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

The Key to Voice-Of-Customer Program Success

September 27th, 2012 | | Customer Experience Strategy
corey

Our own Corey Ganser, Customer Experience Manager at MindTouch, has been getting a lot of attention lately as an industry CX expert. He will be a featured speaker at LavaCon this year and was recently sought out by the Waypoint Group to discuss the implementation, challenges and benefits of our customer experience program. In this interview, Corey discusses how he implemented a highly effective CX program at MindTouch, the results, and gives advice to those starting to put together their own CX programs.

Excerpt:

“Q: What prompted you to start a Customer Experience program? 

When I initially started with MindTouch I was leading the Customer Support department and I needed to understand how well MindTouch was doing in the customer’s eyes.  How could we improve?  As a smaller company, being customer-focused is critical, and a main competitive advantage.  Therefore the focus was on ensuring customers were happy and not on ‘tickets closed’ or other internal metrics. 

While our initial measure of customer success was focused on end-user interaction with the Support organization, we realized that was too narrow.  We leveraged Net Promoter – adding a periodic “relationship” questionnaire that also uses the “recommend” question – to make sure customers are happy overall.  We also ask what can we do to improve MindTouch, and that’s where we learn critical customer priorities:  While the majority of that feedback is around product enhancements, we also learn quite a bit about how to improve our communications, training, documentation, and processes.”

Click here to get the rest of this must-read article.

It’s Nice To Agree With Mark Hurd on The Future of Customer Experience…sort of.

July 16th, 2012 | | Customer Experience Strategy, MindTouch
Oracle President Mark Hurd

The ideas around customer experience have been around a long time – but the pace of innovation in the CX space has greatly accelerated over the last few years due to rising consumer expectations and fueled by the explosive adoption of social media.

A few weeks ago, Oracle made some major waves around its new Customer Experience Suite.  In our view, Oracle maybe at the forefront of redefining customer experience and what it will mean in the future. But niche companies like MindTouch have operated in the space for much longer, and have long drawn the attention of software giants like SAP, who is similarly in the first wave echelon of companies innovating in the Customer Experience space.

CEO Mark Hurd said in front of a national audience, “We are here to talk about one of the most important issues our customers face, which is how our customers deal with their customers. Life used to be simple. You made great products and people bought them. Now it’s more complicated. Today, having a good product isn’t good enough. You have to have a great relationship and a great experience with your customer to keep that customer. Second, Oracle announced the new Oracle Customer Experience Summit at @OracleWorld.

Hurd is smart to make a push into the CX space, however, some industry leaders wonder if Oracle will be able to remain competitively agile as it tries to blend legacy architectures from a mix of acquisitions and old technology. Nonetheless, Oracle is doing a good job of defining customer experience in today’s social world and prioritizing it for vendors and for large corporations. As we’ve pointed out before at MindTouch, customer churn hurts SaaS companies even more than for traditional businesses, making customer experience crucial for these companies.

MindTouch is also leading much of the product development around customer experience. In late June, we hosted dozens of leading customer experience professionals from major organizations and vendors (including Oracle, SAP and Microsoft).The meet-up was a great chance to listen to how many industry insiders see the  CX space developing. For the most part, they agree with Hurd on the importance of customer experience solutions.

But they also agree that the grand vision of customer experience is not easy to implement. Customer experience is how you manage the interactions between your user base and your company. This user base can include prospects as well as customers – which means customer experience touches just about every part of your organization including sales, marketing, support, client services, product, documentation, and operations.

The lack of clear boundaries makes it very difficult to get executive buy-in with a customer experience program orsolution. The executives who find themselves leading the customer experience charge today come from varied backgrounds. For example, some come from a customer service background, while others come from UI or support backgrounds

After speaking with customer experience executives, as well as watching Oracle and SAP make massive pushes into CX, we feel great about MindTouch as a company.

We’ve got our own customer experience manager internally. Statistics show that CX is one of the fastest growing titles (even faster than user experience), and we’re at the front of the trend. We ourselves are learning firsthand how this position is evolving.

But most importantly, MindTouch has been offering and continuously improving it’s product help software by focusing on creating great experiences for our clients’ customers:

  • MindTouch extends its customer insights into multiple departments with each deployment, just as customer experience does. In the case of our customer Zuora, MindTouch connects sales, support, product, and technical documentation silos seamlessly, providing a means by which each department can continually contribute to the improvement of documentation, the product and the user experience all with the customers’ needs in sharp focus.
  • With our close connection between user experience and customer experience, MindTouch offers advanced and easy to use documentation authoring and publishing tools, enhanced usability, feedback and analytics, combining all of the major initiatives in customer experience today
  • The common vendors in the CX space are all around Analytics, Monitoring(support) and Feedback, including one common initiative called Voice of Customer (a fancy name for surveying customers for input). Meeting each of these needs, MindTouch has feedback built in to the product help platform, we have Analytics which  provide actionable data to gauge customers’ sense of product and support fulfillment, and we provide the means  author, publish and surface highly relevant product documentation and knowledge base assets  to customers looking for help or to learn more about the products they use.
  • Furthermore, MindTouch was founded upon an early recognition of the confluence between social networking and social commerce. That’s why MindTouch builds a product help experience that socializes product help and extends itself easily into social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.MindTouch can easily be extended to any current Customer Experience initiative because of our extensible framework and open APIs.

An example is the MindTouch integration with Salesforce, Zendesk, SugarCRM, and a host of other support ticket and CRM applications, which greatly reduces ticket resolution times, and nurtures highly effective self-help in the process, reducing support costs while enhancing the customer experience.

The fast-growing customer experience space continues to evolve, and MindTouch is proud to be one of the pioneers in this movement. Customer experience has become a vital need for companies of all sizes, and we are eager to work with our customers to continually improve customer experience, ultimately leading to happier users and more successful companies.

How to Control Contact Points with Your Customers

February 17th, 2012 | | Customer, Product Help
Customer Support

The Number One Goal for Most Support Departments: Decrease the Overhead for Customer/User Support.

Companies face a large overhead tied to the amount of agents needed to field inbound requests- whether it be by email, phone or chat. Depending on the medium the customer uses to interact with the agent, the cost to the company can increase or decrease. Example: a phone call will usually cost more than an email exchange because it is easier to multi-task with email and you can pull from scripted responses.

The first step companies take to decrease their overhead is to cut the number of support agents. This typically results in poor customer satisfaction because there rarely are enough agents left to handle the volume of tickets.

Before Cutting Agents, First Understand the Lifecycle of a Customer “Issue”

A better way to approach this is to understand the customer issue lifecycle:

Looking at the Customer Issue Lifecycle above, “Self-Troubleshoot” is the number one step any customer takes when they have a question. When self-troubleshooting doesn’t work they continue on through the cycle until eventually the company’s support team gets involved.

Read more…

A Conversation with Corey Ganser: TechWhirl Interview at LavaCon

January 23rd, 2012 | | Awards and Press, Community News, Conferences

One of our own, Corey Ganser, presented “Who Cares about Your Content?” at LavaCon this year. An interview with Corey was recently published on TechWhirl. In it, he stresses the steps content strategists and technical communicators must take in order to prove their worth and get the recognition they deserve.  Here’s an excerpt from Corey’s TechWhirl interview: “Building the Business Case for Technical Communicators by Leveraging Talent, Skills and Passion”

Use Analytic Data of Content to Prove your Worth

Demonstrating value is crucial in the field of technical documentation. Corey suggests Tech communicators push project managers to include a content plan alongside their technology plan, financial plan, and product development plan… Backed by the data, “technical communicators can sit at the big table with the managers,” Corey says, and prove themselves as valuable resources for the company. As a result, a technical communicator can quantify the value of wearing multiple hats, and demonstrate how that their time, money, and energy are effectively being spent to benefit the company’s bottom line.

Corey continued by recommending that technical communicators prove their value to the company in various aspects. “People need to re-define their contribution to a company as a technical communicator. For example [technical communicators] often get caught up with buzzwords and instead need to think strategically as a content strategist about how users can interact with the company who produces the product.”

Documentation Should Help, Not Function as an Afterthought

In our interview, Corey focused on how documentation is often perceived as an afterthought. Read more…