The Content Repository is the Key to Customer Experience Management

August 16th, 2012 | | Content in Context, Guest Blogger
content-is-the-key1

There is a lot of discussion around the role of the web content management system in customer experience management (CXM). Some say it’s the core, others say it’s an element, but not a driver. I say they are both right.

Let`s be very specific here, because it is important. If we were just talking purely about the online customer experience, then I would agree that the web content management system (WCM) is the core to designing and support CXM strategies. Pretty much every supporting CXM technology: marketing automation, social media monitoring, customer relationship management, analytics, personalization, social software, etc…needs to integrate with the WCM. Why? Because it stores all the content you need to manage the experience. We use to call this WebEngagement (orExperience) Management.

But customer experience management is about more than the online channels. And not all WCM platforms provide support to the offline experience. Support channels, print-based marketing, internal knowledge work activities — these things are typically done using other tools. And the content used to support these activities is, typically, stored in these other tools.

What I think brings both these views together is not the WCM itself, but the WCM repository. Or to be more generic, the content repository. I think to be successful managing the customer experience, you need to be able to quickly access and relate all elements of a customer interaction with all the internal knowledge your employees have about not only the customer, but the processes used to work with a customer. You can do that if you have a single content repository to work with.

Many content management systems today are designed to store content not as html pages, but as individual components of content that can be easily reused across different web pages, mobile sites and apps, social networks and more. Managing a single version of that content is important to ensure you are always saying the same thing to your customers. These repositories can also be leveraged by other systems to provide content as well. For example, this content repository could be used by your call center support team to help customers with issues.

Now it’s important to point out that I don’t believe you can only have one single content repository where all information needs to permanently live. I believe that content integration is the key to a well-managed content repository. So you can keep your content in the other systems you work with, but find a way to integrate your content repository with those others systems.

By doing that, you can have a single location to mine for information about your customer and their interactions with you, and to use to design and build new applications or online/offline experiences. A central content repository also allows you to develop support applications that have access to customer information easily, including any information from CRM systems, traffic information, etc…

Today’s content is not only the material you use to develop your CXM strategies, it’s also the interactions customers and prospective customers have with you. Having it all accessible in a centralized content repository will help you identify, design and refine your CXM strategies quickly. If you are required to move from system to system to gather all the intelligence and information you need, you are going to spend far more time hunting and gathering, than actually doing something.

Barb Mosher is a guest columnist for MindTouch and Managing Editor for CMSWire.com. You can follow Barb on Twitter @bmosherzinck

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?

Read more…

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.

Read more…

3 Secrets to a Healthy Customer Relationship: Give, Take and Share

March 13th, 2012 | | CCMS, content strategy, Customer, ESP/SMA, Tech Comm
Give your customers what they want

Every day at MindTouch we see companies come through our doors who find themselves with unhappy customers, low renewals and high support costs.

We’ve deduced the source of these problems to stem from poor relationship management. A relationship is a two-way street where the parties involved are happiest when all benefit. In the end, a social product help system resolves the relationship issues these companies experience and we want to share with you the secret to a healthy customer relationship: Give, Take, Share.

1.) Give:

What should you give your customers? In a customer relationship, what you ‘give’ can either be extremely influential in pushing renewals, or completely useless. The key is to give the customer what they want- not what you think they want. 

To begin, put a support platform in place that will facilitate your ‘giving’ goals. An online social help site is an excellent way to ensure your customers get the information and attention they want. It’s crucial that your online support site include a comprehensive knowledgebase that stores every technical document and media item that could possibly relate to your product. This process is much easier and painless when you get a knowledgebase with in-context WYSIWYG editing, collaborative authoring, versioning, permissions, staging and development of draft/approval workflow.

Just because you have all your content in one place does not mean you’ve given your customers something they want. It is crucial to organize your content into rational hierarchies with every document linking to related content. There should be no dead ends or dead links. This knowledge base must be dynamic and easily navigable otherwise you give the customer an unusable mess that will only result in more frustration, anger and fallout. Once you’ve done your best to give users the tools you think they need, you must keep tabs on what they’re ‘taking’ in order to understand if you have actually given them what they want.

2.) Take:

When users come onto a support platform, their goal is to ‘take.’ They might have never thought of their support usage in this way, but essentially their goals are to go onto the site, find answers to their questions and take away the knowledge to apply to their product usage. In this sense, ‘take’ is a wonderful thing because it means the user has found information they consider valuable enough to ingest.

There are ways to measure the ‘take’ on your social help site. In-site analytics provide an immediate and accurate report of customer interaction with your content. You can also use search analytics to view which articles are most frequently clicked on from a set of search terms and update your documentation accordingly.

Read more…

CXM Strategies: Too Much Personalization, Separating Online From Offline Customer Experiences

February 23rd, 2012 | | Content in Context, content strategy, Guest Blogger
Barb Mosher

What does customer experience mean to you?

For me, a great customer experience is a search box on your website — one that actually works. It’s an online chat support person who can answer your simple questions without having to ask someone else. It’s an unsubscribe button that actually unsubscribes you. It’s a website that says just a little bit more about your product than the flashy PDF brochure you can download. And it’s a store clerk who doesn’t ask you for your email address when they already have it in their database.


For others, a great customer experience might be that you remembered they were on their site last week and looked at a certain product, or that you remember that they actually already bought that product and while they don’t need the sales pitch again, it might be great to see some information on how to use it, or see related products. Read more…