Gamification, Agile Content, and More: This Week’s Great Reads

February 8th, 2013 | | content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post, News
bunny

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. 

Are You in the 91% or 37%? (Be honest, we won’t tell.)

There was a lot of chatter this week over Oracle’s recently released customer experience report. The takeaway message is that failing to provide a good CX will injure your company’s bottom line. (But you knew that.) The results of this study make it pretty clear that although most businesses (91 percent!) want to provide an optimal customer experience, few actually execute strategies to make that happen. In fact, a surprisingly high number of companies (37 percent!) are only just now getting their acts together to implement a CX plan.

Bran Curran, VP, Customer Experience Strategy for Oracle told CMSwire:

“It’s shocking how many companies said they haven’t gotten formal customer experience programs… A brand should engage when a customer asks about a product. This means companies should do things like monitor product communities and customer commentary on social networks, as well as engage customers when they ask a question on a company’s official website.”

Notice Curran says companies should engage customers when and wherever they’re talking about your product. That “wherever” ought to be primarily arenas you’ve created with amazing authoritative content. Put reliable, useful, easy-to-find documentation out there and customers will come to you first for the information they need. Then you can keep on engaging them ad infintium.That sure beats spending all day combing through obscure forums and Twitter hashtags, right?

 

You Get a Badge for Reading This Post

Speaking of customer experience, apparently the banking industry is considering ways to incorporate gamification into its user support strategy. The idea hasn’t made a lot of headway in the U.S. yet, but it’s making a big splash in other countries. Banktech’s Jonathan Camhi says:

U.S. banks may have been slower to adopt gamification so far because they have a more cautious attitude toward digital interaction with their customers, says Stessa Cohen, research director at Gartner, an analyst firm. “U.S. banks are a little more reticent. Look at how they use Facebook. They use it to push info; they don’t engage [with customers],” she points out. But Cohen predicts that banks here will have to take a serious look at gamification and how banks in other countries are using games as they try to outdo each other in digital customer experience. “I think we will definitely see more banks incorporating gamification. The focus [U.S.] banks are putting on customer experience will definitely take them there,” she says.

Whether gamification is appropriate for your product depends on several factors, including user demographics, your business objectives, and whether you’re able to provide incentives customers actually want. Think carefully before adopting this strategy because some people really hate it.

 

Can You Hear Them Now?

Are you talking to your customers, or at them? To be the authoritative voice in your industry means listening to your users and, equally as important, responding to them. A stellar content strategy means being ready to talk to customers about what concerns them right now, not simply telling them what you think they need to know. Sure, users must be able to access fantastic documentation, but they also want a rapport with their product or service provider that let’s them know the company is proactively listening.

Digital agency Firstborn’s Alex Krawitz and Eugene Chung say getting good at agile content development helps you meet this goal.

“Agile means using real-time interactions and behavior monitoring to drive a more agile approach to creating and deploying branded content focused around the consumer. It seems obvious now that any effective approach to content has to put the consumer at the center and must be able to adapt based on cultural trends and consumer insights.”

Are your content creators agile? Can they twist-and-pivot as the customer culture and climate dictate? The article is filled with terrific tips and real-world examples of companies who use this approach with great results. (We’re not entirely convinced that “figital” is a word, though.)

Image: Toms Bauģis

What (Or Who) Is Driving Your Community Discussion Arenas?

February 6th, 2013 | | Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post
referee

Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Q&A website Stack Overflow, talks this week about the care and feeding of community-led forums that spring up around a product or service. He calls them “the dark matter of the web, the B-movies of the Internet” but acknowledges the discussions they perpetuate aren’t without value.

Atwood maintains the quality of community management software that corrals these conversations is so abysmal that business are often forced to cobble together solutions from their existing customer support software. The problem, he says,  is that “customer support isn’t the same as community.”

There’s a kernel of truth in that statement, but when you have users who want to help then it’s important to let them — and not just to stroke their ego in the hope of building consumer loyalty. Part of the reasoning behind opening up documentation to the community is the idea that the community is smarter than the company. Don’t be afraid to mine golden input from people who are knee-deep in your product because, after all, this kind of collaboration has a pretty well-proven track record.

While crowdsourcing may be the goal, forums aren’t the way to get there. As Atwood perceptively points out, community-provided support can become a quagmire of obscurity that makes it difficult to find relevant answers quickly:

“At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers….Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already.”

Agreed. But, now, let’s be honest. The only thing more infuriating than having to wade through a metric ton of irrelevant chatter to find an answer is finding out the answer you finally come up with is wrong.

This is why authoritative content is your friend. Actually, authoritative content is your best friend. You should really think about marrying authoritative content. Historically, forums were a necessary evil born from a lack of good tech options for providing online user documentation. That’s not an excuse anymore. Now you can, and must, get the right answers to your customers exactly when they need them, and get it right the first time.

If there’s a lot of chatter and discussion surrounding your documentation then, guess what? You’re not providing a quality help experience. Forums, discussion groups, support tickets, help desks — those should be last ditch options for your users, not a first line of defense.

I think we can all pretty much agree with Atwood that forums are the dark matter of the web. Do you really want that to reflect your brand? Doubtful, especially when all the tools (software solutions) and resources (help agents, developers, consumers) for better help options are right at your fingertips.

In case you’re tempted to ignore the notion that users might someday turn to each other for troubleshooting tips or anecdata, we have some news for you. They’re already doing it. Let’s kick around some statistics from a survey conducted last year:

  • 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.
  • 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.

Is your first reaction, “Hey, great! Let users help users, that’s one less thing we have to worry about. Now we can focus on putting together a 350-page how-to manual for our site instead”?

Oh, that’s probably not a good plan.

The trick to finding a good balance between encouraging community participation and ignoring it altogether lies in using tools that continually harness the good bits of crowdsourcing. You want a solution that allows users to offer assistance while still retaining control over the moderation process so the signal to noise ratio Atwood refers to doesn’t get out of hand. Authoritative content is what keeps users from a having bad help experience and ultimately abandoning your product. Even kittens like it.

Get out on the playing field with your customers and be ready to referee when necessary. Give them the answers they want, the first time they go looking. Today’s consumers want to be engaged throughout the lifetime of their association with your product, not just until they’ve made their buying decision. Customer support may not be exactly the same as community, but that’s sure where it begins.

Image: Jack Amick

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
200236712-001

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.