Zuora is a global leader in subscription commerce and billing, with enterprise leaders and high-growth companies alike using Zuora’s multi-tenant cloud platform to launch, scale, and monetize their subscription services. Zuora’s applications help subscription businesses with pricing, quoting, orders, billing, payments, and renewals. Built from the ground up by SaaS industry veterans from Salesforce.com, PayPal, and WebEx, Zuora services innovative customers like Informatica, Tata Communications, Box.net, Ning, GigaOm, Xplornet, Ustream, and Reed Business Information.
Zuora’s product is a robust and powerful tool that enables business to manage all aspects of billing and subscription services. In order to assist and guide customers in deploying and managing their solution, Zuora created extensive product documentation. The challenge Zuora faced was making their documentation easy to search, navigate and use for their customers.
Initially, Zuora published their documentation in 2 online Wikis, with very limited authoring tools, which only permitted them to post text. They lacked the ability to post images, videos, nor screenshots to help illustrate their documentation. Likewise, the wikis lacked an adaptive search tool nor the ability to be indexed by search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Collaboration was impossible and editing and modifying documentation created a bottleneck, preventing essential updated documentation from getting to the customer quickly.
Simply put, in order to maintain the pace of innovation and growth that made Zuora an industry leader, they recognized the need to invest in better tools to author and publish their documentation that could also improve their customer’s product and support experience.
To meet these needs, Zuora chose MindTouch—a unique technology used by millions every day for accessible documentation and product help. The very same day that they deployed MindTouch, Zuora was able to begin collaboratively authoring, importing, and publishing documentation to their new and improved help site. Because MindTouch seamlessly integrates with Zendesk, Zuora’s support professionals immediately began using the new documentation to answer customer questions and resolve issues faster. Furthermore, MindTouch enhances the Zendesk support ticketing system by adding a social layer to product documentation and knowledge assets.
To read more about the amazing results Zuora experiences using MindTouch, click here to read the complete Zuora customer story.
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.
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.
When your company introduces a new product, or a familiar category of product with major new features, there’s a lot of internal excitement about its potential in the marketplace. You know your new product is the best, your beta testers are excited, your developers are psyched and your marketing department has identified the most common use cases for your product and are targeting prospective buyers through email, trade shows, social media and all the usual channels. You may even notice that your beta testers are signing on, there’s a buoyant increase in trial users and a flurry of lead generation activity. So far so good! Right?
Well maybe, but chances are you’re not closing as many opportunities as you were sure you would, and you’ve noticed the early passion for your product has waned. This is why you and your sales reps and your marketing folks are pinching the bridges of their noses and wondering why these prospects can’t see the beauty of the thing you’ve created.
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MindTouch can plug into any support ticketing system. Within support ticketing environment agents receive real-time search results from MindTouch that are relevant to the article their viewing. Then agents can drag and drop relevant articles and click send to immediately respond to inbound support requests. Thanks to MindTouch dynamically organizing related articles the agents aren’t just “throwing fish” at the customer, but rather are teaching them to fish because the customer can discover related articles, tutorials, references and maybe even videos that will help them develop their skills.
Furthermore, support agents can also publish to MindTouch in a click and MindTouch organizes the content into the appropriate knowledge base, maps meta-content into our tags and auto-organizes the articles across all content so users can discover this new knowledgebase article via the related pages section available on each MindTouch page.
However, I heard an interesting customer story today that I wanted to share. Sure, we can integrate MindTouch into support ticketing to prevent context switching, but what about if the agent is browsing MindTouch? Here’s the user story:
As a support agent I want to see a button in MindTouch that allows me to click-to-copy the URL and abstract of an article in MindTouch to my clipboard so that I can easily and quickly paste and share with my customers the correct article with context.
Great idea! In fact, we plan to implement for this customer such that only members of the support user group in MindTouch see this button so as to prevent visual clutter in the UI of MindTouch.
I should probably mention that our customers, after deploying MindTouch, see double digit percentage increases in customer satisfaction, dramatic drops in mean time to response and because the end user is shown “how to fish” big drops in support costs. 
Today’s consumers are digitally dependent and face a continuous state of technical anxiety and a myriad of challenges – new products and applications, software upgrades, data migrations, new operating systems…the list goes on. According to the Pew ReSearch Center, more than half of all digital equipment and software users have logged support tickets to resolve their issues, and more than 60 percent say they feel impatient, discouraged and confused by these issues and the resulting disruption of their digital lives and productivity.
Despite these challenges, more than 75% of computer and digital device users consider themselves savvy enough to confront and solve their own problems and express a preference for doing so. Almost half of those that tried to reach out to customer support were not happy with the support they received. They complain of long service wait times, lack of issue resolution, finger pointing between vendors, and language barriers of the support technicians.
Obviously, the source of user anxiety is clear. Take a majority of consumers who consider themselves savvy, DIY problem solvers and fail to allow them to support themselves in a self-serve environment and you’ve created a product abandonment – customer dissatisfaction powder keg waiting to blow inside your revenue stream, and across the web and social media. Frustrated consumers not only vent to friends and co-workers…they broadcast across Facebook, twitter, YouTube, websites, user groups, forums, anywhere and everywhere they have a voice and an audience.
Read more…
Navigating through product documentation can be intimidating, so users will often ask questions of your support team before trying to find those answers themselves. However, you can turn that trend around by following these proven techniques to increase self service support, which often also increases customer satisfaction and lowers support costs. These six best practices are taken directly from the successes of the dozens of technology companies I’ve worked with.
- MindTouch Partners:
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