Customer Experience Strategy

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.

Survey Shows Customers REALLY Want Quick Customer Service Response

May 10th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | Customer, Customer Experience Strategy

According to a recent study conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Zendesk, customers value a quick response to an issue even if it’s not the answer they’re hoping to get. In fact, the actual outcome of a resolution scores pretty far down on the list of customer satisfaction concerns while things like having to explain a problem to multiple people irk customers like crazy.

“Survey participants who had indicated they had a good customer service experience were asked what specifically made that experience good. The most important factor cited by participants was a quick resolution of the problem (69%) followed by being helped by a pleasant person (65%). Interestingly, the actual outcome of the problem was least important with less than half (47%) indicating that their customer service interaction was good because of the outcome.”

The survey results don’t detail what channels respondents used to access support (phone, email, online documentation, etc). It’s clear, however, that providing users with multiple access points vastly increases the chances you’ll give them a great customer service experience.

Ideally, you’ll have a robust knowledge base filled with the most current product documentation so customers can serve — and help — themselves. On top of that, of course, you need a grab bag of other access points: a toll-free number, online chat, a dedicated support email address, and so on. Oh, and you’ll need people to staff and manage all these various channels.

Clearly, the most cost-effective customer support methods take advantage of stuff you’re already doing elsewhere around the company. Your tech writers are assembling documentation and manuals, sales and marketing are showing customers around your product, and community managers are helping users find their way around best practices. Harness all that smart content and put it on your website!

Dimension Research’s survey tells us that a rapid response is a primary (if not predictable) desire of customers who reach out for support. You already have the answers your users need so make sure they, and you, can find it all quickly.

Read more about the survey’s results and findings on Zendesk’s website.

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

Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang on Building an Effective Customer Interaction Strategy

April 3rd, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | Customer, Customer Experience Strategy

“Delight your customers.”

“Content is king.”

“Embrace your user community.”

These are a few of the many key phrases that continually crop up in conversations about customer engagement and they’re clearly very important. Trouble is, they define the why these concepts are necessary but fall short tackling the question of how to make it happen. Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research, Inc, has some answers.

Wang acknowledges that the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty high when it comes to engagement. He says that to be effective, companies need use multiple channels to identify customers, figure out what motivates them, gain acceptance, establish credibility, hold their attention, and keep them coming back for more — all without creating what he calls “channel fatigue.” That’s a tall order to fill from a very small window of opportunity.

Worry not, fearless business owners. Wang has come up with a scaffold of nine engagement strategies you can build around your company’s customer outreach plan to strengthen your market position and let customers know you’re listening.

Wang outlined his key concepts during a Software Advice video interview at the 2013 SXSW Interactive Festival. His discussion, “Building Your Interaction Strategy with the 9 C’s of Engagement,” takes a hard look at what components are necessary to create a three-pronged strategic approach of people-centric values, delivery styles, and right-time action designed to get results. We encourage you to watch the short video for a clear understanding of how Wang’s action plan works.

Take special note of the “Currency” component, where he share some terrific ideas on non-monetary customer engagement and why it’s important. Here’s a sneak peek from Wang’s guest post over at Harvard Business Review:

The last piece is choosing the right time drivers to provide a why, when, and where in engagement. The goal is to inspire action through context, catalysts, and currencies…. [C]urrencies influence behavior through an exchange of value. Monetary models include traditional cash, bonuses, rewards, and rebates, but non-monetary currencies such as virtual goods, recognition, access, and influence can often be more powerful.

Intangible currencies like recognition and “influencer status” can be enormously motivating to customers. Indeed, entire business models are built around the idea. Fortunately, in-house systems to support up-voting or other methods of highlighting accurate, helpful user-generated content are easy to implement.

An amazing customer experience strategy is no longer just a goal in a dusty mission statement or something that just passively happens while you’re off building the next version of your product. Use Wang’s “9 C’s of Engagement” as a blueprint for taking charge of your customer interaction and making it awesome.

Image: InfoMoFo

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

Does Your Organizational Chart Torpedo Your Customer Service?

March 14th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | CRM, Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post

Before you read too much farther, go get a copy of your organizational chart. We’ll wait.

Now, take a good look at it. If you’re like most businesses, your org chart is a pretty standard affair. Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support all have their nice linear slots, with everyone reporting to the CEO at the end of the day. Marketing shepherds your brand around the industry space while the sales team runs around gathering customers. Sales hands off new customers to Support to field post-purchase issues, and so the cycle goes.

That’s a perfectly respectable business strategy but is it the best option? Maybe not. The giant, gaping hole in this inherently reactionary process is that it doesn’t factor in customer experience. Marketing keeps busy behind the scenes building brand awareness and getting eyeballs on your product. Sales teams establish preliminary relationships with potential users but until those users become actual customers, they’re not basking in the glow of a brilliant product support experience. Support teams are fantastic for responding to user issues, but they’re not in the best position to proactively teach your users to become product experts in their own right.

Let’s dust off that organizational chart and look at who’s ideally suited to oversee a grand customer experience: The sales team. Think about it. Sales is in a great spot to help train customers to become their own product experts and position it as an additional selling point. Sales can pre-emptively show users how to get the the right answers with a minimum of hassle instead of simply handing over a toll-free number for the help desk after closing the sale. After all, if you’ve spent a bunch of time and money creating an exceptional product help system, you want people to use it. Given a choice between diving into phone-tree hell that’s rife with bad hold music and knowing where to grab answers for themselves, which option do you think your customers want?

Getting Sales involved the customer experience doesn’t detract from the valuable input Support and Marketing brings to the table, it enhances it. Support personnel are a bottomless well of product knowledge and the marketing department knows how to capture a customer’s attention. Sales is the ribbon that ties it all together.

If you need more incentive to let the sales team lead the charge toward outstanding customer experience, consider the positive impact it can have on your revenue stream. Christine Crandall, President of New Business Strategies, says sharing the customer experience workload might seem unfair, but an all-hands-on-deck approach is critical to keeping users happy.

“Marketing should share responsibility for revenues and customer experience, but in a recent Eloqua whitepaper only nine percent of marketers surveyed felt customer experience was the most important measurement of their ROI… Maybe Support should take more responsibility for customer’s lifetime experience, but that department is usually staffed with technical, rather than business, experts and measured on the speed of ‘one-and-done’ instead of persistent satisfaction and engagement.
“So it falls to you Sales. Whether you like it or not, to deliver on the revenue targets you’re beholden to. You’ll need to lead the entire organization to a customer-centric approach; sponsor research on the buyer’s journey, use your customer relationships to understand how the definition of value evolves over time, get the rest of your peers to change their ways to consistently deliver that value, and transform your own cold-callers into relationship stewards.”

If the thought of an org chart sea change terrifies you, start small. Come up with one or two ways Sales can tackle an aspect of your customer experience strategy and test the waters. The worst case scenario is you’ll need to retool ideas until you figure out what works right. The best case scenario is that you’ll have happy, loyal customers who love your product and the way you support it.

Image: cliff1066™

Where You Listen to Customers is as Important as How You Listen

March 12th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | Customer, Customer Experience Strategy

The topic du jour in the consumer industry these days is how technology is changing the landscape of the customer service experience. That’s true, but it’s not necessarily a cause for hand-wringing. Consider it the new cost of doing business. Customer experience consultant Xavier Rault says:

Because online shopping does not allow the consumer to physically handle the product before making a purchase nor is it as easy to ask questions as it would be in a brick and mortar retail establishment, people now rely on the opinions of other consumers more so than anything else. Like the shot heard around the world, consumer complaints can and do make a difference.

The typical communication methods for internet-savvy consumers are forums and social media networks. That’s where you’ll find lots of chatter about product perception, how to troubleshoot issues, and, yes, complaints. They’re not ideal environments for customers to talk about your product or service, but they’re not going away anytime soon. So what’s a CEO to do? Well, to coin a phrase, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

As we’ve mentioned before, it makes good business sense to corral consumer discourse by leading users to your environment to engage with each other. The goal isn’t to silence your customers, it’s to learn from them. Listen to what they’re talking about, what they need, and what they’re looking for so you can deliver it.

What does that delivery system look like? Ideally it provides real-time information that updates synchronously everywhere; support ticket and call center agent systems, online product documentation and knowledge bases, in-app help docs, and so on. Everywhere. It’s terrific when customers talk about and question your product so give them space to do that. At the end of the day, though, make sure the answers they walk away with are from you so they’re current, complete, and most of all, accurate. Let your help content become your customer communication channel.

If you think providing this kind of exceptional customer experience isn’t worth it, think again. The consumer playing field is nearly level at this point. There are very few ways left to stand out in the crowd so businesses are winning over — and keeping — customers with great customer service.

Do a quick mental inventory of the amount of customer loyalty programs that vie for your attention every time you shop. Every store from pharmacies, airlines and supermarkets, to home improvement retailers and gas stations want you to pledge your unending affection to them. They’re willing to cough up all kinds of incentives to keep you from shopping anywhere else. Consumers know this and they’ll take their dollars to the businesses that consistently do right by them. A superior customer experience is a loyalty program in itself because it incentivizes repeat business.

Since we’re talking about repeat business, let’s take a minute to acknowledge a very real benefit to great customer service: It gives companies a chance to offer users additional products or services. It’s gauche to suggest you should only offer great customer service as a means to increase sales or upsell to your users. Let’s be realistic, though. Companies that don’t maximize income stream opportunities won’t be in business for long. There’s nothing disingenuous about profiting from a favorable rapport with your customers — it’s all in how you manage the relationship.

If your engagement seems shallow and superficial to users, they’ll take their business elsewhere. On the other hand, if your primary focus is on helping your customer, then loyalty — and more sales — will naturally follow. Let’s take Amazon, for example. There’s really no question its primary existence is to sell things to people, yet the company’s excellent customer support landed them the number one spot in MSN.com’s 2012 Customer Service Hall of Fame. While it’s true that Amazon is really good at cross-selling to its customers, their outstanding consumer experience strategy makes it a non-issue for shoppers.

Kudos to businesses that have great social media engagement or ship detailed 32-page booklets with their products. You clearly want to be there for your users and potential customers Now take some time to figure out what else you could be doing to bring people to your doorstep — and keep them there.

Image: publicenergy

Google Misses the Boat With New Cloud Platform Support Packages

March 5th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | Content in Context, Customer, Customer Experience Strategy, Product Help

The cloud platform services market is getting crowded and, like any industry, there comes a point when it may make better business sense to stop competing on price and instead focus on providing an outstanding customer experience. Google recently announced new support packages for Google Cloud Platform and, bless their heart, they didn’t get the memo on how to excel at customer service.

Under the new program, Cloud Platform customers can choose from four tiers that range in price from free to $400/month or more. The free option gets you the bare minimum — online documentation, community forum access, and answers to billing questions. The next two levels add direct access to the support team via email or phone for an additional charge. Top level support offers “direct access to the Technical Account Management team” for even more coin.

Okay, wait. $400 a month just to get someone on the phone? To be fair, that also includes consultations with the Google team about application development or best practices for your specific needs, but still, 400 bucks a bit steep just to get some questions answered.

We get that a company the size and scope of Google needs to limit direct access to its customer support team through the use of paid support models or they’d be so slammed with trouble tickets they’d never get anything done. However, unless you’re as huge as Google and have a quadrillion people using your product, consider theirs a cautionary tale on how not to support your customers.

Your company’s most basic support options should already include access to online documentation, a knowledge base, and authoritative content that encourages users to become product experts in their own right. If they’ve paid for your product, then you’re also on the hook to provide a quality support team to answer questions and offer advice. That may seem like a daunting (and potentially expensive) investment for small or medium-sized businesses, but it doesn’t have to be. Lean in close and we’ll tell you why.

Responding to customer issues costs a lot more than preventing them in the first place.

If you’re product support environment is pro-active, you won’t need a cadre of support staff working phone banks and trouble tickets around the clock to serve your customers when they run into issues. Make product information available through great online documentation and a living knowledge base that’s associated with smart and useful content on your website. If you’re a software provider, product help can even be woven right into the app itself. Give users the answers they need, when and where they need them (hint: support@yourcompany.com isn’t good enough). Create a product support structure that lets customers serve themselves and you’ll help yourself in the long run.

No product or service is 100% issue free so, yes, you want customers to be able to contact you directly with questions. They’ll be much happier, though, when getting tangled up in a phone tree or ticketing system is the last resort instead of the first. As a bonus, you’ll free up human and financial resources that can be diverted to development, marketing, research, and all the other components that keep your business running.

By preventing customer confusion you are delighting your customers. You are making your products more competitive, your brand more valuable, and your customers happy. Happy customers are fiercely loyal and love to talk about you to friends and colleagues. Prevention needs to be a huge part of your customer experience strategy because it lowers your costs and increases your revenues.

Due in part to its enormous customer base, Google can get away with charging Cloud Platform customers upwards of $4,800 per year to its customers for the luxury of a phone call, but most of us can’t. The good news is, we don’t need to. Today’s customers want instant, useful, and correct answers that don’t take three hours, nine phone calls, a pocket full of money, or a blizzard of emails to find. Why not make it easy for them? An ounce of customer confusion prevention is worth a pound of trouble support cure.

Image: setev

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.