Increase Web Site Traffic with Qualified Buyers. How? Product Documentation, of Course.

March 22nd, 2012 | | content strategy, Tech Comm
Increase Traffic

It should come as no surprise that buyers of your products are using search engines to learn more about your products. They may be researching your space to make a purchasing decision or trying to figure out how to better use a competing product. You can actually use your product help to drive prospective buyers to your site. Indeed, search engines reward you for publishing product, technical and help content by increasing your search engine rankings.

If you’re only providing your help center as a service to existing customers, then you’re not getting the full benefit out of what could be your most important marketing tool for lead generation. So, how effectively are you using your product documentation in your marketing efforts?

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The First Law of Customer Happiness: Every Interaction Creates a Personal Reaction

March 20th, 2012 | | Editorial, Product Help
earth

The digital age has broadened individual access to the world. Today, through social networking and community platforms, people can not only see, hear and read information from every corner of the globe, they can speak to the world. This has given rise to the next great historical age we live in today. We’ve emerged from an era dominated by ‘super-powers’ and now live an age of super empowerment. The impact this has had on business has been profound to say the least.

Today, innovation and growth depends upon interactions rooted in modern digital social contexts yet personalized and focused on the individual. The rapid expansion of the digital age, and the resulting empowerment of individual access to information and the ability to quickly gain a wide audience has rendered experiences strictly designed for all as unsatisfactory to most.

Of course, it’s impossible to create a customer success infra-structure for every individual you sell to; that method would simply be impractical. However, you can build into your customer success modalities instances which recognize the individual and engages them on a personal level. For instance, when establishing a product help or support site, there are considerations that should be addressed that would serve to create a positive personal reaction and a great experience for the user.

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“My product is awesome…Why won’t it sell?”: The forgotten crucial step for success

December 29th, 2011 | | Customer Experience Strategy, Product Help, Uncategorized

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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Increasing User Adoption Rates and Lowering Churn

November 30th, 2011 | | ESP/SMA
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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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Structured CMS Buyers Are Adding MindTouch for LiveContent to Defend Revenues and Create Opportunities

November 24th, 2011 | | CCMS

Recent studies concluded by Greenfield Online, Datamonitor, Ovum analysts and Genesys, concluded that companies in the United States lose about $83 billion annually in product abandonment, customer churn and defections due to customer support failures. Globally, across the 16 largest economies, the total loss to support failure was $338 billion annually. The main reason these losses continue is a lack of actionable insight to the consumers’ support expectations and the real customer experience with products. Companies using twenty year old static support architecture, commonly referred to as Help 1.0 environments, are virtually blind to their customers’ sense of product and support fulfillment and are considered by support industry experts to be particularly vulnerable to support failures.

Many companies operating these Help 1.0 environments today are managing their help documentation through CMS platforms like IXIAsoft, SDL TriSoft, SDL LiveContent, DocZone, Astoria, Componize and other DITA XML based products. Though these are powerful tools, and represent a significant investment in document and knowledgebase asset management, they have fallen short of their full ability to empower support leaders with insight because they’re typically tasked to publish to static Help 1.0 dead end publishing points like PDFs, CD-ROMs, and HTML.
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