Recently I read a discussion thread at a LinkedIn Tech Comm group in which Aaron, my CEO, claimed MindTouch didn’t support single sourcing. He was promptly contradicted by a MindTouch customer, Amanda Cross of ExactTarget, and prominent Tech Comm leader who just kicked off a guest blog series here at the MindTouch blog. Later on another MindTouch customer from EMC echoed Amanda’s call that they too use MindTouch for single sourcing.
The MindTouch Leaders of #techcomm and #contentStrategy list is live! You can learn more about:
Now, you can view the entire list of the top 400 leaders. This list is also available in a single Twitter list here: twitter.com/MindTouch/techcomm-2011-influencers. Now, onto the leaders…
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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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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. 
Way back in August, 2010 I wrote an article for Forbes titled “The Evolution of User Manuals” about the strategic value of technical, help and product content. This article has since been referenced by a variety of third parties. In the last few weeks I’ve had several people reach out to me mentioning that the article is difficult to read because some of the styles at Forbes.com are broken. A lot has evolved over the last year+. Here at MindTouch we have hundreds of new data points in the form of ecstatic customers that have proven the benefits of technical, product and help content in increasing customer satisfaction, site traffic, lead generation and in lowering support costs with self-service support and lowered mean times to resolution. Given the popularity of the article I feel it’s appropriate for this article to become my first “re-run”. I always regretted the title not being “User Manual 2.$”. So, I’m applying a little revisionist history to the title, but otherwise it’s re-printed below verbatim.
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.
I’m often asked by customers and prospective buyers of MindTouch how they can show or hide help and product documentation based on the user that views an article without having to create multiple versions of the documentation. Good news! This is easy with MindTouch.
There are a variety of user stories for this kind of functionality. In short, it’s either user/group/role based permissioning or URL based variations on content. In some scenarios it requires creating a master documentation, or base docs, that all other derivative docs inherit. Here are a couple that come up pretty often. These are the most common user stories we hear and address (in no particular order):
You’re probably thinking, “Google’s just a search engine. It can’t be stealing my traffic. I’m ranked really high in a Google search.” Well, you might well be wrong. When users can’t find answers to their questions on a company’s support site, they will often turn to Google instead. If they do find what they’re looking for there, they may well never to return to your own product help. In fact, I’ve done this myself. I’ve even gone so far as to think that I can’t possibly find useful product documentation on a company’s actual site.
So How Do You Keep Your Customers on YOUR Site?
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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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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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