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

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

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

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

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

This leads to a significant challenge: managing customer churn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who’ll Stop the Rain? Social Product Help Umbrellas Protect You and the Customer

April 24th, 2012 | | CCMS, content strategy, Customer, Editorial, Featured Post, Product Help, Uncategorized
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A recent social media customer service survey by TNS reveals that over half (57%) of consumers head directly online when they have a problem with a brand or product. That figure rises to 71% among 16-25 year old consumers and 65% among 25-34 year olds. The problems and questions of frustrated consumers are being gathered and published all across the web.

The question is: where are the answers coming from? 33% of consumers use on-line forums and chat rooms while 25% have turned to on-line video tutorials (i.e. YouTube), and nearly 20% say they turn to query websites such as Facebook Questions, Yahoo Answers, etc. 11% say they turn to popular related blogs.

Now here’s the problem. When people are facing a question or crisis with a product, they’re looking for quick answers from wherever they feel the best answer is likely to come from. However, more often than not, those answers are nested in forums, community sites, and other 3rd party web properties, among similar complaints and problems. It’s here that brands and products take a reputational beating, and the solutions offered are often off the mark. Technology, software, consumer electronics and telecom industries seem to be the most vulnerable to reputational losses in these web arenas as they report greater losses attributed to support failures than most other industries.

The report concluded, “By creating digital content that solves customers’ common problems and making it widely available online, businesses can significantly reduce customer frustration and be seen as a user-friendly brand while lowering the costs associated with live agent support. When asked what companies could do to improve the customer service experience, 35% of all respondents, including nearly half (48%) of 16-24 year olds, said “post video demonstrations, tutorials and instructions.”

There answer is simple and cost effective, and in fact saves money and increases revenue. By implementing socially enabled product help your giving your product and knowledgebase assets a life on the web. A key consideration when implementing social product help is SEO. You only win the battle for your users if your content is search engine optimized. By giving your documentation and knowledgebase assets a life on the web, you’ll make sure your prospects and customers are getting the best product information from the most credible source, your company.

Next, your social product help software must take your documentation and knowledgebase assets and optimize them with effective search and feedback mechanisms as well as social engagement tools designed specifically around product help. Nothing deepens brand loyalty more than enabling the customer to quickly find highly relevant information that solves their problem and which expands their understanding of your product along the way.

You’ll also need a robust set of analytics tools. These are essential for understanding how your customer uses your product and the kind of information they’re looking for.

To bring it all together, you should make sure that your social product help integrates solidly with your support ticketing system and CRM as well as having the ability to extend into social networks and expand upon existing authoring tools (if any). By doing so, you dramatically improve your customers’ experience with your brand because your company can quickly respond to and engage the customer at a crucial point. Consumer surveys show that effective support experiences are often weighted more heavily than price in the decision to recommend, renew, or buy again.

Implementing social product help is simple and creates a single source of truth about your products and your brand. Think of social product help as an umbrella, encompassing all the ways consumers expect to interact with your brand while protecting your reputation and the customer experience.

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

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

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

Make it Effortless for Customers to Find What they Need


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

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The First Law of Customer Happiness: Every Interaction Creates a Personal Reaction

March 20th, 2012 | | Editorial, Product Help
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The digital age has broadened individual access to the world. Today, through social networking and community platforms, people can not only see, hear and read information from every corner of the globe, they can speak to the world. This has given rise to the next great historical age we live in today. We’ve emerged from an era dominated by ‘super-powers’ and now live an age of super empowerment. The impact this has had on business has been profound to say the least.

Today, innovation and growth depends upon interactions rooted in modern digital social contexts yet personalized and focused on the individual. The rapid expansion of the digital age, and the resulting empowerment of individual access to information and the ability to quickly gain a wide audience has rendered experiences strictly designed for all as unsatisfactory to most.

Of course, it’s impossible to create a customer success infra-structure for every individual you sell to; that method would simply be impractical. However, you can build into your customer success modalities instances which recognize the individual and engages them on a personal level. For instance, when establishing a product help or support site, there are considerations that should be addressed that would serve to create a positive personal reaction and a great experience for the user.

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Poor Documentation Formats (PDF) and the Encyclopedia Britannica

March 15th, 2012 | | Editorial
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imageThis week the Encyclopedia Britannica announced the end of the print editions of their encyclopedia. This comes as no surprise. Wikiepedia has proven that web-ready social documentation is far more effective than dead formats.

No, I’m not saying print is dead, but it’s clear that dynamic, easy to update, living documents trump a $1,400 set of dead trees. Literally shipping knowledge in a format that is immediately out of date upon publishing and incapable of being updated or feedback to be easily delivered to the authors makes no sense at all, in this context. It’s quaint for collectors, but not pragmatic or pleasing to users.

PDF is another example of a quaint technology that makes no sense. At least, not when applied to  product and technical documentation. It’s a horrible medium that is aggravating to users. Incapable of delivering feedback to the authors. Unsuitable for collaboration. And because it’s not web-ready it can’t be surfaced as contextual help or in support ticketing.

The sooner companies stop using PDF for their tech and help docs the sooner they, like Encyclopedia Britannica, will be giving users what they want.

 

A Giving Approach to Sales and Marketing

January 10th, 2012 | | Editorial

Ashby Fulkerson running at Balboa ParkSales and marketing should create value in and of itself for the person being sold. I grew up a salesman and a product guy. I love creating and building products. I launched my first product when I was nine years old and the first thing I learned was that it didn’t really matter how good your product is–you still have to “sell” if you want people to use what you created. Even at  nine years old I saw no point in a product that no one used. However, being as fervently anti-establishment as I was growing up (and through my twenties), I could not be that wanker sales guy. This notion has stayed with me and I’ve always believed that the right way to market and sell is not by manipulations, but rather by caring enough to understand your buyer and giving something of value at every exchange.
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A Conversation with Jeff Miller

May 17th, 2010 | | Editorial

Jeffrey A Miller Earlier today I had a chat with Jeff Miller. Jeff was the CEO of Documentum and was responsible for taking the company from about a million in annual revenue through the initial public offering in 1996 and the $1.7 billion acquisition by EMC in December, 2003. Quite a success story. Jeff openly spoke of applying a “Crossing the Chasm” strategy to build the business.

The conversation was insightful and validating. Jeff shared with me several insights that stood out. Here’s a couple:

1. Sell a solution, deliver a platform.

2. Focus on a particular use case and bend over backward for these customers delivering whatever they ask.

Darwin’s Finches

May 13th, 2010 | | Editorial

Sam Ramji (@sramji) is a good friend and advisor to MindTouch. I met Sam while he still was at Microsoft. Now he’s onto something infinitely more interesting at Sonoa Systems, which does API management. Sonoa also runs Apigee, which provides API testing, API debugging, API analytics and API security.

Sam recently spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo on the topic of APIs and took down the house with his presentation. Here’s his slide deck.

Darwin’s Finches, 20th Century Business, and APIs
View more presentations from Sam Ramji.

Start your Skunkworks

April 14th, 2010 | | Editorial

Originally coined at Lockheed Martin, the term skunkworks is used to describe teams of people within companies that are working on projects that are decidedly unofficial.  Many, many famous projects started as nothing more than an idea worked on by a few dedicated individuals. The original Mac, AOL instant messenger, and more recently the Best Buy social site “Blue Shirt Nation”, all started as rogue projects flying under the radar within their companies.  In each of these cases, a small team of people felt so driven to solve an issue that they took it upon themselves to do so, preferring the ask for forgiveness instead of begging for permission.

I wrote about this phenomenon in an article on the Thunderbird Knowledge Network.  In my article, I explored how advances in technology continue to lower the barrier to entry to starting these skunkworks projects, which I describe as the rise of “corporate entrepreneurs”.  Working at MindTouch, we often hear from users that are embarking on a skunkworks project and building their solution on the MindTouch platform, and we love hearing how these applications are enabling collaboration and teamwork inside and outside the walls of the company.

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MindTouch goes to South By Southwest

March 26th, 2010 | | Conferences, Editorial, Enterprise 2.0

daviddees-busLast week I had the opportunity to attend the annual South By Southwest conference in Austin for the first time, and it was an absolutely amazing experience.  During the week, I was surrounded by fifteen thousand progressively minded individuals that live on the front end of innovation, design thinkers and doers from all over the world.  The energy was, in a word, infectious. I came away with a number of new perspectives on Enterprise 2.0, Entrepreneurship, and Open Source.

The first thing that struck me was the sheer amount of knowledge that was available in all of the panels, sessions, round table discussions, all night coding sessions and of course the parties.  As a multi-disciplinary individual, I wanted to experience everything.  The issue was that, at any given time slot, there were 20 different sessions to choose from;  I quickly came to the realization that I needed to find a few topics to focus on or I would burnout before the end of the first day.  I decided to focus on E2.0, Entrepreneurship, and Open Source.  At the very least, this focus made it easier to narrow down my session choices.

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