoying to find conflicting answers among users. It’s unforgivable when they come from inside the company itself. A solid, in-house, continually updated knowledge base means your customers get the correct answers everywhere, every time.

Burn down information silos that hold your company back. In the early days of web-centric customer service, it was quite common to house product documentation in one area, techcomm in another, and miscellany like FAQs in yet another. It wasn’t the best solution, but it was based on the technology we had to work with at the time (read: not much).

Today’s tools easily turn mountains of disparate, siloed information into a cohesive bank of searchable data that’s easy to both update and manage. Customers and staff can find the right answers, right when they need it. That, friends, is one of the main goals of excellent customer support.

Twitter, Facebook, and the myriad other social networking platforms out there are fantastic ways to engage and groom customers. The people have spoken and decided that’s where they want to be able to talk with businesses, so go hang out with them. Before you head over to the social media snack lounge, though, make sure your house is in order so you can have them over for a full meal.

Image: Extranoise

How I Met Your Product Documentation (And Why We Broke Up)

February 19th, 2013 | | Content in Context, content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Product Help
HIMYM_Ted-3

Once upon a time, I was in the market for a special relationship with a product that would change my life. Together, we would rule the world (or my corner of it). It wasn’t easy, but I put myself out there; cruising websites, trying all kinds of makes and models until finally found my soul mate. I was ready to make a commitment.

Our first few days together were, frankly, pretty awesome. I was caught up in the heady fun of a new romance and I’d thought we’d have many happy years together. Then something went wrong. You weren’t behaving as expected and I wasn’t sure what was wrong.

I figured it would be an easy fix so I rushed to the computer and went to the website where we met, looking for answers. Reliable advice was nowhere to be found, but I did find a 164-page downloadable PDF your parents put together way back when you were born.

There was a live chat button, but no one answered the other end. I found a contact form buried in the depths of the site but it seemed so cold and dismissive. The FAQ support page was littered with outdated information, broken links, and technical jargon I didn’t understand.

There had to be another way.

I nosed around in forums where people in similar relationships congregated to share their stories. I was glad to discover I wasn’t the only one encountering the challenges we faced but no one could really give me any straight answers about how to fix what went wrong between us. Sure, they had a lot of advice that might work but the hours I spent combing the conversations produced more questions than answers.

Despondent, I turned to my friends on Twitter and Facebook but they were even less enlightened. Some of my buddies tried gamely to help but most of them just talked about how happy they were in their relationships with others who weren’t…you.

I tried to make it work, I really did. I did my best to understand you but when things got complicated I had nowhere to turn. When I needed support, I got headaches. When I needed guidance, I got none.  We’re breaking up. It’s not me, it’s you.

 

Write a Better Love Story

Sound familiar? Thought so. We’ve all been on the receiving end of truly abominable support documentation and no matter how wonderful the product in-hand is, there comes a point where you want to just chuck it out the nearest window. It usually happens when you’re left floundering around trying to fix the intimate object of your affection by traipsing through 20 different information channels to find one nugget of useful advice.

Take Garmin, for example. They’re one of the leading GPS manufacturers in the industry but you’d never know it from their customer support. They get off to a good start with a seemingly helpful support page but things disintegrate quickly. There are eight different PDF manuals for just one watch! The first two have a total 57 pages between them, for Pete’s sake. How are you supposed to decide which one has the information you need unless you download them all? Not terribly inviting.

Garmin

If that’s too daunting, feel free to browse though the 100-question online FAQ. Don’t bother looking for a search option to make parsing all the data a little easier. There isn’t one. Garmin sells eight categories of products, each with dozens of items specific to that category. Do the math on how many pages of documentation that company must be trying and failing) to wrangle.

Garmin’s not the only mega-corp with lousy product support. Roku is a popular device around MindTouch HQ but their documentation would make Ghandi lose his patience. Here’s just one example: There are six “Featured Questions” on the main support page. Five of them date back to 2010. ‘Nuff said.

Roku

TiVo, the TV time-shifting darling many of us adore, has such notoriously dismal product support that its user community rallied together in what we can only assume is a plot to keep potential customers from noticing. TiVo started its own forums in response, but it only added to the documentation confusion on its site. In addition to the forums, visitors can “find answers” in five different categories containing a whopping 47 sub-categories. Type “set up TiVo Premiere” into the search box and get ready to sift through 468 articles, one or two of which might answer your question.

TiVo

All three of these companies make wonderful products. Indeed, they’re so well-liked that they manage to have loyal followers in spite of the product documentation they offer to customers. If you aspire to achieve the same level of customer loyalty as Garmin, Roku, and TiVo, then start by not making your users cry.

What would a good customer support experience look like? We’re glad you asked.

Silos are for farmers. Get rid of documentation silos that run customers into brick walls before giving them the answers they need. A good support strategy seamlessly offers users all the product information you have no matter where or how they access your documentation.

The Holy Grail of Help. Let customers access troubleshooting steps and product documentation right where they need it, without having to leave your software application to find it.

No phone, no email, no problem. Allow users to offer feedback or ask questions right inside your documentation without stopping to email or direct-dial customer support.

Avoid analysis paralysis. The ability to easily identify customer pain points mean you can respond rapidly to their needs and learn which support materials need to be re-tooled. Detailed data on user search patterns is icing on the cake.

Cop to speedy tickets. Some companies swear by their ticketing systems. A customer support strategy that integrates with your existing CRM to allow agents to search, answer, and publish in real-time kicks up the ticketing process about 10 levels for better all-around customer service.

The common denominator among these things is that they deliver knowledge-as-a-service across all support channels rather than forcing customers to slog through cobbled-together advice spread out all over the internet. Sure, there’s a time, a place, and a need for PDF manuals, FAQs, knowledge base articles, “chat now” website buttons, and all the other myriad forms of support options. Advances in technology and software make it easier than ever for companies to harness that information into collaborative, searchable data that saves customers time and their sanity. Users are catching on to that fact and are even willing to pay a premium for it.

Customer service used to be an either/or experience: Users either looked online for answers, or called a support number. There weren’t a lot of other channels for businesses to reach their customers. Now it’s possible to offer several customer support options at once, and keeping them all harmoniously updated doesn’t have to be a chore.

Let’s face it, every industry is competitive these days and there’s no room for slackers. All things being equal, the support experience makes the difference between whether you and your customer have a long, happy life together or they drop you like radioactive waste.

What an Oreo can Teach You About Content Strategy

February 4th, 2013 | | Content in Context, content strategy, Featured Post
oreo-2

There’s already so much to read about the importance of developing good content strategy that writing another post about it seems like walking into an echo-chamber. We keep bringing it up, though, because it’s the number one thing you must do right now if you want to provide the best customer experience you’re capable of offering.

Content strategy is not only about good documentation, smart product placement, a busy blog, or an engaging Twitter account. It’s about all those things. Are you agile enough across multi-channel customer support avenues to respond quickly when surprises crop up in your industry?

Whether you watched Super Bowl XLVII or not, you’ve no doubt heard about the two biggest one-off stories of the night. The Superdome power failure and the fascinatingly delightful response by the people behind the scenes at Oreo.

Minutes after the blackout, 360i, the marketing firm behind the cookie company’s incredibly successful social media campaign, tweeted this gem. Here’s how they pulled it together so quickly:

“We had a mission control set up at our office with the brand and 360i, and when the blackout happened, the team looked at it as an opportunity,” agency president Sarah Hofstetter told BuzzFeed. “Because the brand team was there, it was easy to get approvals and get it up in minutes.”

Well, played, 360i. Well played.

Is your content that adaptable? Do you have you what you need in place to respond to unpredictable situations during your industry’s version of The Big Game? If not, you need to be proactively thinking about how your product documentation and authoritative content can be called up at a moment’s notice, before people need it.

You may never have the chance to unexpectedly solidify your place in an industry in front of millions people but that’s no reason you shouldn’t make sure your content strategy isn’t every bit as pulled together as Oreo’s. The foundation of your strategy should be rooted in product documentation, followed by well-crafted authoritative content. Then you’ll be in a perfect position to respond rapidly to whatever opportunity presents itself.

A smart content strategy doesn’t rely solely on keeping a robust set of FAQs and blog links at the ready, then stuffing it into a digital drawer on your website. No, it also requires foresight, planning, and consideration about how you’ll use your content in unexpected ways. Do a little high-level thinking, give people authority to pull the trigger quickly when opportunities crop up, and even plan out some what-if scenarios. In short, once you have the content, don’t be afraid to use it!

Image: mihoda

The How and Why of Authoritative Content

January 31st, 2013 | | Content in Context, Featured Post
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Back in the day, building customer relationships was simply a matter of creating an outstanding product or service then backing it up with some good user documentation. Today’s customers expect more — far more — from us. They want contextual, fresh, and relevant information so great engagement means you need to be part mind-reader, part sherpa, and part concierge. You can be all these things when you provide authoritative content to your customers.

What’s all this voodoo about authoritative content? Isn’t it enough to simply create an online knowledge base and let customers pick through your living documentation? Not anymore. Let’s take a look at the importance of authoritative content and why it’s more than just piling up words on your company’s website.

Be a mind reader. At a time when about 50% of business leaders pinpoint customer churn as the topmost threat to their company, Forrester analyst Kate Leggett notes proactivity is vital to customer retention. “Customers want to feel like the company has their best interests at heart and that the company is partnering with its customers to keep them satisfied and loyal throughout their engagement lifetime,” she says. “[And] they want this proactive service to happen, whenever possible, behind the scenes so that problems are addressed before they happen.” In other words, give customers the information they need before they even realize they need it.

Of course, evergreen content that people can reference for months and years to come is a priority. Paired with a continually-updated website, blog, or knowledge base puts you on the leading edge of information resources.

Be a sherpa. When you’re the go-to site for information about a particular type of product or service, customers will look to you for guidance in addition to their friends on social media networks. Peer assistance is great but customers need definitive answers, not supposition. Make yours the authoritative content that people link to as they help one another troubleshoot or look for new business solutions.

In addition to building your company’s personal brand, content that solves issues and shows users how to get maximum value from your product lets customers know you’re listening. Consumer loyalty is a minefield these days and authoritative content — in addition to a great product and superior customer service — is the glue that binds users to their product. Corporate communications writer Erica Harrison calls this cycle the “psychology of trust:”

1. A user searches for a topic relevant to your industry.
2. They come across your authoritative content (i.e. white paper, blog, or case study).
3. The positive response (i.e. trust) to the authority of your content is then directly paired with your organization.
4. The reader assumes if you have such informative content online, then you must be a leading authority in the industry.
5. This automatically builds their trust in your organization.
6. They then visit your site where they will most likely become a client or customer.

Be a concierge. Don’t underestimate the power of authoritative content to establish yourself as an industry leader. Spend some time sharing your thoughts on market trends and analyzing what’s going on in your industry. Don’t be afraid to make forecasts and predictions. Authoritative content is predicated on bringing fresh, new information to readers and keeping your finger on the pulse of things that affect your customers. Let them know where to go, what to see, and what to do.

There’s little doubt the customer engagement playing field has changed drastically in recent years. The good news is that with great change comes great opportunity. Serving up smart, authoritative content is a particularly important arrow in your quiver of customer service resources.

Image: Brian J. Matis

The Content Repository is the Key to Customer Experience Management

August 16th, 2012 | | Content in Context, Guest Blogger
content-is-the-key1

There is a lot of discussion around the role of the web content management system in customer experience management (CXM). Some say it’s the core, others say it’s an element, but not a driver. I say they are both right.

Let`s be very specific here, because it is important. If we were just talking purely about the online customer experience, then I would agree that the web content management system (WCM) is the core to designing and support CXM strategies. Pretty much every supporting CXM technology: marketing automation, social media monitoring, customer relationship management, analytics, personalization, social software, etc…needs to integrate with the WCM. Why? Because it stores all the content you need to manage the experience. We use to call this WebEngagement (orExperience) Management.

But customer experience management is about more than the online channels. And not all WCM platforms provide support to the offline experience. Support channels, print-based marketing, internal knowledge work activities — these things are typically done using other tools. And the content used to support these activities is, typically, stored in these other tools.

What I think brings both these views together is not the WCM itself, but the WCM repository. Or to be more generic, the content repository. I think to be successful managing the customer experience, you need to be able to quickly access and relate all elements of a customer interaction with all the internal knowledge your employees have about not only the customer, but the processes used to work with a customer. You can do that if you have a single content repository to work with.

Many content management systems today are designed to store content not as html pages, but as individual components of content that can be easily reused across different web pages, mobile sites and apps, social networks and more. Managing a single version of that content is important to ensure you are always saying the same thing to your customers. These repositories can also be leveraged by other systems to provide content as well. For example, this content repository could be used by your call center support team to help customers with issues.

Now it’s important to point out that I don’t believe you can only have one single content repository where all information needs to permanently live. I believe that content integration is the key to a well-managed content repository. So you can keep your content in the other systems you work with, but find a way to integrate your content repository with those others systems.

By doing that, you can have a single location to mine for information about your customer and their interactions with you, and to use to design and build new applications or online/offline experiences. A central content repository also allows you to develop support applications that have access to customer information easily, including any information from CRM systems, traffic information, etc…

Today’s content is not only the material you use to develop your CXM strategies, it’s also the interactions customers and prospective customers have with you. Having it all accessible in a centralized content repository will help you identify, design and refine your CXM strategies quickly. If you are required to move from system to system to gather all the intelligence and information you need, you are going to spend far more time hunting and gathering, than actually doing something.

Barb Mosher is a guest columnist for MindTouch and Managing Editor for CMSWire.com. You can follow Barb on Twitter @bmosherzinck

3 Ways to Optimize Your Content Strategy

July 23rd, 2012 | | Content in Context, content strategy, Tech Comm
keyword

Gerry McGovern says we shouldn’t talk about content strategy, because it’s not the content that should be the primary focus but the task a user is trying to do. The content, he says, supports the task, so we need to frame it in that context.

I like how he looks at it and I do agree that we should focus our work on understanding the reasons why a user comes to a website and what tasks they are trying to achieve. But I also understand that within that task identification evolves a solid content strategy. And I understand that a solid content strategy must include how we are going to reach out across social media and search to get people to find us and come to our site to complete their task.

Krista LaRiviere, of GShiftLabs calls this an optimized content strategy, which she defines as follows:

Optimized Content Marketing is the art of understanding exactly what your prospects and customers need to know and deliberately producing optimized content based on keyword phrases that are driving organic search traffic and conversions. Then delivering that optimized content to them in a relevant and compelling way to grow your business by socializing the content through your organization’s social networks.”

So how can you write optimized content? Here are three suggestions:

1. Analyze the content that people are reading & keywords people are searching on and clean/write more content to meet those needs

This is not a new idea. It’s been around for a while now, but many organizations are still living with the “write it and forget it” mindset. Content needs to be fresh and continually updated. But not all of it. Some of it is crap and needs to be treated as such (crumpled up and thrown in the proverbial garbage can).

So how do you know what’s working, what needs to be better and what’s missing altogether? Analyze your website traffic stats. What are people looking at now, how much time are they spending on that page? What are they searching for? What pages are sending them away?

If you are focused on the task(s) a user comes to your website to do, then your content needs to be written in such a way as to help them achieve that task. The more (and better) content you write that focuses on key areas visited and key search terms, the better chance you have of helping that user achieve their goal.

If you have implemented any social features, like Tweet This, Like This, Comments, etc.. you can also use that information to help you understand what content is most helpful to people. Build more of that. Or improve the stuff that’s not if it’s critical to the task at hand.

2. Track trending topics/keywords in Google for your product/service and make sure you are including them in your content.

Not only should be you analyzing the traffic and social popularity on your own website, but you should also be tracking on the web overall. Google Trends is great for identifying popular keywords and phrases on the web right now. If you track the terms you think are popular, you’ll get a good feel if you are right. You can also track terms used by competitors and through Google search overall.

If a competitor is constantly coming before you in the Google Search results, find out why. Work to understand what they might be doing better to make them more popular in search. But before you make changes to your own content to reflect the popularity of a competitor, decide if it’s the right thing to do based on the tasks your visitors might be trying to achieve. Maybe you’ve been focused in the wrong area all along and need to refine your content.

3. Incorporate Google+ into your sharing options

Easy enough to understand that Google Search would pay close attention to content being recognized via the +1 button. And although there has been much discussion about whether it’s fair or not, the reality is Google+ is becoming an important place to be. So while you are ensuring that you have that Tweet This Button and Like This Button (Facebook), make sure you also have that Google+ button available.

You might also want to spend some time in your Google+ account discussing the content the you have written and also searching out what others have written on the same topic to see how well their content is received.

Closing Comments

These are just three ways to improve your content and get it into the hands of the people who need it. The key is that the content must support a task a user is trying to do, and it needs to be fresh and relevant, not just stacked with keywords. If a person comes to your website and is able to complete their task successfully, your work is done right.

Three Dimensions of Context You Probably Haven’t Thought About

April 30th, 2012 | | Content in Context, Guest Blogger, Let's Talk Techcomm, Tech Comm
Amanda Cross 150x150

Contextual help isn’t new. The notion of giving a user a snippet of information related specifically to the thing they’re looking at has been around for a long time. It was 1987 when IBM introduced the  Common User Access standard, which defined standards for computer program user interfaces. That standard included a specification that contextual help be accessed using the F1 key, which many programs were already doing before the standard was even introduced.

Back then the definition of “context” was limited to “the place where the user is in the program.” For example, if the user is on the Name field and presses F1, the Name field contextual help appears. Some users might see a translated version of the help, if they were using a translated version of the UI, but by and large the field you were on was the only thing that determined which piece of field help you saw.

Special help for a special userBut these days, the name of the game is social integration. Have you noticed how many programs let you log in with your social credentials? That’s convenient for you, the user, but it also lets those programs have access to the information in your social media presence. That might sound a little scary, but if users are willing to give your system the access to information about then, there’s no excuse for that software not to leverage what it knows to create an exceptional help experience.

When my writers weren’t sure of what to write in the contextual help system, I’d tell them to think about what they’d say to the user if they were sitting right there, running into trouble at that spot. Of course, if each software license came with a friendly, patient person sitting next to you, ready to guide you over stumbling blocks, you’d expect that person to get to know you and use that knowledge to target the message.

As technology gets access to more and more of this kind of knowledge, suddenly which field you are on does not need to be the only deciding factor in which piece of help the system shows you.  This knowledge of the user becomes a dimension of context, helping to pinpoint exactly the right piece of content for this one, special person.

Here are three potential dimensions of context that you might want to consider as you go forward designing an excellent user assistance experience:

Dimension #1 – Experience Level

Whenever I’m thinking about a piece of information about a user as a dimension of context, I ask myself two questions about it. The first is:

How does this user attribute affect how I would help them?

So, in this case, if you were sitting down next to a person, how would their level of experience affect how you’d help them?

Probably a brand new user would need some more background information than a person who already had the hang of the application, but that’s about it. I would not, for example, expect to see a different piece of help for someone who has been using your product for one year versus someone who had been using it for two years. You’re either new or you’re not.

The second question is:

How can we capture this information?

It doesn’t do much good to prepare a separate piece of field help for a first-time user if your software can’t tell who your first time users are. Identifying first time users is pretty easy for online applications where users log in since you can just count the number of log-ins. It’s more complicated for desktop applications, since people can share the application and you can’t tell if the person  using it today is the same person who’s been using it all month or someone completely new.

But that’s not a reason to give up. You can still create that first time user experience and show it the first time the application is opened, plus make it available to launch again.

Dimension #2 – Job Role

If you’re document enterprise software that people are using to do their jobs, does the job role affect what you would tell the user in the contextual user assistance?

I can imagine a piece of business software where front-line users need to know the nuts-and-bolts of using the feature effectively, but a manager needs to do reviews, while a developer needs to automate processes. The help for the same field for these three different job roles would be different:

  • Front-line user – What to put in this field
  • Manager – How the value in this field affects the rest of the workflow
  • Developer – How to access the value in this field via the API

So now that we’ve determined that there could be different content based on job role, we need to ask whether we can capture this attribute.  In business software, it is not uncommon to have system permissions based on job roles. If that is the case in your product, you could leverage those permission settings to determine which help a person sees.

Dimension #3 – Industry

If your product is used by people in a finite number of discrete industries, would the user’s industry affect what you would say to them?

Let’s take as an example a payroll software package that is used primarily by accounting firms and corporate human resources departments. For the same field, you might take some accounting jargon for granted in the field help when talking to the accounting firm, but define the accounting terms a little more for the human resources user.

So, yes, in this case, the industry would affect how you tell the story of the software. But how can we know what industry a user is in? That’s a tricky one because there’s so much variation in how industries are defined: the same company might be identified in different industries by different people. So, why not go straight to the source and ask the user? You could set up a profile page where the user could indicate their own industry.

The Interplay of Context Dimensions

I’ve been calling these user attributes “dimensions of context” because they don’t just control the selection of content on their own, but actually work together. For example, how would the contextual help you write for a manager who is a first-time user in HR differ from the help you would write for an experienced manager in HR? And how would that differ from a developer first-time user at an accounting firm? To make matters more complicated, you might not have a different answer for every combination of user attributes.

What to hear more?

Traditionally in technical communication we have had to write for the least-common-demoninator user. This change in paradigm to a personalized user assistance experience means great things for the field of technical communication:

  • By writing a separate experience for each user, the burden on each user to find relevant information is less, making for happier customers.
  • This approach requires deep knowledge of the users and the subject matter plus advanced tools, which are special skills you bring to the table, not commodities.
  • Creating highly integrated, highly contextual content brings you more tightly into the development process, giving you the opportunity to demonstrate greater worth to your company.

The data management and content strategy needed to support this kind of solution can get kind of complicated, though. It demands changes to your tools, processes, and general thought process about providing user assistance. There aren’t a lot of best practices already in place to guide you.

Even so, I predict that this sort of customized interaction will become a requirement of technical communications departments going forward.

Amanda Cross is a guest writer for MindTouch Magazine, she has over 10 years designing cutting edge technical information processes and is the owner of Crosswise Consulting.


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