5 Ways To Radically Reinvent Product Help for a Competitive Edge

November 30th, 2012 | | Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post, MindTouch, Product, Product Help, TCS Features
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Let’s assume that product documentation and support is a major pain point at your company (for most, it is). The first step is to fix it by looking at it from the outside-in. In other words, what would you do differently if you really measured the usefulness and accessibility of your documentation from your customers’ perspective? For example, why can’t they search your documentation for the answers they need? Why can’t they easily let you know whether or not they found what they were looking for? Why can’t they use your documentation to do more than find answers, but to learn and enhance their product expertise?

Solutions to address these questions may seem costly and burdensome at first, but by staying ahead of disruptive social trends and creating cutting edge innovations, MindTouch provides cost effective tools any company can use to effectively–and profitably–turn traditional approaches to product documentation and support upside-down. Let’s take a look at what product documentation and support at your company could look like.

Imagine how you could delight your customers and leapfrog your competition if. . .

  • Your customers could access a powerful search engine dedicated to helping them quickly and easily find the most relevant information from the most credible source (your company, not a 3rd party forum).
  • Your software users could access product help when and where they need it without having to leave your application.
  • Your customers could easily provide feedback and ask a question directly from within your documentation rather than having to email you or waiting on hold for a support agent.
  • You connected every piece of product documentation customers used to an analytical service that could more quickly diagnose product and documentation problems and quickly offer customers relevant guidance.
  • You could eliminate documentation silos and distribute the latest, most up to date, documentation internally so that all product information was instantly accessible to any customer-facing employee.

With MindTouch you can!

Adaptive Search MindTouch includes a powerful search engine that indexes articles, comments and even the contents of file attachments. We call it adaptive because MindTouch learns from user interactions and continues to get better as your users score content, visit, click and interact with pages. No work on your part – just let MindTouch do its job. Site admins have access to tools for analyzing search, manipulating and specifying recommended results.

 

 

F1 Help Button: Contextual Help System In just minutes you can add a contextual help system powered by MindTouch to your web applications. This allows your users to receive screen or field level contextually relevant help within your applications. Because MindTouch automatically relates content your users will get answers to their questions and be recommended content that will help them develop their expertise even further.

 

 

Feedback Tools MindTouch offers page and search result scoring and feedback mechanisms. Scoring impacts the adaptive search and informs behavioral analytics. Also, user feedback can open a support ticket in your current ticketing system via email and MindTouch will email the appropriate author or editor who can respond directly to the user’s feedback.

 

 

Analytics These powerful reports were designed to inform content strategy: which articles need to be written or improved. Reviewing user search patterns will also help product, marketing and sales teams. Marketers and content strategists value the ability to tactically execute on search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Support and product leaders rely on these reports to identify hot-spots.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CRM/Ticketing Integration.  MindTouch plugs into pretty much any support ticketing system. Support agents will receive real-time search results from MindTouch. Agents can drag and drop relevant articles and click send. Your users will get the best possible solution, will know where to return to self serve and with auto-related articles they will develop their product expertise. Agents can also publish to MindTouch with a click.

 

 

 

With these capabilities, companies in every industry have improved their customers’ brand and product experience while significantly reducing documentation and support costs.

To learn more about how MindTouch can help your company get a competitive edge, gain valuable insight into your customers’ sense of product satisfaction and improve your customers’ experience: click here.

6 Ways to Help Your Users Help Themselves with Contextual Help

March 30th, 2012 | | Customer, MindTouch, Product
Helping Hand (flicker.com/johnnyalive)

Wading through product documentation can be intimidating and downright boring, so users will often ask questions of your support team so they don’t have to deal with the mounds of information which may or may not solve their problem. However, you can turn that trend around by utilizing a contextual help system that makes finding answers easier. Below, we provide six simple ways that you can help your users help themselves by accessing contextual help.

1. Don’t Tell Your Users, Show Them

Rather than replying to user support tickets with detailed answers, send them a direct link to the appropriate page in your product help system where they can find detailed, straightforward and get this – helpful – answers to their questions. It’s also important to make sure that the page you send them to features related content so that they can continue exploring, which bring us to…

Direct users to related content2. Direct Users to Related Content

Each page in your contextual help system should link out to another page that has related articles, tutorials, videos, etc. This ensures that users continue to click through your product help as they search for and learn about particular features, helping them to discover more information on the things they want to know about.

3. Provide In-Product Help

Picture this: one of your product users completely lost trying to figure out what a feature in your software does. Or maybe they don’t know how to populate a field. Perhaps they just want to ensure they did something right..

Read more…

Product Documentation Updates

March 17th, 2012 | | Product
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I’m pleased to share that this week we’ve rolled out some really helpful new documentation at the MindTouch Help Center.

Using the behavioral analytics built into MindTouch I was able to identify the articles most desired by our users. Here are some of these articles that I expect to be popular based on what I found in our behavioral analytics.

Global Variables: MindTouch allows users to setup Global Variables that can be used to control the value of a variable anywhere within your documentation. Global Variables are beneficial in maintaining consistency within your documentation for things like version numbers, product names, dependency information, etc. Using the Global Variables feature within MindTouch you are able to define variables and values where the values will be in a single location so you can easily change the value, but the variables can be used anywhere within your documentation.

Custom PDF Styles: With MindTouch, an article, entire guide or collection of pages can be saved as a print ready PDF and this PDF output can be completely customized to the look and feel your company’s branding.

Customizing MindTouch: New articles on skinning MindTouch with CSS overrides.

Social Integration: New section on social signon and  social sharing.

Let me know what you think. Of course, you already have in a way thanks to MindTouch behavioral analytics, which is how I identified these as important articles to write and improve. Smile

Take Self-Service to New Heights with Behavioral and Search Analytics

March 15th, 2012 | | Product
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Thanks to our instant-gratification culture, self-service is the easiest way to maximize customer happiness and support efficiency. In fact, nearly half  of all customers prefer finding their own answers to talking to a support agent. But how do you measure ticket deflection? How do you know what content users want? We’ve been trying to make it easy for our customers to answer these questions and know the real value of their self-service. MindTouch solves these problems with their advanced behavioral analytics which allow you see exactly what content users like, don’t like and what they want. It’s the perfect way to satisfy your users and keep ensuring you’re promoting customer success. Self-service hasn’t been this easy since the invention of self-service frozen yogurt.

Drive Customer Success with Self-Service  Search Analytics

The intuitive nature of MindTouch enables users to effortlessly locate answers with minimal support department resources. The advantages of providing customers with self-service resources can’t be ignored. Customers no longer need to tie up customer support lines with questions they could more quickly discover themselves. Even the best support departments have limits and cutting down on the amount of simple, repetitive questions allows the department to focus on more complicated, infrequent issues.

Glean Powerful Insights from Your Reporting Dashboard

MindTouch Behavioral analytics allow you to identify missing and low quality content, boost SEO and focus in on specific resources with pin-point precision. Don’t wonder if users have found the information they’re looking for- Know. The following tools aid in ensuring customer success:

  • Search analytics
  • In-search promoted content
  • Community scoring analytics
  • Content aging analytics
  • User activity reporting
  • User Feedback

You can find more about this in the product documentation on this topic at the MindTouch Help Center.