3 Secrets to a Healthy Customer Relationship: Give, Take and Share

March 13th, 2012 | | CCMS, content strategy, Customer, ESP/SMA, Tech Comm
Give your customers what they want

Every day at MindTouch we see companies come through our doors who find themselves with unhappy customers, low renewals and high support costs.

We’ve deduced the source of these problems to stem from poor relationship management. A relationship is a two-way street where the parties involved are happiest when all benefit. In the end, a social product help system resolves the relationship issues these companies experience and we want to share with you the secret to a healthy customer relationship: Give, Take, Share.

1.) Give:

What should you give your customers? In a customer relationship, what you ‘give’ can either be extremely influential in pushing renewals, or completely useless. The key is to give the customer what they want- not what you think they want. 

To begin, put a support platform in place that will facilitate your ‘giving’ goals. An online social help site is an excellent way to ensure your customers get the information and attention they want. It’s crucial that your online support site include a comprehensive knowledgebase that stores every technical document and media item that could possibly relate to your product. This process is much easier and painless when you get a knowledgebase with in-context WYSIWYG editing, collaborative authoring, versioning, permissions, staging and development of draft/approval workflow.

Just because you have all your content in one place does not mean you’ve given your customers something they want. It is crucial to organize your content into rational hierarchies with every document linking to related content. There should be no dead ends or dead links. This knowledge base must be dynamic and easily navigable otherwise you give the customer an unusable mess that will only result in more frustration, anger and fallout. Once you’ve done your best to give users the tools you think they need, you must keep tabs on what they’re ‘taking’ in order to understand if you have actually given them what they want.

2.) Take:

When users come onto a support platform, their goal is to ‘take.’ They might have never thought of their support usage in this way, but essentially their goals are to go onto the site, find answers to their questions and take away the knowledge to apply to their product usage. In this sense, ‘take’ is a wonderful thing because it means the user has found information they consider valuable enough to ingest.

There are ways to measure the ‘take’ on your social help site. In-site analytics provide an immediate and accurate report of customer interaction with your content. You can also use search analytics to view which articles are most frequently clicked on from a set of search terms and update your documentation accordingly.

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PDFs, North Korea, and the Iron Curtain of Product Help

February 14th, 2012 | | ESP/SMA
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Remember when Kim Jong Il died, and we all became reacquainted with what life was like in North Korea? Remember that nighttime satellite picture that showed the North nearly entirely dark and the South glimmering with vibrant light?

Well if you’re still supporting your customers with static product documents like PDFs, the analogy would be that you’re keeping your product help and the customer on the wrong side of the DMZ.  However, unlike a despotic regime, you don’t have secret police, product commissars, an Army and thousands of miles of barbed wire to keep your customer from defecting because your product help is keeping them from succeeding and flourishing with it. (If you’re daydreaming about how great that would be right now…take a break to play some on-line Risk, and come back later) They’re free to seek happiness and success with a company and a product that gives them every opportunity to do that.

Let’s take a closer look behind the Iron Support Curtain and what do we see. Read more…

The Eighty Year Old Technology that will Change How You Support Your Customers

February 7th, 2012 | | ESP/SMA
Vannevar Bush portrait

frustrated baby via Flickr by Niklas HellerstedtI recently had an abject lesson in how end user success is strongly correlated to a company’s success when I won a telescope from a holiday drawing. I’m not a telescope kind of person per se. I’ve never used a telescope and the extent of my constellation knowledge is Orion’s Belt and maybe the Big Dipper – or is it the Little Dipper? But after I got home from the party I was so excited to open the box and get it up and running.

Unfortunately, the telescope company didn’t particularly care whether I used the telescope or not. I say this because as soon as I opened the box, I saw a telescope in little pieces that needed assembly. Usually assembling things doesn’t freak me out, but when I took a look at what they called ‘instructions’ I was far from excited.

More doesn’t mean ‘better’

Included in the box was not one, but two instructional guides and a DVD. Let’s just say more is not always better. The documentation was like a puzzle where I had to hop from one PDF manual to another and then jump on my computer to download a CD which was full of more PDFs that were supposed to supplement the first two manuals. It was not fun, not pretty and by the time I had halfway assembled the telescope I just gave up. I put the pieces back in the box and went online to return it.

It’s called hypermedia and it’s been around 80 years now

This isn’t just about me getting frustrated when I was putting together a telescope, there is a much more important lesson here. We are now in the age of computers. And guess what–these complex machines allow me to connect to the Internet and interact with hypermedia (that’s what we now call interactive web pages), which Vannevar Bush designed way back in 1930 (see Memex) as a way to foster and accelerate learning and information transfer. Today we’ve taken the hypermedia concept even further by baking “social” into the fabric of the web. With this in mind, why would any company today feel it is appropriate to give it’s user a PDF- literally pictures of paper- and pretend it’s sufficient. Read more…

Is Your Product a Mountain or a Mole Hill?

January 30th, 2012 | | ESP/SMA
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Nothing determines the success of your software more than your users’ ability to succeed with it, and to succeed with it they must understand it.

But first you must understand your customer by facilitating an almost obsessive focus on your users’ needs and wants. In today’s world, software start-ups are nowhere nearly as expensive to start and ramp up as they were just a few years ago. Product development has taken on a rapid pace due to the availability of a wide array of development tools and platforms. The only remaining competitive advantage in the software space these days is achieved by targeting the perfect customer persona or market segment and thoroughly understanding their needs and desires.

Further, you must create extreme alignment between your product experience and how your user wants to experience it. Gone are the days where users must shape their behavior to suit the software. There are simply too many choices for today’s consumers to allow developers to continue to determine how products are used.

So, in order to help users understand your product, you need to gain insight into exactly how they want to use it. You must then deliver the knowledge in a highly focused, agile manner.
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Increasing User Adoption Rates and Lowering Churn

November 30th, 2011 | | ESP/SMA
f1_contextual_help

Providing top-notch customer service doesn’t have to involve lengthy back-and-forth calls with your users.  It can be much easier. In fact, bad product documentation could be hurting your customer retention. Indeed your help and product documentation is a valuable customer relationship management (CRM) tool that you might be overlooking.  Your documentation increases customer retention and turns your users into product experts whom would never dream of leaving your products. So, it’s more important than ever to seriously consider whether your product documentation is actually proving useful.
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3 Ways to Lower Subscriber Churn: Email Service Providers, CRM and Marketing Automation Take Note

November 17th, 2011 | | ESP/SMA
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Among the most critical concerns facing product and support leaders at subscriber based service providers—such as Email Service Providers (ESP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Marketing Automation companies—is the cost of churn. The subscriber based service market is competitive,  to say the least, and taking proactive steps to defend against subscriber churn is essential to your company’s growth, long-term stability, and competitiveness.

Here are 3 steps you can take now to combat subscriber churn:

1) Enable your users to succeed right away

User_DevelopmentThe fact is a large number of people unsubscribe from your service because no clear pathway has been established for their immediate success using  your application. You can create that pathway very easily by adding Contextual Help to your product. It allows your developers to easily add a fully integrated help system to your application. This modern F1-style help system creates a rich social help experience for your users by giving them contextually relevant help information right inside your product. Customers don’t have to exit the application to search for the answers they need because they are only one click away.
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