Grab Your Promo Code for 50% Off LavaCon’s Strategy Workshop Registration Fee

March 20th, 2013 | | Community News, Conferences, content strategy
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Organizers of the annual LavaCon Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies have put together a three-day content strategy workshop and we’ve got the scoop on how to attend for half-off the registration fee.

The hands-on workshop, “How to Create and Execute a Unified Content Marketing and Multichannel Publishing Strategy”  will be held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-25, 2013. LavaCon’s Executive Director, Jack Molisani, says,

It is not uncommon to have content marketing and product documentation initiatives in simultaneous production. Rarely, however, do Marketing and Tech Pubs coordinate their content strategies. Without a unified content strategy, companies waste valuable resources, create an inconsistent user experience, and let new revenue opportunities slip away.

Sessions will be facilitated by industry leaders from Red Hat, Adobe, IBM, MindTouch, and more. The workshop drills down into how to create a strategy, how to build the right ecosystem to house and deliver content, and how to execute your grand plan within your business environment.

By the time you leave, you’ll have a roadmap in hand to hit the ground running but if you need additional guidance, workshop attendees may purchase a monthly phone consultation package with any of the workshop’s presenters. That’s a great way to get personalized, one-on-one assistance to hammer out strategy details or implementation issues when you take what you’ve learned back to the office.

Schedule, session, and facilitator details are available online [PDF]. Register before March 23rd to grab the standard rate of $1,450 and get 50 percent off with promo code mindtouch50. We have a limited number of codes and they’re first come, first served so register now.

In order to receive the discount, attendees must register at the New Orleans Riverfront Hotel with a special group rate of $189 per night. Rooms at that rate are available as early as Saturday, April 20th so come to town a couple of days early and make a vacation out of it.

Next month’s workshop is being held ahead of the big event this fall in Portland, OR. LavaCon got its start in Hawaii in 2002 — lava, get it? The original intent of the conference was to help companies design technical communications projects but has grown to cover emerging concepts surrounding content strategy, mobile devices, social media, and more.

Registration for LavaCon is now open and session speakers are expected to be announced soon. In the meantime, check out session slides from previous LavaCon conferences.

Image: Bernat

5 Ways To Radically Reinvent Product Help for a Competitive Edge

November 30th, 2012 | | Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post, MindTouch, Product, Product Help, TCS Features
revolutionary product helpA

Let’s assume that product documentation and support is a major pain point at your company (for most, it is). The first step is to fix it by looking at it from the outside-in. In other words, what would you do differently if you really measured the usefulness and accessibility of your documentation from your customers’ perspective? For example, why can’t they search your documentation for the answers they need? Why can’t they easily let you know whether or not they found what they were looking for? Why can’t they use your documentation to do more than find answers, but to learn and enhance their product expertise?

Solutions to address these questions may seem costly and burdensome at first, but by staying ahead of disruptive social trends and creating cutting edge innovations, MindTouch provides cost effective tools any company can use to effectively–and profitably–turn traditional approaches to product documentation and support upside-down. Let’s take a look at what product documentation and support at your company could look like.

Imagine how you could delight your customers and leapfrog your competition if. . .

  • Your customers could access a powerful search engine dedicated to helping them quickly and easily find the most relevant information from the most credible source (your company, not a 3rd party forum).
  • Your software users could access product help when and where they need it without having to leave your application.
  • Your customers could easily provide feedback and ask a question directly from within your documentation rather than having to email you or waiting on hold for a support agent.
  • You connected every piece of product documentation customers used to an analytical service that could more quickly diagnose product and documentation problems and quickly offer customers relevant guidance.
  • You could eliminate documentation silos and distribute the latest, most up to date, documentation internally so that all product information was instantly accessible to any customer-facing employee.

With MindTouch you can!

Adaptive Search MindTouch includes a powerful search engine that indexes articles, comments and even the contents of file attachments. We call it adaptive because MindTouch learns from user interactions and continues to get better as your users score content, visit, click and interact with pages. No work on your part – just let MindTouch do its job. Site admins have access to tools for analyzing search, manipulating and specifying recommended results.

 

 

F1 Help Button: Contextual Help System In just minutes you can add a contextual help system powered by MindTouch to your web applications. This allows your users to receive screen or field level contextually relevant help within your applications. Because MindTouch automatically relates content your users will get answers to their questions and be recommended content that will help them develop their expertise even further.

 

 

Feedback Tools MindTouch offers page and search result scoring and feedback mechanisms. Scoring impacts the adaptive search and informs behavioral analytics. Also, user feedback can open a support ticket in your current ticketing system via email and MindTouch will email the appropriate author or editor who can respond directly to the user’s feedback.

 

 

Analytics These powerful reports were designed to inform content strategy: which articles need to be written or improved. Reviewing user search patterns will also help product, marketing and sales teams. Marketers and content strategists value the ability to tactically execute on search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Support and product leaders rely on these reports to identify hot-spots.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CRM/Ticketing Integration.  MindTouch plugs into pretty much any support ticketing system. Support agents will receive real-time search results from MindTouch. Agents can drag and drop relevant articles and click send. Your users will get the best possible solution, will know where to return to self serve and with auto-related articles they will develop their product expertise. Agents can also publish to MindTouch with a click.

 

 

 

With these capabilities, companies in every industry have improved their customers’ brand and product experience while significantly reducing documentation and support costs.

To learn more about how MindTouch can help your company get a competitive edge, gain valuable insight into your customers’ sense of product satisfaction and improve your customers’ experience: click here.

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.

Serenic Taps MindTouch to Create Better Product Help Experiences, Increased Brand Value and Competitiveness

November 1st, 2012 | | Customer, Customer Experience Strategy

Serenic Corporation is a leading international software developer that publishes mission-critical software products for non-profit organizations, educational institutions, and governments. Serenic specializes in integrated financial management and human capital management software solutions. The company’s products are based on Microsoft technology platforms and are distributed worldwide.

Among the reasons that Serenic leads the pack in their space is not only their rapid pace of innovation toward meeting their customers’ evolving needs, it’s their keen awareness of the necessity to provide the best possible experience with their products. Toward that end, Serenic invested in improving a keystone in the customer experience…their product help.

Serenic creates many different software products, and each of those solutions requires its own help documentation. Serenic was previously using RoboHelp to create this documentation and Microsoft Compiled Help to distribute the documentation to users. However, creating, maintaining and updating and distributing user documentation was cumbersome and time consuming and behind the curve of their pace of innovation, and they needed more agile tools to create and publish product documentation and better mechanisms for keeping their customers’ needs in focus. So they turned to MindTouch.

Now, with the new MindTouch system in place, Serenic has created a new cloud-based help site that enables all customers and support staff to have instant access to the most up-to-date documentation online, all in one centralized location. And with best-in-class search funcationality from MindTouch everyone can quickly find the information they need about any given Serenic software product. Going beyond simple searches, the MindTouch solution also automatically generates links to related help topics, leading users to answers faster and expanding product expertise among their users. Furthermore, Serenic now has its’ finger on the pulse of their documentation with robust MindTouch analytics, giving them insight into what their users are looking for, if they’re finding it, and what documents are working and which need to be improved,

Serenic’s new MindTouch-powered help site also serves as a knowledge exchange tool. Serenic employees have written new troubleshooting documentation, created a new knowledge base with informational articles, and filmed new how-to videos for their users, greatly expanding the limited help offerings that were previously available. The MindTouch system also provides a simple way for Serenic to distribute the content directly to users. In addition, MindTouch is a social solution, enabling multi-channel interchange around their documentation within the company and facilitating users to provide feedback and engage with Serenic inside their product help model.

By leveraging MindTouch to make creating and publishing product help easier for them and more discoverable and engaging for their users, Serenic has increased the value of their brand and strengthened their dominant position among their competitors who have failed to make the investment in the product help experience.

To read more about Serenic’s success using MindTouch, you can get a free copy of their case study from the MindTouch Resource Center.

New eBook “Open Minded CEOs”, an Expose of Open Source Revolutionaries

October 18th, 2012 | | Awards and Press, Community News

In a compelling new eBook, Open Minded CEOs: A collection of essays and interviews from opensource.com, we learn that working the open source way isn’t always easy and the reward of fanning idea sparks into successful product bonfires takes more than effort, it takes passion and determination. CEOs that make every effort daily to implement open source philosophies in their companies face some central and challenging questions: How can we bring people together to do great things? What motivates them? How can we coordinate them when they unite? How does working the open source way allow us to anticipate the future and adapt to thrive in it? And what counts as success?

This eBook features CEOs from some of today’s most fascinating companies, including our own Aaron Fulkerson who …”has emerged as a true open source leader. Aside from being a much sought-after public speaker and prolific blogger, he has grown and managed MindTouch to a company of more than 50 that was voted one of the best places to work in San Diego, CA .”

Aaron is featured in a section titled MindTouch CEO on open standards, culture, and working at Microsoft, originally published in May 2010. Since then MindTouch has grown into a global company with hundreds of employees serving thousands of companies large and small alike around the world. From its open source beginnings MindTouch has evolved stridently from an enterprise collaboration leader to a company that is reinventing and reinvigorating product help with web, social and mobile innovations that dramatically improves the customer experience and provides business with fresh key benefits and ROI from their product help and documentation investment.

Click here to receive a free copy of Open Minded CEOs: A collection of essays and interviews from opensource.com

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

Media Round Up: New MindTouch CRM Connector for Salesforce

October 5th, 2012 | | Awards and Press, Featured Post
appexfeatured

Earlier this week, we released the following news:  MindTouch Announces a Salesforce® Partnership: Enterprise Grade Knowledge Now Available in AppExchange®, and the pick-up and buzz has been amazing. We knew this was an important big step forward for our company, and has served to forge a keen relationship with Salesforce, but I think we underestimated the level of excitement this has generated. Our customers are excited and so our prospects. MindTouch has always been driven to apply years of web and social innovation to create and deliver great product help to users, kick open social engagement channels around documentation, and harvest meaningful and actionable data from user interaction with product help channels. By innovating in the gap between CRMs and support ticketing systems and product documentation and knowledge-bases, we’ve created a meaningful and necessary bridge between them that has unleashed amazing benefits for help seekers with faster resolution times, more engaging help delivery, and expanded access to collateral information to deepen product expertise and business leaders have quickly latched onto the benefit of tapping into the support silo to inform all the channels in their companies, especially product, sales and tech-comm.

Here’s some excerpts from the leading writers in technology:

MindTouch Social Help System Aligns With Salesforce Ecosystem, Exemplifies What Oracle Lacks by Alex Williams

“The MindTouch service creates a web-oriented way to view documents. It has a search component built in so help documents rise to the top based on what people are looking for. These results will also show up in Google search results. The MindTouch service turns a support document into a marketing opportunity.

Oracle and HP offer similar servies. Oracle acquired InQuira in 2011 and HP owns Autonomy. But InQuira has not been updated in some time and who the hell knows what HP is doing with Autonomy.

But more so, Oracle represents a monolithic software stack. The only way they can integrate is to do a costly partnership or an acquisition. Salesforce and others with platforms can just fit apps into a loosely coupled ecosystem.

The result is that Oracle will have to continue serving only the highest-end customers of the world. The rest of the market will go to services such as Salesforce and partners like MindTouch.”

MindTouch working with Salesforce.com to improve support experience by Rachel King

“MindTouch is expanding its partnership with Salesforce.com to improve the online customer support experience  on its internal knowledge bases and help systems with a new CRM integration…MindTouch cited internal research that support agents using the MindTouch CRM Connector for Salesforce resolved support tickets 47 percent faster on average. Additionally, the social help system provider said that 65 percent of users prefer to be taught how to self-serve themselves on the open platform.”

MindTouch Offers Its Salesforce CRM Connector on AppExchange by Barry Levine

“Deeper Content = Better Customer Support: The company announced the integration with Salesforce in June, but the connector itself is what will now enable quick integration. Salesforce VP of Business Development Scott Collison said in a statement that MindTouch “is going to be a really important partner of ours in the future, by providing a documentation platform for all kinds of software companies and cloud services.”

MindTouch Delivers Knowledge Base for Salesforce Customers by Ben Kepes

“Institutionalizing individual knowledge, and then disseminating it out to support workers is critical in order to ensure customer service delivers quick and accurate support. However the knowledge base has traditionally been siloed and separate from the customer service solution. Any time a service agent needs to switch between two systems of record, a degree of cognitive dissonance occur which, at best reduced efficiency but at worst lessens the customer support outcome. Building a self learning knowledge base that feed in two ways to and from customer support agents is a key step to make customer service faster, more accurate and more resource-efficient.

Scott Collison from Salesforce speaks to this fact when he says that;

The way that software companies or cloud companies used to do support was “hey, we are going to have a documentation team, write up the docs, put them on website, hopefully you can find them.” You want to call someone, – that might be difficult or might cost you some money. But I think by incorporating the community into creating living documentation describing how to use software – that has been a huge thing for us.”

Click here to learn more about MindTouch and how integrating your product help with your CRM will benefit you.

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.

How Not to Pull a ‘Corporate Thelma and Louise’ Over the Fiscal Cliff

September 20th, 2012 | | Customer Experience Strategy, Enterprise 2.0, Featured Post, Product Help
ThelmaAndLouise

There is plenty of intrinsic uncertainty in business, and with an intractably grid locked Congress driving the nation towards a “fiscal cliff”, and Europe unsteadily struggling with massive economic reforms and austerity measures, the business climate faces the potential for massive volatility in the near future. However, according to  Jim Rohrer, President of Customer Care Partners:

“When the economy slows down, your business doesn’t have to. Businesses can still succeed and grow even now, in one of the most challenging economies we’ve had since the 1970’s. The secret involves improving client loyalty, the only element proven to cause growth.”

The more your company engages and partners with your customers the more loyal they will be to you. The more you can help them achieve their goals, the more essential you become to their success and they would never think of choosing another vendor (partner).

Surprisingly, even in this economy, many companies remain exclusively sales driven to achieve growth and have given very little attention to introducing innovation into their customer care modalities. The result for many of these companies has been a hapless struggle against accelerating churn rates by doubling down on marketing and sales investments.

In companies failing to focus on their existing customers, churn is frequently treated like the common cold: management presumes the root causes of the problem can’t be cured and think that the very best that can hoped for is to alleviate the symptoms. But bear in mind, in much the same way that pharmaceutical advancements make it possible for healthcare professionals to attack viral strains directly, enterprises are able to diagnose and cure the underlying causes of customer departures and disenchantment. Simply put, churn is curable.

The outcome of investing in customer experience tools almost never has a negative impact on revenue and it’s easy to understand how any churn prevention initiative is likely have a positive effect on other parts of the company because the most-effective churn reduction methods are bolstered by unambiguous and legitimate assemblies of information and data from all channels in the company. A look below at the most common drivers of churn, identified by the Institute for Customer Service, illustrates this:

  • Unethical practices and overstated capabilities at the point of sale.
  • Sign-up, activation, and new user challenges.
  • Fulfillment glitches.
  • Service, support and documentation inadequacies.
  • Unpredictable billing practices and poor payment capacities.
  • Misaligned and/or inconsistently applied policies.
  • Difficulty with product and/or package features—or the lack thereof.

Note that 4 of these 7 are closely linked to your product and support channels. This means improvement of the customer experience in these areas is an essential keystone in your over-arching customer loyalty strategy.

Before the Going Gets Tough, Make Customer Experience and Loyalty a Priority

MindTouch has learned through its long history in providing product help solutions that about 50% of business leaders pinpoint customer churn as the topmost threat to their company. Given that customer retention will be crucial to your business’ capacity to thrive; you simply must focus on it as a central business goal. Position your people, operations and strategy towards creating a fantastic customer experience and make absolutely certain it will be embedded in all parts of the company.

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Softer

Cost cutting on customer care and technical support is generally a false economy. Rather, carefully consider both the ‘soft’ – intangible or emotional – as well as monetary returns of customer relationships and invest in strengthening the stickiness of your product or service by using essential tools to make your product easier to use and easier to understand through engaging and socially enabled product help.

When the Going Gets Tough, Don’t Swing the Axe at Customer Care

Nearly one third (31%) of business leaders point out their quality of service has been weakened due largely to a short-term focus on cost-cutting and profits. Fair price combined with a valuable product are the foundations of an exceptional customer experience. Start building on this with real value-added, customer focused and publically facing customer care and support investments.

When the Going Gets Tough, the Customer Will Always Be Right

Acquiring and holding onto loyal customers will undoubtedly be crucial as, according to Consumer Studies Research out of Rutgers University, almost fifty percent (47%) of consumers  and B2B buyers describe themselves in this economic climate as more prone to switch companies or vendors in the foreseeable future as their budgets tighten. To counteract this, carefully consider ways in which your business strategy, as well as operating approach, reflects what today’s customer and buyer truly expects from your product and your company.

When the Going Gets Tough, Your Customer Care Team Will Save the Day

Customer care is a legitimate and essential profession that has all too often been outsourced into the hands of persons without a stake in the outcomes of their performance and function with very loose accountability. Therefore, strive to equip and coach your own staff to offer the very best customer care and technical support possible and most importantly invest in a proven technology, like that offered by MindTouch to effectively promote self-service support. Furthermore, empower, stimulate and cultivate customer care skill sets in all your employees – clients will certainly benefit and so will your staff.

Before the Going Gets Tough, Engage and Empathize

The softer elements of the customer experience and engagement are in many cases neglected. Clients favor being taken care of as people, not account numbers. Engage your client at every opportunity, communicate that you understand, and deliver consistency, trustworthiness, reliability every time. This will help ensure that your clients become your advocates. One of the most neglected customer engagement points is, amazingly, when an where customers look for help with a product. This is perhaps the most critical point to maximize engagement…when the customer (or user) is having a problem and looking for answers on Google or your web site. Its critical to know when when and where your customer is looking for help on-line, and to know whether or not they’re finding the information they need.

Wall Flowers Never Grow-Get Social and Listen

Social media, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, etc.,  gives you and your customers a medium for feedback as well as mutual sharing and engagement. Harness the variety of applications designed to both monitor customer reactions and comments and engage with them to enhance the total product, customer care and product support experience. Companies like HTC, SuccessFactors and SAP have even taken the extra step of integrating their MindTouch powered product help with their CRM and ticketing platforms and social network accounts to provide rapid solutions to customers looking for help across multiple channels.

An Ounce of Prevention is Better than a Pound of Churn

Customer problems and grievances cost time and money but a workable, easy to use and scalable system will allow you too efficiently and cost effectively pinpoint weaknesses. Monitor customer feedback and adopt streamlined engagement and monitoring applications, for instance MindTouch, a socially enabled product help system, enables you to address customer problems with your product and its documentation before they catch fire.

Think Strategically and Gather Intelligence

Customer care and technical support is a significant driver of bottom-line performance and will be the decisive battlefield in the blistering struggle through economic downturns for new buyers. Keep coming back customer care strategy routinely, evaluating the ways in which your clients as well as  your staff  regard it, not to mention the ways in which it stacks up to competitors’ approaches.

Drive Customer and Buyer Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt Off the Cliff Instead

83% of executives, interviewed by a Rutgers University research team, specified that the caliber of customer care and product support is a greater determining factor as weighted against price in determining their ongoing loyalty as a client. So, lastly, differentiate, as well as market yourself on the excellence of your customer and technical support as well as your product, ensuring that clients continue to keep coming back and to lend stability against fear, uncertainty and doubt in the minds of potential buyers.

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