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

May 6th, 2013 | | content strategy, Customer, Product Help
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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?

  1. 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.
  2. 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 You won’t find a bunch of outdated info and broken links here.
  3. 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 | | Content in Context, content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post, Product Help
dinner_table

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

Number Crunching, Video, and Whack-A-Mole: This Week’s Great Reads

March 8th, 2013 | | Customer, Product Help, Video
Whack a mole

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.

Let’s run some numbers

Whether you visit this blog as a CEO, small business owner, MindTouch customer, tech journalist, customer service manager, or you’re just killing time until your dentist appointment, we all have one thing in common. We’re all consumers of something. To that end, we know you’ll nod your head in agreement with some data points we’re about to throw your way.

While discussing the operational details of providing an optimal customer service strategy, Forrester Analyst Kate Leggett crunches some important data:

“Sixty-six percent of customers agree that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide good service. Forty-five percent of US online adults will abandon their online purchase if they can’t find a quick answer to their question.

Why is it so important to deliver on customer expectations?  Customer satisfaction correlates to customer loyalty, and loyalty has economic benefits. Forrester calculates that a 10-percentage-point improvement in a company’s customer experience score can translate into more than $1 billion in revenue. Conversely, poor customer experiences are costly: Our data shows that 75% of consumers move to another channel when online service fails, which can incur a cost of many millions of dollars.”

That’s right, 75 percent of consumers will bail on you if your online customer service isn’t up to snuff. That’s an insanely high number but we’ll bet most readers are thinking right now about how fast they left a company because of a bad customer experience. You may think you can’t afford to worry about the nuances of a good customer experience strategy but, can you afford not to? Are you willing to risk losing 75 percent of your customers over something preventable? Spend some time thinking about these concepts after you leave the dentist.

 

Caught on video

Savvy business owners know that single-sheet paper documentation or a general support email address buried in a website no longer cuts it as a means to providing outstanding customer service. Many companies now employ an integrated help system with multiple points of entry via online product documentation, continuously updated knowledge bases, and robust ticketing systems. That’s a lot of ways to offer automated self-help. Can you think of more?

1to1Media’s Cynthia Clark says video is the next rising star in the self-service product help arena.

“The benefits of video extend beyond its ability to show customers what they need to do to address their issues, but its availability around the clock means that customers can access the information at anytime they want and at a lower cost, even when a contact center might be closed. [Invodo CEO Craig] Wax notes that while video can be beneficial for all self-service situations, it is particularly effective to address complex issues or ones that involve detailed instructions through visuals.”

Given the popularity of YouTube, vlogging, and other forms of video content, this is a pretty safe conclusion to draw. It’s not a sparkling new idea, though. E-commerce industry experts have been making this case for years and Gerrard Dennis, managing director of TheSimplyGroup.com, has one of the best arguments we know of about the  importance of including video in your product documentation. Commenting on how videos increased sales by 25 percent and cut down substantially on return rates, Dennis tells Econsultancy:

“The key here is that, along with all the other information on the products pages, these videos answer all the questions which customers may have about products, bringing it closer to the in-store experience. In fact, Gerrard argues that this can be better than the in store experience, since ‘you get the most knowledgable member of staff each time, not just the Saturday guy.’”

Take another look at that last remark. Consumers “get the most knowledgeable member of staff each time,” not just a random person who happens to be in a position to answer customer questions. Customer service doesn’t get much more proactive than this, folks. Anticipate what people want to know and have answers ready when they’re looking for them. Whether you produce them in-house or contract out the work to a specialty agency, there’s no denying video tutorials are the next wave. Catch it, ride it.

 

Maybe we like Whack-A-Mole

Awesome customer interaction isn’t limited to just providing speedy answers or detailed product help. Sometimes its the little things that count. Amazon built a subtle but amazingly effective touch into its drop down menu functionality that makes navigating its site a smooth, delay-free experience. Ben Kamens, lead developer at Kahn Academy, drills down into the predictive technology behind interactive Amazon’s menu feature and why “to-delay-or-not-to-delay” is an important consideration from a consumer standpoint:

“You need that, because otherwise when you try to move your mouse from the main menu to the submenu, the submenu will disappear out from under you like some sort of sick, unwinnable game of whack-a-mole.”

We spend a lot of time here talking about optimizing the customer experience by being proactive and making sure you delight your customers every single time they come in contact with you. This little gem of a detail Kamens unearthed is a great example of how the smallest change on your website can mean better engagement of your customer. Putting this idea to practical use, if part of your product documentation involves lots of drop down menus requiring users to click around for information, take a page from Amazon and give some thought to whether that process is as smooth as it can be. [via Mashable]

 Image: jeff_kontur

Big Data, BMWs, and Barriers to KM: This Week’s Great Reads

February 23rd, 2013 | | News, Product Help
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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. 

Big Data, Big Insight

If you want to outrank other businesses in your industry, consumer strategy consultant Mark Ratekin says you’d better pay attention to big data. He defines the newest catchphrase as “the collection and synchronization of disparate data sources with the intent of having a more holistic view of a system and its component parts.” Ratekin urges companies to crunch numbers as if their very lives depend on it — because that’s probably the case. He offers several observations, including these prescient points:

  • Having a mechanism and process by which we can understand the inter-relationships of various data provides greater opportunities – and more imperative – to take a more action-oriented analytic approach. Stated differently – analyses that do not focus on action (and business outcomes) will have little value in organizations.
  • The complexity of the data systems will require that customer strategists be skilled (or at least conversant) in the theory of data structures.
  • As the volume of transactional data grows, the opportunity (and demand) for sophisticated longitudinal analysis and/or complex predictive analytics will increase. Customer strategists will need to be not only more data-savvy, but also will need to be more skilled in the use of complex predictive analytics.

One of the deepest analytical data wells you can mine lies right inside your company’s content. Behavior and curation analytics take a look at how your customers interact with your support team, documentation, and knowledge base for insightful information on what’s working and what needs improvement.

When you’re looking over your users’ shoulders though analytics, you’ll begin to understand how they relate to your product and gain a better understanding of what you can do to provide them even greater value. There’s a lot of buzz right now about big data and new ways to collect it, but don’t overlook what’s already right under your nose.

 

The Geniuses at BMW

Following the example of other luxury car makers, BMW is soft-launching a new program aimed at offering face-to-face customer service right in the showroom. The “BMW Genius Everywhere” pilot puts iPads into the hands of employees specifically trained as vehicle specialists. The Geniuses aren’t salespeople and aren’t expected to close a deal. Rather, they’ll roam the showroom as “product explainers” and be ready to troubleshoot or answer questions on the spot.

Ian Robertson, BMW board member for sales and marketing told AdAge.com the move is in response the company’s increased understanding that customers want pre- or post-purchase answers which don’t typically fall under the purview of a salesperson.

“The salesman has a complicated job…He has to understand product, he has to be trained and he has to understand financial services. And honestly, it has probably gotten a little too broad. One of the things we considered very carefully: Can we break the process up into bite-size chunks?”

The Genius program is part of a larger customer support initiative expected to take shape later this year. It’s focus is to make the vehicles as user-friendly as possible because as one BMW exec notes, “We engineer a lot of things into the car that are difficult to explain.”

This is a really great approach to customer support and a terrific way to provide an outstanding customer experience with one of the lowest barriers of entry possible. Apple may be a pioneer in the “genius” approach but it’s wonderful to see other companies take a page from their playbook. iPad-wielding specialists may not be right for your business so what off-the-beaten-path methods are you using to help your customers find the answers they’re looking for?

 

Breaking the Barriers

Nick Milton, founder and director of knowledge management (KM) consulting firm Knoco, agrees with the premise of an MIT Sloan Management Review article on How to Build Collaborative Advantage [PDF]. Its authors assert there are four barriers to KM that affect everyone in a product’s ecosystem from suppliers to users, all of which Milton says can be overcome.  The dichotomy of two barriers in particular stand out:

The unable supplier suffers from the Stranger problem – “I don’t know who to share this with”. This can be tackled through developing a Pull-based approach, so that they share by answering  the questions of an individual or team (through community forums, or peer assist), or by using the concept of the “Unknown User” – the psychological construct that we can bring into retrospects and after action reviews.

The unable user suffers from “needle in a haystack” – they don’t know where to look. Here we need the knowledge assets, that synthesized knowledge that creates the faucet rather than the firehose. We need the expertise locator. We need good search, and we need the places to ask – the community forums described above.

On the one hand, you have a supplier with a wealth of knowledge and nowhere to put it. On the other, you have a user looking for knowledge and nowhere to find it. This was a very real issue when MIT released this paper back in 2004, but there are all kinds of options available today that now pull down these barriers with ease.

Traditional knowledge management systems didn’t allow for collaboration the way today’s solutions do. KM used to be a fairly one-dimensional affair for both the user and supplier, and rarely the twain shall meet. This has been particularly true in the software industry but the proliferation of software-as-a-service has changed all that. Now its possible and even desirable to ensure KM is both collaborative and constantly updated across all support channels.

Check out Milton’s post to learn more about all four barriers to knowledge management, then scan the MIT article to see how far the KM industry has come in less than a decade.

Image: whisperwolf 

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

February 19th, 2013 | | Content in Context, content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Product Help
HIMYM_Ted-3

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.

Garmin

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.

Roku

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.

TiVo

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.

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
revolutionary product helpA

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.

LavaCon 2012 Corey Ganser: What Makes a Superhero? Doing What Others Can’t and/or Won’t

October 16th, 2012 | | Conferences, content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Product Help, Tech Comm

The following is an overview of MindTouch Customer Experience Manager, Corey Ganser’s highly attended presentation this year at LavaCon 2012.

“Today I’m going to cover What Makes a Superhero? Doing What Others Can’t and/or Won’t. I’ll explain more about this as we get into the presentation, but before I get started, here is a little overview of me. I’m the Customer Experience Manager at MindTouch. As a Customer Experience Manager, I’m responsible for working with every department within MindTouch to ensure we provide a consistent and positive experience for all of our customers.  Note that when I say customers, it extends beyond our actual customers that pay us money, but also incorporates prospects or people that are interested in evaluating our software.

The Customer Experience initiative provides a holistic approach to providing an excellent experience for customers to ultimately affect initiatives dictated at an executive level.

Working with customers of MindTouch, I see this initiative consistently and I’ve been able to extract elements of the organization that exist before they move towards a unified customer experience.

The first thing that is evident is that there is a division among departments that make it hard for the customer to receive a consistent message or experience. Not only does this affect the customer though, it also affects the employees within the organization and is primarily rooted in a dispersion of content for the customer.

We see the Support department has a knowledge base, the Technical Writing team maintains the formal documentation/User Manuals, Product can have a separate in product help that isn’t pulled from any of the above resources. Marketing and Sales too have a separate repository of information that they use to entice prospects join the sales pipeline.

This division leads to a lot of duplicated effort that causes confusion within the company.

This confusion is easily transmitted to the customer and in turn, they take on the confusion and have a hard time getting a positive experience. The Support team should be leveraging the documentation that the Technical Writing team is putting together and the Technical Writing team should be able to leverage the SME in support to help seed their content. And for those of you that think PDF is an acceptable delivery method for your support team to leverage, it isn’t. Your support team isn’t going to send a PDF to a customer and say: “download this PDF, scroll down to page 56 and then look at paragraph 3 and that is your answer.” What an awful way to receive help.

Product, Marketing, and Sales should be leveraging the work coming out of Technical Writing and Support combined to enhance the experience for the users. Product can incorporate this into the product. Marketing and Sales can tie in this documentation into their tools to share with prospects. Ultimately if the prospect doesn’t find information that helps them make an informed decision about what to buy, they aren’t going to choose your company as their vendor.

Let’s take a look at some of MindTouch customers that are doing this currently.

Case Study #1: coolOrange

• The Need:
a)    Integration with Support Ticketing
b)    Easy to use interface for authoring
c)    Ability to create templates for consistency of knowledge capture
d)   A system that wouldn’t require management and  upgrading by coolOrange

 
 

• Solution:
a)    MindTouch as a central repository for content with integration into Zendesk

• Benefits:
a)    Decreased costs for creation of docs, increased quality of support, and improved communication all around
b)    17% drop in support tickets

 
 

Case Study #2: Zuora

• The Need:
a)    Increase collaboration among SMEs
b)    Support Ticketing Integration
c)    Make documentation more accessible to users
d)   Increase analytics around documentation to identify trends and usage

 

 

• Solution Implemented:
a)    MindTouch at the center of content
b)    Integration with Zendesk

• Benefits:
a)    Opening up documentation to SMEs resulted in 200 new articles over the course of a couple of months.
b)    Zuora’s customers increased usage of self-help.
c)    Sales leads are generating from documentation
 
 
 
Case Study #3: SuccessFactors

• The Need:
a) Looking for a central location for documentation
b) Chat Integration
c) Easy to manage documentation repository
d) Integration with SAP Service OnDemand
e) Ability to extend documentation into the product
f) Personalize the customer’s experience with help from SSO
 
 
 

• Solution:
a)    MindTouch as their main support portal
b)    SnapEngage for chat
c)    Service OnDemand for help desk
d)    SSO integration with MindTouch and pass- through to chat and helpdesk

• Benefits:
a)    Central location for customers to access self-help with a personalized experience
 
 
Ultimately what each one of these companies is doing is creating an authoritative source for content: everyone (prospects, customers, and employees) has access to the single source of truth as opposed to multiple answers to the same question

 

 

 

As you review your plan to move ahead with a solution like MindTouch, make sure you don’t just choose a solution that is right for you only now. I like to relate this to Mr./Mrs. Right vs. Mr./Mrs. Right now. If you choose Mr./Mrs. Right Now, you’ll most likely overlook a lot of critical requirements that will unfortunately surface later on in the relationship. This truth can be said about a documentation solution. Write down a list of the direction you want to go with your content. This includes covering:

  • Creation – Web authoring and making it easy to create content.
  • Publishing – Don’t go through 10 steps to publish your documentation when it should only be 3-5.
  • Consumption – Identify how your customers want to access your content and make sure you can support that          delivery method.
  • Contribution – don’t be afraid to open the doors to your  community to solicit feedback from them. They have been       using your product for a long time and will have some great knowledge that should be captured.”
Corey then led a discussion around these following questions which serve to guide any approach to improving product help and customer engagement.

To learn how MindTouch can can help you get the most out of your product documentation and help click here

How Not to Pull a ‘Corporate Thelma and Louise’ Over the Fiscal Cliff

September 20th, 2012 | | Customer Experience Strategy, Enterprise 2.0, Featured Post, Product Help
ThelmaAndLouise

There is plenty of intrinsic uncertainty in business, and with an intractably grid locked Congress driving the nation towards a “fiscal cliff”, and Europe unsteadily struggling with massive economic reforms and austerity measures, the business climate faces the potential for massive volatility in the near future. However, according to  Jim Rohrer, President of Customer Care Partners:

“When the economy slows down, your business doesn’t have to. Businesses can still succeed and grow even now, in one of the most challenging economies we’ve had since the 1970’s. The secret involves improving client loyalty, the only element proven to cause growth.”

The more your company engages and partners with your customers the more loyal they will be to you. The more you can help them achieve their goals, the more essential you become to their success and they would never think of choosing another vendor (partner).

Surprisingly, even in this economy, many companies remain exclusively sales driven to achieve growth and have given very little attention to introducing innovation into their customer care modalities. The result for many of these companies has been a hapless struggle against accelerating churn rates by doubling down on marketing and sales investments.

In companies failing to focus on their existing customers, churn is frequently treated like the common cold: management presumes the root causes of the problem can’t be cured and think that the very best that can hoped for is to alleviate the symptoms. But bear in mind, in much the same way that pharmaceutical advancements make it possible for healthcare professionals to attack viral strains directly, enterprises are able to diagnose and cure the underlying causes of customer departures and disenchantment. Simply put, churn is curable.

The outcome of investing in customer experience tools almost never has a negative impact on revenue and it’s easy to understand how any churn prevention initiative is likely have a positive effect on other parts of the company because the most-effective churn reduction methods are bolstered by unambiguous and legitimate assemblies of information and data from all channels in the company. A look below at the most common drivers of churn, identified by the Institute for Customer Service, illustrates this:

  • Unethical practices and overstated capabilities at the point of sale.
  • Sign-up, activation, and new user challenges.
  • Fulfillment glitches.
  • Service, support and documentation inadequacies.
  • Unpredictable billing practices and poor payment capacities.
  • Misaligned and/or inconsistently applied policies.
  • Difficulty with product and/or package features—or the lack thereof.

Note that 4 of these 7 are closely linked to your product and support channels. This means improvement of the customer experience in these areas is an essential keystone in your over-arching customer loyalty strategy.

Before the Going Gets Tough, Make Customer Experience and Loyalty a Priority

MindTouch has learned through its long history in providing product help solutions that about 50% of business leaders pinpoint customer churn as the topmost threat to their company. Given that customer retention will be crucial to your business’ capacity to thrive; you simply must focus on it as a central business goal. Position your people, operations and strategy towards creating a fantastic customer experience and make absolutely certain it will be embedded in all parts of the company.

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Softer

Cost cutting on customer care and technical support is generally a false economy. Rather, carefully consider both the ‘soft’ – intangible or emotional – as well as monetary returns of customer relationships and invest in strengthening the stickiness of your product or service by using essential tools to make your product easier to use and easier to understand through engaging and socially enabled product help.

When the Going Gets Tough, Don’t Swing the Axe at Customer Care

Nearly one third (31%) of business leaders point out their quality of service has been weakened due largely to a short-term focus on cost-cutting and profits. Fair price combined with a valuable product are the foundations of an exceptional customer experience. Start building on this with real value-added, customer focused and publically facing customer care and support investments.

When the Going Gets Tough, the Customer Will Always Be Right

Acquiring and holding onto loyal customers will undoubtedly be crucial as, according to Consumer Studies Research out of Rutgers University, almost fifty percent (47%) of consumers  and B2B buyers describe themselves in this economic climate as more prone to switch companies or vendors in the foreseeable future as their budgets tighten. To counteract this, carefully consider ways in which your business strategy, as well as operating approach, reflects what today’s customer and buyer truly expects from your product and your company.

When the Going Gets Tough, Your Customer Care Team Will Save the Day

Customer care is a legitimate and essential profession that has all too often been outsourced into the hands of persons without a stake in the outcomes of their performance and function with very loose accountability. Therefore, strive to equip and coach your own staff to offer the very best customer care and technical support possible and most importantly invest in a proven technology, like that offered by MindTouch to effectively promote self-service support. Furthermore, empower, stimulate and cultivate customer care skill sets in all your employees – clients will certainly benefit and so will your staff.

Before the Going Gets Tough, Engage and Empathize

The softer elements of the customer experience and engagement are in many cases neglected. Clients favor being taken care of as people, not account numbers. Engage your client at every opportunity, communicate that you understand, and deliver consistency, trustworthiness, reliability every time. This will help ensure that your clients become your advocates. One of the most neglected customer engagement points is, amazingly, when an where customers look for help with a product. This is perhaps the most critical point to maximize engagement…when the customer (or user) is having a problem and looking for answers on Google or your web site. Its critical to know when when and where your customer is looking for help on-line, and to know whether or not they’re finding the information they need.

Wall Flowers Never Grow-Get Social and Listen

Social media, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, etc.,  gives you and your customers a medium for feedback as well as mutual sharing and engagement. Harness the variety of applications designed to both monitor customer reactions and comments and engage with them to enhance the total product, customer care and product support experience. Companies like HTC, SuccessFactors and SAP have even taken the extra step of integrating their MindTouch powered product help with their CRM and ticketing platforms and social network accounts to provide rapid solutions to customers looking for help across multiple channels.

An Ounce of Prevention is Better than a Pound of Churn

Customer problems and grievances cost time and money but a workable, easy to use and scalable system will allow you too efficiently and cost effectively pinpoint weaknesses. Monitor customer feedback and adopt streamlined engagement and monitoring applications, for instance MindTouch, a socially enabled product help system, enables you to address customer problems with your product and its documentation before they catch fire.

Think Strategically and Gather Intelligence

Customer care and technical support is a significant driver of bottom-line performance and will be the decisive battlefield in the blistering struggle through economic downturns for new buyers. Keep coming back customer care strategy routinely, evaluating the ways in which your clients as well as  your staff  regard it, not to mention the ways in which it stacks up to competitors’ approaches.

Drive Customer and Buyer Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt Off the Cliff Instead

83% of executives, interviewed by a Rutgers University research team, specified that the caliber of customer care and product support is a greater determining factor as weighted against price in determining their ongoing loyalty as a client. So, lastly, differentiate, as well as market yourself on the excellence of your customer and technical support as well as your product, ensuring that clients continue to keep coming back and to lend stability against fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of potential buyers.

5 Modern Consumer Expectations About Product Help

September 11th, 2012 | | Customer Experience Strategy, Enterprise 2.0, Product Help
batman_techsupport

According to The Pew Internet and American Life Project around 48% of technology users usually need help to set-up new devices and software, or to show them how they function. Without a quick and easy means for consumers to access relevant documentation and product help, the experience often leads to impatience and frustration and, for some, ultimately product abandonment. The more consumers struggle with a new product the likelihood of widespread adoption decreases enormously.

Although nearly 75 % of consumers of digital devices and software consider themselves tech-savvy and express a preference for trying to solve their own product issues, here is how most did it:

  • 38% of users with failed technology called user support for help.
  • 28% of technology users fixed the problem themselves.
  • 15% fixed the problem with help from colleagues friends or family.
  • 15% of tech users were unable to fix their problem
  • 2% found help online

Sydney Jones, co-author of the report says ““In an age in which new technologies are introduced almost daily, a new gadget or service can become popular well before the technology itself is understood by the average user. Naturally, some users catch on to new technology more quickly than others, and those who have more trouble grasping the technology are left confused, discouraged, and reliant on help from others when their technology fails.”  Furthermore, when polled about their support experience, a full 40% say they felt confused by the information they were getting, and 48% felt discouraged by the amount of effort needed to find a solution.

Its consumer numbers like these that are increasingly driving companies to place product help at the forefront of their customer experience strategies. Some of the most successful companies at leveraging product help into good customer experiences are HTC, Autodesk, SuccessFactors, Fujitsu, PayPal, and Intuit. The reason these companies are so successful at transforming the product help experience into a brand building and customer loyalty strategy is because they offer an engaging self-service portal to their customers that are highly effective in these 5 areas consumers have come to anticipate as part of their experience:

1) Usability: Your site must be easy to navigate and powered by an adaptive search engine that surfaces highly relevant information to your customer along with other meaningful collateral information that deepens the expertise of the product user.

2) Feedback: You need to know how engaged and satisfied your customers are with the information, help and documentation your providing them. Offering the opportunity to the customer to offer feedback around your product gives you the opportunity not only to engage the customer when they need help, but also provides a stream that feeds continuous improvement of the customer experience.

3) Active Brand Participation: Users of your self-serve community have to know you’re actively listening to them and paying attention to their needs in your support channel. Although your customers may be served well by your documentation or your user community, you’ll magnify the consumer experience by actively participating with the community, recognizing and rewarding productive participation, even if it’s only to acknowledge a members contribution toward solving another’s problem.

4) Analytics: Having continuous visibility into the performance of your self-serve community is a must to drive continuous improvement while keeping your customers’ needs in focus. It’s also essential because often the early warning signs of support hot-spots will surface within your analytics, enabling you to respond quickly and directly. Analytics will also provide actionable information regarding your customers’ sense of product fulfillment and provides a means by which to tune into and respond to consumers’ desires for certain product features or improvements.

5) Friendly Guidance: There will be times when either your documentation or your community won’t have the right answer or your customer simply needs someone confident to guide them through a crisis. When this happens your customer needs an escape route directly to your support team. This can be via phone, email, or live chat.

By meeting consumer expectations with these essential elements in place, any company can and will improve their customer experience marks, and create a community of engaged product advocates in place of a large group of frustrated and under-served customers likely to defect to another brand.

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