Social Product Help: Building Trust Across the Social Landscape

November 8th, 2012 | | Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post
trust-meter

The impact and reach of the social media landscape is forever changing and buyers as well as industry reviewers are relying more and more upon social media to get a fix on the products and services most likely to offer the best experience.

There is no question that Twitter and Facebook have put tremendous power in the hands of consumers, giving everyone a digital soapbox to broadcast their thoughts and feelings to the world at large. In the pre- and contemporary digital age, word of mouth is considered the best advertising and with the vast social media landscape at play, word gets around pretty fast. But consumer behavior is changing as social media continue to grow and mature.

According to the GlobalWebIndex Annual Report for 2011, a dramatic surge is underway in how consumers use social media. Instead of creating unique content, social media users are sharing professionally created content more and more in their social networks, video sharing platforms and blogs. Furthermore, 50% of users worldwide reported an increase in their trust of contacts on social networks. This same group reported a 21% increase in trust for industry expert blog sites.

Much of this trend is also borne out in Edelman’s 2011 Trust Barometer which indicates a slight trust decline in non-professional social peers and a significant rise in trust for professional peers and industry experts on social networks.

What does this mean for your company and the ways in which you protect and enhance your brand’s reputation?

Well, trust is no longer a commodity that is acquired, rather a benefit that is bestowed, earned through action, reinforced by integrity, transparency and engagement. Your business has the opportunity to build lasting pillars of trust if you’re willing to commit to a strategy that brings value to your users and invests in their success and happiness with your product. For today’s socially savvy buyer and your trusted industry reviewers, a new level of transparency on capabilities, product documentation and support capabilities is essential to move the ‘trust needle’ forward and inspire entry into your sales process.

Lastly, your strategy must build and maintain reliable channels of engagement with your buyer before and after the sale. Among the keystones of any strategy along these lines is the implementation of socially enabled product help. Solutions, such as those provided by MindTouch, are invaluable not only because they provide the best means of supporting the success of your customers, but they also provide essential transparency into the true value and key benefits of your products and importantly signals your commitment to a great customer experience to potential buyers and industry peer reviewers while also creating multi-channel lanes of engagement with your company for those looking for more quality or functionality than the current product they’re using or for those current customers who need a little help. Engagement bestows trust.

This is how brands like Autodesk, HTC, SuccessFactors, HP Palm, PayPal and many more have become among the most trusted brands in the world.

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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Repurposing the CCMS (SDL Trisoft, IXIAsoft), a “How-to” [TOOLKIT]

November 8th, 2011 | | CCMS

MindTouch worked with the Gilbane Group, some of our customers, the Society for Technical Communicators and several industry experts to develop a toolkit that provides a “how-to” for repurposing Componentized Content Management Systems (CCMS’s) by adding a social publishing layer. This benefits your customers in profound and measurable ways. If you care about your users, you need this toolkit.publishing-flow2

CCMS’s like SDL Trisoft and IXIAsoft have proven their value to the market by lowering the costs associated with producing, maintaining and translating content. However, MindTouch customers, companies like Autodesk, Paypal, Intuit and hundreds of others, have been proving that this content can be used to create the foundation of a social learning community that increases top line revenues and improves the quality of end user support.

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