How Resilient is Your Product Help?

May 20th, 2013 | | Customer, Customer Experience Strategy
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As consumers, we’re an impatient bunch.

We expect instant gratification and have trouble waiting four seconds for an online shopping cart to load after we’ve decided to buy something. We’ve become accustomed to shopping online vs. schlepping to a free-standing geographically-located structure (that’s a “store” for you kids out there). We’d rather quickly click some buttons on a laptop instead of calling a help line and stumbling through a phone tree. We want to flip through online documentation while making purchasing decisions, not spend an hour getting a hardcore pitch from a sales rep.

In fairness, we can partly blame technology for giving us the attention span of a fruit fly and, overall, businesses have done and admirable job of keeping pace with our  restlessness. They’re getting really good at following us around the internet, ready to fling themselves in front of us the instant we decide to make a purchase or troubleshoot an issue. Meanwhile behind the scenes, companies busily build redundancy-filled fortresses to process and protect customer data.

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It’s great to have proactive customer experience strategies in place and it’s critical to safeguard customer data, but the two are not mutually exclusive. It’s vital to take a good look at your customer service channels and treat them with the same importance you give to protecting your databases.

Forrester’s Rachel Dines notes that even the most proactive companies have a bit of a problem with resiliency. They’re so busy planning what to do if backend mechanisms fail that they forget to plan for unexpected customer-facing service slips:

“I’ve found that resiliency initiatives often fail to get momentum because they are so focused on disasters and downtime, and fail to link back to critical business processes and services. …[W]e should be focusing our investments in resiliency on the customer experience. It doesn’t matter if the data center is under 5 feet of water or if someone accidentally deleted a critical file, if the customer experience suffers, we need to have a plan.”

Admittedly, infrastructure overhaul can take months but there’s at least one area you can focus on to get immediate results: Product documentation. Customers must be able to flawlessly and consistently find instant answers on your website to issues that plague them. Not just any answers will do, of course. They have to be useful and, above all, correct. It really doesn’t matter what the product docs have to say about Your Awesome App 2.3 when you’ve just launched v3.1.

Naturally, if you sell a product on your site, a working shopping cart should be your number one priority. Next up on the list must be tight product support so you don’t lose the customers you worked so hard to get. Some studies show that up to 48% of customers will abandon a website if they don’t get a quality response in less than five minutes.

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It’s unacceptable to have outdated support docs on your website when implementing a cloud-delivered, self-service help center is so easy. Excellent product documentation is one of the fundamental principles of an excellent overall customer experience and users won’t want to hear a sob story about why a meteor shower interfered with their ability to find the answers they need. When you think about resiliency strategies, don’t forget about how to keep your product support intact. It’s easier — and more important — than you think.

Image: Javier Alvarez, Jon Worth, woodleywonderworks

Survey Shows Customers REALLY Want Quick Customer Service Response

May 10th, 2013 | | Customer, Customer Experience Strategy
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According to a recent study conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Zendesk, customers value a quick response to an issue even if it’s not the answer they’re hoping to get. In fact, the actual outcome of a resolution scores pretty far down on the list of customer satisfaction concerns while things like having to explain a problem to multiple people irk customers like crazy.

“Survey participants who had indicated they had a good customer service experience were asked what specifically made that experience good. The most important factor cited by participants was a quick resolution of the problem (69%) followed by being helped by a pleasant person (65%). Interestingly, the actual outcome of the problem was least important with less than half (47%) indicating that their customer service interaction was good because of the outcome.”

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The survey results don’t detail what channels respondents used to access support (phone, email, online documentation, etc).  It’s clear, however, that providing users with multiple access points vastly increases the chances you’ll give them a great customer service experience.

Ideally, you’ll have a robust knowledge base filled with the most current product documentation so customers can serve — and help — themselves. On top of that, of course, you need a grab bag of other access points: a toll-free number, online chat, a dedicated support email address, and so on.  Oh, and you’ll need people to staff and manage all these various channels.

Clearly, the most cost-effective customer support methods take advantage of stuff you’re already doing elsewhere around the company. Your tech writers are assembling documentation and manuals, sales and marketing are showing customers around your product, and community managers are helping users find their way around best practices. Harness all that smart content and put it on your website!

Dimension Research’s survey tells us that a rapid response is a primary (if not predictable) desire of customers who reach out for support. You already have the answers your users need so make sure they, and you, can find it all quickly.

Read more about the survey’s results and findings on Zendesk’s website.

Don’t Use My Product: 3 Things You Wouldn’t Say to Your Customer

May 6th, 2013 | | content strategy, Customer, Product Help
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Imagine a company that actively discouraged its customers from buying or using its products. Imagine it quick, because a company like that won’t be in business for long. Sadly, some companies spend tons of money and hundreds of hours creating all kinds of marketing and customer service strategies only to shoot themselves in the foot by subtly driving users away with poor product documentation.

Take a tour of your website, wiki, and in-house forums to see if you’re inadvertently sending customers any of these discouraging messages.

“Don’t use my product!”  This is what you’re telling users when you don’t provide proper documentation around how to use your product. Unless your entire customer base can psychically divine how to interact with or troubleshoot your product, reliable documentation is critical. By “reliable” we don’t mean it must be “good enough.” We mean it must be excellent. What does excellent product documentation look like?

  1. Searchable: Microsoft TechNet knocks it out of the park when it comes to searchable content. The homepage is laid out cleanly and links to specific types of content are clearly displayed. A handy search box at the top of the page helps users drill down quickly without a lot of frivolous clicking.
  2. Proactive: Mobile device company HTC excels at providing current, proactive documentation. The site uses words like “latest” and “recent” — and means it. You won’t find a bunch of outdated info and broken links here.
  3. Approachable: Dell does a great job of making its content accessible to every type of customer it serves. Clear product categories and search options ensure even novice users aren’t intimidated or overwhelmed with a blizzard of options and information.

 

“Your time is worthless”  This is what you’re saying when you require users to jump through multiple hoops to gain access to your documentation. Customers shouldn’t have to register on your site, click though 43 subpages, and offer up the blood of a unicorn just to find out how to replace a battery.

Complex products sometimes require complex documentation, but it’s your responsibility to make the process as painless as possible. If you’re product is software, the solution is dead simple: in-app support. Expose documentation directly within your product so users never have to leave the app to find the answers they need. That’s some pretty heroic product support, isn’t it?

 

“Your feedback doesn’t matter.”  We’re all customers in some way, so we know you’ll agree it’s important to know that a company taking your money actually cares about you. When a user takes the time to offer input, share tips, or make suggestions, ignore them at your own peril. Your customers are down in the trenches, experiencing your product in ways you may have never thought about and have great feedback to share.

Customers don’t expect hand-signed birthday cards every year, but they do expect a measure of respect and appreciation that shouldn’t stop once their check clears. One of the best ways to honor customer feedback is to make it easy for people to offer it right on your site — and then listen to what they say. Customers are a great source to mine for nuggets of product knowledge and user stories that might not have occurred to you yet.

This type of customer engagement carries an inherent bonus: You can correct misinformation before it finds its way onto offsite meta-support channels like Twitter or Facebook. When feedback is a two-way street, users become their own product experts and you gain valuable insight into how customers experience your products.

We know no one plans on alienating customers but it can happen. It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of running a lucrative business and overlook some potentially off-putting vibes you may be sending customers. Take a few minutes today to make sure your product documentation process sends the right message to users instead of turning them away.

 Image: Mollypop

 

Who’s Responsible for Providing Your Authoritative Content?

March 25th, 2013 | | content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post
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Recently, we took a look at the how and why of authoritative content. Now that you’re convinced of its importance, lets talk about how who’s responsible for providing the high-quality content you need to best serve your customers. (Hint: It takes more people than you think.)

There’s no single magic bullet, master wordsmith, or staff role that provides you with all the content you could ever need, because authoritative content comes from many different places and all of them are important. In the same way that all roads lead to Rome, all content streams eventually lead back to your company’s doorstep.

Let’s take a look at the most common places smart businesses should mine for authoritative content:

Product documentation – This one is a no-brainer. You must have excellent online product documentation and it must be easily accessible the minute your customer needs it. This doesn’t mean you can slap a 42-page PDF on your site and hope for the best. It means, at the bare minimum, your content must be easily searchable, factually accurate, and continuously updated. Ideally, it is also created proactively before customers go looking for answers and also teaches users how to become their own product experts.

Marketing – The marketing department knows what customers in your space are looking for and what pre-purchase answers they want. Pick the brains of your marketing team to learn what authoritative content demonstrates that you’re a thought leader in your industry with the product and customer experience strategy to back it up.

Sales – As we’ve previously noted, the sales team can do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to helping your customers become their own product experts which, lets face it, should be the end goal of your product support. Sales knows what common barriers to entry potential customers face and can help you design content that will pre-emptively (there’s that word again) address common pain points or overcome implementation issues.

Tech support - These people are in the trenches every day with your product so put their knowledge to good use. Make it effortless for agents to share existing documentation with one another and with customers. Streamline processes that put immediate answers into the hands (or on the computer screens) of the people who need them.  A content system that supports ticketing integration means support agents can simply drag and drop relevant articles, then click send. Users get the best possible solution and know where to return to self-serve.

Customers — Do not underestimate the power of your users to provide smart answers to questions that may never have occurred to you. They are the perfect group to collect odd, quirky, or unique user scenarios that you couldn’t possibly test for in pre-production. Sure, there may be only six customers in the universe who need your product to be cross-compatible with hardware made in 1972. However, if one of them figures out how to make it work and the other five customers find that information on your site, you’ll forever be the hero of a handful of devoted users. Wikis and user forums give customers a place to help each other noodle around issues without involving your escalation team in solving every obscure problem customers encounter.

Content strategist – It may make sense for some businesses to hire a content strategist to oversee all the cogs and wheels that go into creating exceptional authoritative content. If you’re maximizing all the resources at your disposal, from tech support to marketing and sales, you need someone — or several someone’s, depending on the size of your company — to make sure there’s a single unified voice delivering your content. If you’re not sure how to put together an effective content strategy, here’s a good place to start.

You know authoritative content is necessary but putting it together doesn’t have to be frightening. You already have the resources you need at your fingertips, it just needs to be collected from various silos around the company. It takes a village to raise good content so start talking to your neighbors.

Image: irrezolut

Where You Listen to Customers is as Important as How You Listen

March 12th, 2013 | | Customer, Customer Experience Strategy
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The topic du jour in the consumer industry these days is how technology is changing the landscape of the customer service experience. That’s true, but it’s not necessarily a cause for hand-wringing. Consider it the new cost of doing business. Customer experience consultant Xavier Rault says:

Because online shopping does not allow the consumer to physically handle the product before making a purchase nor is it as easy to ask questions as it would be in a brick and mortar retail establishment, people now rely on the opinions of other consumers more so than anything else. Like the shot heard around the world, consumer complaints can and do make a difference.

The typical communication methods for internet-savvy consumers are forums and social media networks. That’s where you’ll find lots of chatter about product perception, how to troubleshoot issues, and, yes, complaints. They’re not ideal environments for customers to talk about your product or service, but they’re not going away anytime soon. So what’s a CEO to do? Well, to coin a phrase, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

As we’ve mentioned before, it makes good business sense to corral consumer discourse by leading users to your environment to engage with each other. The goal isn’t to silence your customers, it’s to learn from them. Listen to what they’re talking about, what they need, and what they’re looking for so you can deliver it.

What does that delivery system look like? Ideally it provides real-time information that updates synchronously everywhere; support ticket and call center agent systems, online product documentation and knowledge bases, in-app help docs, and so on. Everywhere. It’s terrific when customers talk about and question your product so give them space to do that. At the end of the day, though, make sure the answers they walk away with are from you so they’re current, complete, and most of all, accurate. Let your help content become your customer communication channel.

If you think providing this kind of exceptional customer experience isn’t worth it, think again. The consumer playing field is nearly level at this point. There are very few ways left to stand out in the crowd so businesses are winning over — and keeping — customers with great customer service.

Do a quick mental inventory of the amount of customer loyalty programs that vie for your attention every time you shop. Every store from pharmacies, airlines and supermarkets, to home improvement retailers and gas stations want you to pledge your unending affection to them. They’re willing to cough up all kinds of incentives to keep you from shopping anywhere else. Consumers know this and they’ll take their dollars to the businesses that consistently do right by them. A superior customer experience is a loyalty program in itself because it incentivizes repeat business.

Since we’re talking about repeat business, let’s take a minute to acknowledge a very real benefit to great customer service: It gives companies a chance to offer users additional products or services. It’s gauche to suggest you should only offer great customer service as a means to increase sales or upsell to your users. Let’s be realistic, though. Companies that don’t maximize income stream opportunities won’t be in business for long. There’s nothing disingenuous about profiting from a favorable rapport with your customers — it’s all in how you manage the relationship.

If your engagement seems shallow and superficial to users, they’ll take their business elsewhere. On the other hand, if your primary focus is on helping your customer, then loyalty — and more sales — will naturally follow. Let’s take Amazon, for example. There’s really no question its primary existence is to sell things to people, yet the company’s excellent customer support landed them the number one spot in MSN.com’s 2012 Customer Service Hall of Fame. While it’s true that Amazon is really good at cross-selling to its customers, their outstanding consumer experience strategy makes it a non-issue for shoppers.

Kudos to businesses that have great social media engagement or ship detailed 32-page booklets with their products. You clearly want to be there for your users and potential customers  Now take some time to figure out what else you could be doing to bring people to your doorstep — and keep them there.

Image: publicenergy

How I Met Your Product Documentation (And Why We Broke Up)

February 19th, 2013 | | Content in Context, content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Product Help
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Once upon a time, I was in the market for a special relationship with a product that would change my life. Together, we would rule the world (or my corner of it). It wasn’t easy, but I put myself out there; cruising websites, trying all kinds of makes and models until finally found my soul mate. I was ready to make a commitment.

Our first few days together were, frankly, pretty awesome. I was caught up in the heady fun of a new romance and I’d thought we’d have many happy years together. Then something went wrong. You weren’t behaving as expected and I wasn’t sure what was wrong.

I figured it would be an easy fix so I rushed to the computer and went to the website where we met, looking for answers. Reliable advice was nowhere to be found, but I did find a 164-page downloadable PDF your parents put together way back when you were born.

There was a live chat button, but no one answered the other end. I found a contact form buried in the depths of the site but it seemed so cold and dismissive. The FAQ support page was littered with outdated information, broken links, and technical jargon I didn’t understand.

There had to be another way.

I nosed around in forums where people in similar relationships congregated to share their stories. I was glad to discover I wasn’t the only one encountering the challenges we faced but no one could really give me any straight answers about how to fix what went wrong between us. Sure, they had a lot of advice that might work but the hours I spent combing the conversations produced more questions than answers.

Despondent, I turned to my friends on Twitter and Facebook but they were even less enlightened. Some of my buddies tried gamely to help but most of them just talked about how happy they were in their relationships with others who weren’t…you.

I tried to make it work, I really did. I did my best to understand you but when things got complicated I had nowhere to turn. When I needed support, I got headaches. When I needed guidance, I got none.  We’re breaking up. It’s not me, it’s you.

 

Write a Better Love Story

Sound familiar? Thought so. We’ve all been on the receiving end of truly abominable support documentation and no matter how wonderful the product in-hand is, there comes a point where you want to just chuck it out the nearest window. It usually happens when you’re left floundering around trying to fix the intimate object of your affection by traipsing through 20 different information channels to find one nugget of useful advice.

Take Garmin, for example. They’re one of the leading GPS manufacturers in the industry but you’d never know it from their customer support. They get off to a good start with a seemingly helpful support page but things disintegrate quickly. There are eight different PDF manuals for just one watch! The first two have a total 57 pages between them, for Pete’s sake. How are you supposed to decide which one has the information you need unless you download them all? Not terribly inviting.

Garmin

If that’s too daunting, feel free to browse though the 100-question online FAQ. Don’t bother looking for a search option to make parsing all the data a little easier. There isn’t one. Garmin sells eight categories of products, each with dozens of items specific to that category. Do the math on how many pages of documentation that company must be trying and failing) to wrangle.

Garmin’s not the only mega-corp with lousy product support. Roku is a popular device around MindTouch HQ but their documentation would make Ghandi lose his patience. Here’s just one example: There are six “Featured Questions” on the main support page. Five of them date back to 2010. ‘Nuff said.

Roku

TiVo, the TV time-shifting darling many of us adore, has such notoriously dismal product support that its user community rallied together in what we can only assume is a plot to keep potential customers from noticing. TiVo started its own forums in response, but it only added to the documentation confusion on its site. In addition to the forums, visitors can “find answers” in five different categories containing a whopping 47 sub-categories. Type “set up TiVo Premiere” into the search box and get ready to sift through 468 articles, one or two of which might answer your question.

TiVo

All three of these companies make wonderful products. Indeed, they’re so well-liked that they manage to have loyal followers in spite of the product documentation they offer to customers. If you aspire to achieve the same level of customer loyalty as Garmin, Roku, and TiVo, then start by not making your users cry.

What would a good customer support experience look like? We’re glad you asked.

Silos are for farmers. Get rid of documentation silos that run customers into brick walls before giving them the answers they need. A good support strategy seamlessly offers users all the product information you have no matter where or how they access your documentation.

The Holy Grail of Help. Let customers access troubleshooting steps and product documentation right where they need it, without having to leave your software application to find it.

No phone, no email, no problem. Allow users to offer feedback or ask questions right inside your documentation without stopping to email or direct-dial customer support.

Avoid analysis paralysis. The ability to easily identify customer pain points mean you can respond rapidly to their needs and learn which support materials need to be re-tooled. Detailed data on user search patterns is icing on the cake.

Cop to speedy tickets. Some companies swear by their ticketing systems. A customer support strategy that integrates with your existing CRM to allow agents to search, answer, and publish in real-time kicks up the ticketing process about 10 levels for better all-around customer service.

The common denominator among these things is that they deliver knowledge-as-a-service across all support channels rather than forcing customers to slog through cobbled-together advice spread out all over the internet. Sure, there’s a time, a place, and a need for PDF manuals, FAQs, knowledge base articles, “chat now” website buttons, and all the other myriad forms of support options. Advances in technology and software make it easier than ever for companies to harness that information into collaborative, searchable data that saves customers time and their sanity. Users are catching on to that fact and are even willing to pay a premium for it.

Customer service used to be an either/or experience: Users either looked online for answers, or called a support number. There weren’t a lot of other channels for businesses to reach their customers. Now it’s possible to offer several customer support options at once, and keeping them all harmoniously updated doesn’t have to be a chore.

Let’s face it, every industry is competitive these days and there’s no room for slackers. All things being equal, the support experience makes the difference between whether you and your customer have a long, happy life together or they drop you like radioactive waste.

What an Oreo can Teach You About Content Strategy

February 4th, 2013 | | Content in Context, content strategy, Featured Post
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There’s already so much to read about the importance of developing good content strategy that writing another post about it seems like walking into an echo-chamber. We keep bringing it up, though, because it’s the number one thing you must do right now if you want to provide the best customer experience you’re capable of offering.

Content strategy is not only about good documentation, smart product placement, a busy blog, or an engaging Twitter account. It’s about all those things. Are you agile enough across multi-channel customer support avenues to respond quickly when surprises crop up in your industry?

Whether you watched Super Bowl XLVII or not, you’ve no doubt heard about the two biggest one-off stories of the night. The Superdome power failure and the fascinatingly delightful response by the people behind the scenes at Oreo.

Minutes after the blackout, 360i, the marketing firm behind the cookie company’s incredibly successful social media campaign, tweeted this gem. Here’s how they pulled it together so quickly:

“We had a mission control set up at our office with the brand and 360i, and when the blackout happened, the team looked at it as an opportunity,” agency president Sarah Hofstetter told BuzzFeed. “Because the brand team was there, it was easy to get approvals and get it up in minutes.”

Well, played, 360i. Well played.

Is your content that adaptable? Do you have you what you need in place to respond to unpredictable situations during your industry’s version of The Big Game? If not, you need to be proactively thinking about how your product documentation and authoritative content can be called up at a moment’s notice, before people need it.

You may never have the chance to unexpectedly solidify your place in an industry in front of millions people but that’s no reason you shouldn’t make sure your content strategy isn’t every bit as pulled together as Oreo’s. The foundation of your strategy should be rooted in product documentation, followed by well-crafted authoritative content. Then you’ll be in a perfect position to respond rapidly to whatever opportunity presents itself.

A smart content strategy doesn’t rely solely on keeping a robust set of FAQs and blog links at the ready, then stuffing it into a digital drawer on your website. No, it also requires foresight, planning, and consideration about how you’ll use your content in unexpected ways. Do a little high-level thinking, give people authority to pull the trigger quickly when opportunities crop up, and even plan out some what-if scenarios. In short, once you have the content, don’t be afraid to use it!

Image: mihoda

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.

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.

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