Content Strategy | MindTouch

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

May 16th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

5 Cold, Hard Truths About PDFs as Product Support

May 8th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | content strategy, Customer

There’s been quite a hue and cry this week over Adobe’s decision to shift Creative Suite to a subscription-only business model. Beginning in June, the company’s flagship boxed set of widely used tools like Illustrator and Photoshop will be moved to, and supported in, the cloud.

It’s a bold move, but not a shocking one, as more software vendors see the benefit of pushing their business to the cloud. It’s certainly more cost-effective than shipping CDs and vying for product placement on crowded store shelves, to say nothing of how easy it is to roll out updates or patches.

Interestingly, Adobe’s other big seller, Adobe Technical Communication Suite, isn’t headed to the cloud. Why? The most likely answer is because desktop publishing tools are becoming increasingly obsolete. With its heavy focus on collaborative PDFs, this particular collection of apps doesn’t have much maneuvering room as companies shift away from reliance on PDFs as their primary information delivery system.

Internal document management and online product help manuals are key reasons companies use PDFs. While the former isn’t likely to change anytime soon, the latter is heading the way of the dodo bird because customers simply don’t like PDF support docs.

When it comes to product help, PDFs as an exclusive means of documentation will work against you. You may have the best product or service your corner of the market has ever seen but if all your supports docs are PDFs, you might as well be offering manuals on stone tablets.

Today’s product manuals aren’t really manuals in the traditional sense. They’re collaborative, fluid, current, living databases filled with knowledge. User Manual 2.0, if you will.

Here are five cold, hard truths about PDF product support:

PDFs make customers cry. Here’s a typical usage scenario: Have a product question, head to the company wesbite’s help section. Hope for a quick answer, get directed to a huge PDF instead. Make a sandwich while it downloads. Try searching the document for your question, get 93 hits on your search term. Sigh audibly.

Make a stiff drink, then bravely poke through each response to find a useful answer. Rejoice when answer #89 seems to be what you need. Cry when you discover the PDF hasn’t been updated in two years and the information is wrong. Launch laptop at the wall.

If you want to be responsible for tears and crushed dreams, make sure all your product help docs are PDFs.

A living knowledge base, on the other hand, lets users quickly find the answers they need. Since it’s easy to update and keep current, customers know they’re getting the right answers every time. Software vendors can take product support a step further with in-product contextual help that allows users to access information related to what they see onscreen — without ever leaving your app.

PDFs cost your company money. Static documents are expensive to maintain. Somebody (or several somebodys) need to constantly monitor them for accuracy, make changes as needed, convert and upload documents, and so on. The hours your team spends managing PDFs are far better spent helping customers directly instead of tinkering with static manuals.

A living knowledge base helps maintain itself by continually updating across all channels. It’s a collaborative system that gives customers and support agents the real-time information they need, when they need it. On top of that, you’re not paying team members to constantly update PDFs or losing money when frustrated users jump ship for a company with better customer support.

PDFs look unprofessional. Back when the world was on dial-up, websites were single-page affairs, and hosting space was a million dollars a GB, there weren’t many options for getting product help into the hands of users. Today, there’s simply no reason for companies to overlook technology that makes life easier for customers.

Do you really want to force customers to print out reams of pages at their own expense just to figure out how to use your product? Does it warm your heart to picture the PDFs you worked so hard to assemble shoved in a file in the bowels of someone’s hard drive and forgotten?

PDF product help docs make your company look dated and unprofessional. They send the message that you don’t value your customers’ time or resources. A slick online database filled with loads of documentation that’s easily searchable looks far more professional than an outdated website with huge files to download.

PDFs don’t help users become experts. The entire point of customer support is to help users help themselves, to offer them a buffet of options that assist them in finding answers quickly and efficiently. Done right, a good help strategy turns your users into product experts by giving them multiple access points to useful product documentation.

PDF-based support systems have a number of potential fail points and customers have frustratingly few options if the documents are wrong. Sure, they can call a toll-free number or open a trouble ticket, but those avenues make users more dependent on your support team, not less.

Knowledge-based help systems give users multiple channels for finding help and troubleshooting issues. Customers expect to have content that adapts to who they are and the channel they’re accessing. You can’t do that with a static PDF.

PDFs build walls around your teams. Data silos can’t exist within a living knowledge base that’s continually updated and accessed by everyone in the company. PDFs, on the other hand, are locked data points controlled by tech writers.

To be sure, tech writers are an extremely valuable component of product support, but they shouldn’t be the only source of branded product knowledge. Marketing, Sales, Support, Community Managers, and even ancillary support teams have value to add to your existing content, but they can’t do that if all your help docs are protected PDFs.

Collaborative knowledge bases tear walls instead of reinforcing them. If your own teams can’t use your product help effectively, think how your customers must feel.

Used sparingly, PDFs do have their place on a company website. They’re fine for media kits, press releases, printable maps, or for delivering information that rarely or never changes. They’re a terrible method for managing product support info, however. A real-time knowledge base is the help platform your customers need. It’s the new user manual.

Images: Storyvillegirl, Purpleslog, Elvissa, Cogdogblog, Keith Roper

Don’t Use My Product: 3 Things You Wouldn’t Say to Your Customer

May 6th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | content strategy, Customer, Product Help

Imagine a company that actively discouraged its customers from buying or using its products. Imagine it quick, because a company like that won’t be in business for long. Sadly, some companies spend tons of money and hundreds of hours creating all kinds of marketing and customer service strategies only to shoot themselves in the foot by subtly driving users away with poor product documentation.

Take a tour of your website, wiki, and in-house forums to see if you’re inadvertently sending customers any of these discouraging messages.

“Don’t use my product!” This is what you’re telling users when you don’t provide proper documentation around how to use your product. Unless your entire customer base can psychically divine how to interact with or troubleshoot your product, reliable documentation is critical. By “reliable” we don’t mean it must be “good enough.” We mean it must be excellent. What does excellent product documentation look like?

Searchable: Microsoft TechNet knocks it out of the park when it comes to searchable content. The homepage is laid out cleanly and links to specific types of content are clearly displayed. A handy search box at the top of the page helps users drill down quickly without a lot of frivolous clicking.
Proactive: Mobile device company HTC excels at providing current, proactive documentation. The site uses words like “latest” and “recent” — and means it. You won’t find a bunch of outdated info and broken links here.
Approachable: Dell does a great job of making its content accessible to every type of customer it serves. Clear product categories and search options ensure even novice users aren’t intimidated or overwhelmed with a blizzard of options and information.

“Your time is worthless” This is what you’re saying when you require users to jump through multiple hoops to gain access to your documentation. Customers shouldn’t have to register on your site, click though 43 subpages, and offer up the blood of a unicorn just to find out how to replace a battery.

Complex products sometimes require complex documentation, but it’s your responsibility to make the process as painless as possible. If you’re product is software, the solution is dead simple: in-app support. Expose documentation directly within your product so users never have to leave the app to find the answers they need. That’s some pretty heroic product support, isn’t it?

“Your feedback doesn’t matter.” We’re all customers in some way, so we know you’ll agree it’s important to know that a company taking your money actually cares about you. When a user takes the time to offer input, share tips, or make suggestions, ignore them at your own peril. Your customers are down in the trenches, experiencing your product in ways you may have never thought about and have great feedback to share.

Customers don’t expect hand-signed birthday cards every year, but they do expect a measure of respect and appreciation that shouldn’t stop once their check clears. One of the best ways to honor customer feedback is to make it easy for people to offer it right on your site — and then listen to what they say. Customers are a great source to mine for nuggets of product knowledge and user stories that might not have occurred to you yet.

This type of customer engagement carries an inherent bonus: You can correct misinformation before it finds its way onto offsite meta-support channels like Twitter or Facebook. When feedback is a two-way street, users become their own product experts and you gain valuable insight into how customers experience your products.

We know no one plans on alienating customers but it can happen. It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of running a lucrative business and overlook some potentially off-putting vibes you may be sending customers. Take a few minutes today to make sure your product documentation process sends the right message to users instead of turning them away.

Image: Mollypop

Serve Your Customers Snacks on Twitter and Dinner on Your Website

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

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

Three and a Half Ways to Turn Lurkers into Participating Community Members

April 26th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | content strategy, Customer, Customer Experience Strategy

There’s an old business adage that for everyone person who makes a public comment on the internet about your company, there are dozens — perhaps hundreds — more thinking about you but not commenting. That’s not a huge deal if you don’t worry too much about customer engagement (something you know we don’t recommend).

But what if you believe that your user base is a fountain of knowledge worth tapping into? How do you turn lurkers into participating members of your community?

Make the process user-friendly — Nothing turns away an enthusiastic contributor faster than a 29-step registration process just to leave some feedback or advice for another user. While it’s fine, and sometimes necessary, to require contributors to provide basic information in order to join conversations, you risk running off a lot of people by asking for details about their address, hair color, and whether they prefer cats or dogs.

Sure, the temptation is great to mine visitors to your site for information you can share with marketing and sales, but don’t do it. The goal is to make potential contributors feel valued for what they can offer your community, not your company’s bottom line.

Do an attitude check — Is your community approachable? Is it friendly and welcoming or filled with blowhards impressed with their own amazing skills? Even if your community members are made of glitter and unicorn fur, there are plenty of internet introverts out there who are intimidated by large communities with their own ways of doing things.

Some companies appoint established community members to be greeters or mentors who job it is to help newcomers get the lay of the land. The benefit here is three-fold. Helpful members appreciate it when their expertise is recognized, existing members have a reason to participate responsibly to get on the company’s radar, and new members see you care enough to make sure they feel welcome.

Incentivize the troops — Obviously, not every member can be a community leader so figure out other clever ways to encourage participation among users. The incentives you choose should be based on what drives your specific user base. In some cases, unlocking participation-based badges and avatars is motivation enough while the potential to earn discounts or tangible goods carry more weight in other communities. Gamification, incentives, and loyalty rewards are remarkably effective when they’re well matched with the users earning them.

Do nothing — This advice may seem counterintuitive, but it might be the right answer in some circumstances. Take, for example, the small startup with a team that’s already overextended. A few weeks after launch, the marketing team (or, more likely, the marketing person) notices site traffic is off the charts and starts brainstorming how to capture these visitors and hold them close for all eternity.

That’s a noble plan but probably not where your focus should be right then. As we’ve said before, become the authoritative voice in your industry and people will keep coming back. Offer the right answers at the right time, in the right place and you’ll solidify your place in their browser bookmarks. Spend time creating good content and building an excellent customer experience strategy so users want to be a part of your community. Once you’ve built a rock-solid base for them to stand on and a terrific product they’ll be proud to support, then you can figure out how to further encourage members to participate in your community.

We could spend days throwing around more ideas on how to lurkers into contributors but we’d rather hear from you. What’s worked for you? What didn’t? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Image: worthyfm

Who’s Responsible for Providing Your Authoritative Content?

March 25th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post

Recently, we took a look at the how and why of authoritative content. Now that you’re convinced of its importance, lets talk about how who’s responsible for providing the high-quality content you need to best serve your customers. (Hint: It takes more people than you think.)

There’s no single magic bullet, master wordsmith, or staff role that provides you with all the content you could ever need, because authoritative content comes from many different places and all of them are important. In the same way that all roads lead to Rome, all content streams eventually lead back to your company’s doorstep.

Let’s take a look at the most common places smart businesses should mine for authoritative content:

Product documentation – This one is a no-brainer. You must have excellent online product documentation and it must be easily accessible the minute your customer needs it. This doesn’t mean you can slap a 42-page PDF on your site and hope for the best. It means, at the bare minimum, your content must be easily searchable, factually accurate, and continuously updated. Ideally, it is also created proactively before customers go looking for answers and also teaches users how to become their own product experts.

Marketing – The marketing department knows what customers in your space are looking for and what pre-purchase answers they want. Pick the brains of your marketing team to learn what authoritative content demonstrates that you’re a thought leader in your industry with the product and customer experience strategy to back it up.

Sales – As we’ve previously noted, the sales team can do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to helping your customers become their own product experts which, lets face it, should be the end goal of your product support. Sales knows what common barriers to entry potential customers face and can help you design content that will pre-emptively (there’s that word again) address common pain points or overcome implementation issues.

Tech support - These people are in the trenches every day with your product so put their knowledge to good use. Make it effortless for agents to share existing documentation with one another and with customers. Streamline processes that put immediate answers into the hands (or on the computer screens) of the people who need them. A content system that supports ticketing integration means support agents can simply drag and drop relevant articles, then click send. Users get the best possible solution and know where to return to self-serve.

Customers — Do not underestimate the power of your users to provide smart answers to questions that may never have occurred to you. They are the perfect group to collect odd, quirky, or unique user scenarios that you couldn’t possibly test for in pre-production. Sure, there may be only six customers in the universe who need your product to be cross-compatible with hardware made in 1972. However, if one of them figures out how to make it work and the other five customers find that information on your site, you’ll forever be the hero of a handful of devoted users. Wikis and user forums give customers a place to help each other noodle around issues without involving your escalation team in solving every obscure problem customers encounter.

Content strategist – It may make sense for some businesses to hire a content strategist to oversee all the cogs and wheels that go into creating exceptional authoritative content. If you’re maximizing all the resources at your disposal, from tech support to marketing and sales, you need someone — or several someone’s, depending on the size of your company — to make sure there’s a single unified voice delivering your content. If you’re not sure how to put together an effective content strategy, here’s a good place to start.

You know authoritative content is necessary but putting it together doesn’t have to be frightening. You already have the resources you need at your fingertips, it just needs to be collected from various silos around the company. It takes a village to raise good content so start talking to your neighbors.

Image: irrezolut

Grab Your Promo Code for 50% Off LavaCon’s Strategy Workshop Registration Fee

March 20th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | Community News, Conferences, content strategy

Organizers of the annual LavaCon Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies have put together a three-day content strategy workshop and we’ve got the scoop on how to attend for half-off the registration fee.

The hands-on workshop, “How to Create and Execute a Unified Content Marketing and Multichannel Publishing Strategy” will be held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-25, 2013. LavaCon’s Executive Director, Jack Molisani, says,

It is not uncommon to have content marketing and product documentation initiatives in simultaneous production. Rarely, however, do Marketing and Tech Pubs coordinate their content strategies. Without a unified content strategy, companies waste valuable resources, create an inconsistent user experience, and let new revenue opportunities slip away.

Sessions will be facilitated by industry leaders from Red Hat, Adobe, IBM, MindTouch, and more. The workshop drills down into how to create a strategy, how to build the right ecosystem to house and deliver content, and how to execute your grand plan within your business environment.

By the time you leave, you’ll have a roadmap in hand to hit the ground running but if you need additional guidance, workshop attendees may purchase a monthly phone consultation package with any of the workshop’s presenters. That’s a great way to get personalized, one-on-one assistance to hammer out strategy details or implementation issues when you take what you’ve learned back to the office.

Schedule, session, and facilitator details are available online [PDF]. Register before March 23rd to grab the standard rate of $1,450 and get 50 percent off with promo code mindtouch50. We have a limited number of codes and they’re first come, first served so register now.

In order to receive the discount, attendees must register at the New Orleans Riverfront Hotel with a special group rate of $189 per night. Rooms at that rate are available as early as Saturday, April 20th so come to town a couple of days early and make a vacation out of it.

Next month’s workshop is being held ahead of the big event this fall in Portland, OR. LavaCon got its start in Hawaii in 2002 — lava, get it? The original intent of the conference was to help companies design technical communications projects but has grown to cover emerging concepts surrounding content strategy, mobile devices, social media, and more.

Registration for LavaCon is now open and session speakers are expected to be announced soon. In the meantime, check out session slides from previous LavaCon conferences.

Image: Bernat

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

February 19th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | Content in Context, content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Product Help

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gamification, Agile Content, and More: This Week’s Great Reads

February 8th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post, News

As we head into the weekend, let’s take a look back at some of the news, articles, and blog posts that caught our eye over the last few days.

Are You in the 91% or 37%? (Be honest, we won’t tell.)

There was a lot of chatter this week over Oracle’s recently released customer experience report. The takeaway message is that failing to provide a good CX will injure your company’s bottom line. (But you knew that.) The results of this study make it pretty clear that although most businesses (91 percent!) want to provide an optimal customer experience, few actually execute strategies to make that happen. In fact, a surprisingly high number of companies (37 percent!) are only just now getting their acts together to implement a CX plan.

Bran Curran, VP, Customer Experience Strategy for Oracle told CMSwire:

“It’s shocking how many companies said they haven’t gotten formal customer experience programs… A brand should engage when a customer asks about a product. This means companies should do things like monitor product communities and customer commentary on social networks, as well as engage customers when they ask a question on a company’s official website.”

Notice Curran says companies should engage customers when and wherever they’re talking about your product. That “wherever” ought to be primarily arenas you’ve created with amazing authoritative content. Put reliable, useful, easy-to-find documentation out there and customers will come to you first for the information they need. Then you can keep on engaging them ad infintium.That sure beats spending all day combing through obscure forums and Twitter hashtags, right?

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Speaking of customer experience, apparently the banking industry is considering ways to incorporate gamification into its user support strategy. The idea hasn’t made a lot of headway in the U.S. yet, but it’s making a big splash in other countries. Banktech’s Jonathan Camhi says:

U.S. banks may have been slower to adopt gamification so far because they have a more cautious attitude toward digital interaction with their customers, says Stessa Cohen, research director at Gartner, an analyst firm. “U.S. banks are a little more reticent. Look at how they use Facebook. They use it to push info; they don’t engage [with customers],” she points out. But Cohen predicts that banks here will have to take a serious look at gamification and how banks in other countries are using games as they try to outdo each other in digital customer experience. “I think we will definitely see more banks incorporating gamification. The focus [U.S.] banks are putting on customer experience will definitely take them there,” she says.

Whether gamification is appropriate for your product depends on several factors, including user demographics, your business objectives, and whether you’re able to provide incentives customers actually want. Think carefully before adopting this strategy because some people really hate it.

Can You Hear Them Now?

Are you talking to your customers, or at them? To be the authoritative voice in your industry means listening to your users and, equally as important, responding to them. A stellar content strategy means being ready to talk to customers about what concerns them right now, not simply telling them what you think they need to know. Sure, users must be able to access fantastic documentation, but they also want a rapport with their product or service provider that let’s them know the company is proactively listening.

Digital agency Firstborn’s Alex Krawitz and Eugene Chung say getting good at agile content development helps you meet this goal.

“Agile means using real-time interactions and behavior monitoring to drive a more agile approach to creating and deploying branded content focused around the consumer. It seems obvious now that any effective approach to content has to put the consumer at the center and must be able to adapt based on cultural trends and consumer insights.”

Are your content creators agile? Can they twist-and-pivot as the customer culture and climate dictate? The article is filled with terrific tips and real-world examples of companies who use this approach with great results. (We’re not entirely convinced that “figital” is a word, though.)

Image: Toms Bauģis

What an Oreo can Teach You About Content Strategy

February 4th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | Content in Context, content strategy, Featured Post

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