Product Help | MindTouch

5 Reasons Why E-commerce Systems Need a Social Help System

May 16th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | Content in Context, content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy

Social help systems can benefit nearly every type of online business you can think of, but e-commerce is one area where it really shines. Lets take a look at five ways social help improves the customer experience and how some companies are using it to build brand loyalty with their users.

1. In-line help for complex forms. The Internal Revenue Service is famous for deluging hapless U.S. citizens with frightening help docs filled with algorithms, charts, and tables. It’s unlikely anyone finds these useful and they’ve probably caused more than one stress-related eating binge. Don’t be like the IRS. Offer users in-line assistance if they run into issues while filling in forms on your site. As a bonus, since in-line support is easier to keep current and updated, it trumps PDFs any day of the week.

2. Access to why certain information is required. Though the U.S. government flunks customer service 101 when it comes to complex forms, it got a help feature right on another one of its sites. The State Department requires a lot of confidential information from visitors who are applying for passports online, which can be off-putting for many people. However, clicking on the question mark next to each input field brings up an explanation of why the data is necessary — a particularly useful feature for quelling fears customers sometimes have about sharing personal information online. Snag this idea for reassuring visitors to your website or use it to serve up info on error messages people may stumble upon while they’re there.

3. Offer support and troubleshooting for users to work through without resorting to the company help line. Don’t assume your customers want to call your toll-free number for support because, frankly, they probably don’t. Instead, take a cue from Amazon. It gives customers seven different ways to get the information they need, with phone contact coming in as a last resort. Users love having a batch of options to choose from and you’ll love that you can cut way down on your trouble tickets and support calls just by implementing this one simple feature.

4. Provide straightforward answers alongside related topics. One sure way to delight customers is to turn them expert users who can navigate your product with ease. HTC‘s online product documentation strategy includes offering extra product education alongside product support material on its website. Customers can deep-dive into topics related to their question or issue and become product experts. Long-term, these become the loyal customers and brand advocates all companies love to have.

5. Connect people with a community of users who are working through the same problems and may have identified the answers. Where do your product experts and brand advocates most often end up? Sharing their knowledge and expertise with others in online community forums. Paypal smartly adds links to its onsite forum and pointers to the hottest discussion topics directly from its support pages along with . That’s a terrific way to encourage users to help each other work through common issues and free up your support team for other projects.

5 Cold, Hard Truths About PDFs as Product Support

May 8th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | content strategy, Customer

There’s been quite a hue and cry this week over Adobe’s decision to shift Creative Suite to a subscription-only business model. Beginning in June, the company’s flagship boxed set of widely used tools like Illustrator and Photoshop will be moved to, and supported in, the cloud.

It’s a bold move, but not a shocking one, as more software vendors see the benefit of pushing their business to the cloud. It’s certainly more cost-effective than shipping CDs and vying for product placement on crowded store shelves, to say nothing of how easy it is to roll out updates or patches.

Interestingly, Adobe’s other big seller, Adobe Technical Communication Suite, isn’t headed to the cloud. Why? The most likely answer is because desktop publishing tools are becoming increasingly obsolete. With its heavy focus on collaborative PDFs, this particular collection of apps doesn’t have much maneuvering room as companies shift away from reliance on PDFs as their primary information delivery system.

Internal document management and online product help manuals are key reasons companies use PDFs. While the former isn’t likely to change anytime soon, the latter is heading the way of the dodo bird because customers simply don’t like PDF support docs.

When it comes to product help, PDFs as an exclusive means of documentation will work against you. You may have the best product or service your corner of the market has ever seen but if all your supports docs are PDFs, you might as well be offering manuals on stone tablets.

Today’s product manuals aren’t really manuals in the traditional sense. They’re collaborative, fluid, current, living databases filled with knowledge. User Manual 2.0, if you will.

Here are five cold, hard truths about PDF product support:

PDFs make customers cry. Here’s a typical usage scenario: Have a product question, head to the company wesbite’s help section. Hope for a quick answer, get directed to a huge PDF instead. Make a sandwich while it downloads. Try searching the document for your question, get 93 hits on your search term. Sigh audibly.

Make a stiff drink, then bravely poke through each response to find a useful answer. Rejoice when answer #89 seems to be what you need. Cry when you discover the PDF hasn’t been updated in two years and the information is wrong. Launch laptop at the wall.

If you want to be responsible for tears and crushed dreams, make sure all your product help docs are PDFs.

A living knowledge base, on the other hand, lets users quickly find the answers they need. Since it’s easy to update and keep current, customers know they’re getting the right answers every time. Software vendors can take product support a step further with in-product contextual help that allows users to access information related to what they see onscreen — without ever leaving your app.

PDFs cost your company money. Static documents are expensive to maintain. Somebody (or several somebodys) need to constantly monitor them for accuracy, make changes as needed, convert and upload documents, and so on. The hours your team spends managing PDFs are far better spent helping customers directly instead of tinkering with static manuals.

A living knowledge base helps maintain itself by continually updating across all channels. It’s a collaborative system that gives customers and support agents the real-time information they need, when they need it. On top of that, you’re not paying team members to constantly update PDFs or losing money when frustrated users jump ship for a company with better customer support.

PDFs look unprofessional. Back when the world was on dial-up, websites were single-page affairs, and hosting space was a million dollars a GB, there weren’t many options for getting product help into the hands of users. Today, there’s simply no reason for companies to overlook technology that makes life easier for customers.

Do you really want to force customers to print out reams of pages at their own expense just to figure out how to use your product? Does it warm your heart to picture the PDFs you worked so hard to assemble shoved in a file in the bowels of someone’s hard drive and forgotten?

PDF product help docs make your company look dated and unprofessional. They send the message that you don’t value your customers’ time or resources. A slick online database filled with loads of documentation that’s easily searchable looks far more professional than an outdated website with huge files to download.

PDFs don’t help users become experts. The entire point of customer support is to help users help themselves, to offer them a buffet of options that assist them in finding answers quickly and efficiently. Done right, a good help strategy turns your users into product experts by giving them multiple access points to useful product documentation.

PDF-based support systems have a number of potential fail points and customers have frustratingly few options if the documents are wrong. Sure, they can call a toll-free number or open a trouble ticket, but those avenues make users more dependent on your support team, not less.

Knowledge-based help systems give users multiple channels for finding help and troubleshooting issues. Customers expect to have content that adapts to who they are and the channel they’re accessing. You can’t do that with a static PDF.

PDFs build walls around your teams. Data silos can’t exist within a living knowledge base that’s continually updated and accessed by everyone in the company. PDFs, on the other hand, are locked data points controlled by tech writers.

To be sure, tech writers are an extremely valuable component of product support, but they shouldn’t be the only source of branded product knowledge. Marketing, Sales, Support, Community Managers, and even ancillary support teams have value to add to your existing content, but they can’t do that if all your help docs are protected PDFs.

Collaborative knowledge bases tear walls instead of reinforcing them. If your own teams can’t use your product help effectively, think how your customers must feel.

Used sparingly, PDFs do have their place on a company website. They’re fine for media kits, press releases, printable maps, or for delivering information that rarely or never changes. They’re a terrible method for managing product support info, however. A real-time knowledge base is the help platform your customers need. It’s the new user manual.

Images: Storyvillegirl, Purpleslog, Elvissa, Cogdogblog, Keith Roper

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

May 6th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | content strategy, Customer, Product Help

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?

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.
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.
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

The How and Why of Authoritative Content

January 31st, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | Content in Context, Featured Post

Back in the day, building customer relationships was simply a matter of creating an outstanding product or service then backing it up with some good user documentation. Today’s customers expect more — far more — from us. They want contextual, fresh, and relevant information so great engagement means you need to be part mind-reader, part sherpa, and part concierge. You can be all these things when you provide authoritative content to your customers.

What’s all this voodoo about authoritative content? Isn’t it enough to simply create an online knowledge base and let customers pick through your living documentation? Not anymore. Let’s take a look at the importance of authoritative content and why it’s more than just piling up words on your company’s website.

Be a mind reader. At a time when about 50% of business leaders pinpoint customer churn as the topmost threat to their company, Forrester analyst Kate Leggett notes proactivity is vital to customer retention. “Customers want to feel like the company has their best interests at heart and that the company is partnering with its customers to keep them satisfied and loyal throughout their engagement lifetime,” she says. “[And] they want this proactive service to happen, whenever possible, behind the scenes so that problems are addressed before they happen.” In other words, give customers the information they need before they even realize they need it.

Of course, evergreen content that people can reference for months and years to come is a priority. Paired with a continually-updated website, blog, or knowledge base puts you on the leading edge of information resources.

Be a sherpa. When you’re the go-to site for information about a particular type of product or service, customers will look to you for guidance in addition to their friends on social media networks. Peer assistance is great but customers need definitive answers, not supposition. Make yours the authoritative content that people link to as they help one another troubleshoot or look for new business solutions.

In addition to building your company’s personal brand, content that solves issues and shows users how to get maximum value from your product lets customers know you’re listening. Consumer loyalty is a minefield these days and authoritative content — in addition to a great product and superior customer service — is the glue that binds users to their product. Corporate communications writer Erica Harrison calls this cycle the “psychology of trust:”

1. A user searches for a topic relevant to your industry.
2. They come across your authoritative content (i.e. white paper, blog, or case study).
3. The positive response (i.e. trust) to the authority of your content is then directly paired with your organization.
4. The reader assumes if you have such informative content online, then you must be a leading authority in the industry.
5. This automatically builds their trust in your organization.
6. They then visit your site where they will most likely become a client or customer.

Be a concierge. Don’t underestimate the power of authoritative content to establish yourself as an industry leader. Spend some time sharing your thoughts on market trends and analyzing what’s going on in your industry. Don’t be afraid to make forecasts and predictions. Authoritative content is predicated on bringing fresh, new information to readers and keeping your finger on the pulse of things that affect your customers. Let them know where to go, what to see, and what to do.

There’s little doubt the customer engagement playing field has changed drastically in recent years. The good news is that with great change comes great opportunity. Serving up smart, authoritative content is a particularly important arrow in your quiver of customer service resources.

Image: Brian J. Matis

5 Ways To Radically Reinvent Product Help for a Competitive Edge

November 30th, 2012 | Michael Stewart | Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post, MindTouch, Product, Product Help, TCS Features

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.

It’s Nice To Agree With Mark Hurd on The Future of Customer Experience…sort of.

July 16th, 2012 | Michael Stewart | Customer Experience Strategy, MindTouch

The ideas around customer experience have been around a long time – but the pace of innovation in the CX space has greatly accelerated over the last few years due to rising consumer expectations and fueled by the explosive adoption of social media.

A few weeks ago, Oracle made some major waves around its new Customer Experience Suite. In our view, Oracle maybe at the forefront of redefining customer experience and what it will mean in the future. But niche companies like MindTouch have operated in the space for much longer, and have long drawn the attention of software giants like SAP, who is similarly in the first wave echelon of companies innovating in the Customer Experience space.

CEO Mark Hurd said in front of a national audience, “We are here to talk about one of the most important issues our customers face, which is how our customers deal with their customers. Life used to be simple. You made great products and people bought them. Now it’s more complicated. Today, having a good product isn’t good enough. You have to have a great relationship and a great experience with your customer to keep that customer. Second, Oracle announced the new Oracle Customer Experience Summit at @OracleWorld.

Hurd is smart to make a push into the CX space, however, some industry leaders wonder if Oracle will be able to remain competitively agile as it tries to blend legacy architectures from a mix of acquisitions and old technology. Nonetheless, Oracle is doing a good job of defining customer experience in today’s social world and prioritizing it for vendors and for large corporations. As we’ve pointed out before at MindTouch, customer churn hurts SaaS companies even more than for traditional businesses, making customer experience crucial for these companies.

MindTouch is also leading much of the product development around customer experience. In late June, we hosted dozens of leading customer experience professionals from major organizations and vendors (including Oracle, SAP and Microsoft).The meet-up was a great chance to listen to how many industry insiders see the CX space developing. For the most part, they agree with Hurd on the importance of customer experience solutions.

But they also agree that the grand vision of customer experience is not easy to implement. Customer experience is how you manage the interactions between your user base and your company. This user base can include prospects as well as customers – which means customer experience touches just about every part of your organization including sales, marketing, support, client services, product, documentation, and operations.

The lack of clear boundaries makes it very difficult to get executive buy-in with a customer experience program orsolution. The executives who find themselves leading the customer experience charge today come from varied backgrounds. For example, some come from a customer service background, while others come from UI or support backgrounds

After speaking with customer experience executives, as well as watching Oracle and SAP make massive pushes into CX, we feel great about MindTouch as a company.

We’ve got our own customer experience manager internally. Statistics show that CX is one of the fastest growing titles (even faster than user experience), and we’re at the front of the trend. We ourselves are learning firsthand how this position is evolving.

But most importantly, MindTouch has been offering and continuously improving it’s product help software by focusing on creating great experiences for our clients’ customers:

MindTouch extends its customer insights into multiple departments with each deployment, just as customer experience does. In the case of our customer Zuora, MindTouch connects sales, support, product, and technical documentation silos seamlessly, providing a means by which each department can continually contribute to the improvement of documentation, the product and the user experience all with the customers’ needs in sharp focus.
With our close connection between user experience and customer experience, MindTouch offers advanced and easy to use documentation authoring and publishing tools, enhanced usability, feedback and analytics, combining all of the major initiatives in customer experience today
The common vendors in the CX space are all around Analytics, Monitoring(support) and Feedback, including one common initiative called Voice of Customer (a fancy name for surveying customers for input). Meeting each of these needs, MindTouch has feedback built in to the product help platform, we have Analytics which provide actionable data to gauge customers’ sense of product and support fulfillment, and we provide the means author, publish and surface highly relevant product documentation and knowledge base assets to customers looking for help or to learn more about the products they use.
Furthermore, MindTouch was founded upon an early recognition of the confluence between social networking and social commerce. That’s why MindTouch builds a product help experience that socializes product help and extends itself easily into social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.MindTouch can easily be extended to any current Customer Experience initiative because of our extensible framework and open APIs.

An example is the MindTouch integration with Salesforce, Zendesk, SugarCRM, and a host of other support ticket and CRM applications, which greatly reduces ticket resolution times, and nurtures highly effective self-help in the process, reducing support costs while enhancing the customer experience.

The fast-growing customer experience space continues to evolve, and MindTouch is proud to be one of the pioneers in this movement. Customer experience has become a vital need for companies of all sizes, and we are eager to work with our customers to continually improve customer experience, ultimately leading to happier users and more successful companies.

MindTouch Announces Integration With Salesforce.com Help Desk to Improve Customer Experience

June 7th, 2012 | Michael Stewart | Featured Post, Press Release

MindTouch Extends CRM to Post-Sale, Reducing Churn, Increasing Self-Help and Speeding Time to Resolution

SAN DIEGO, CA. June 7, 2012—MindTouch, the company dedicated to creating the world’s best self-service help experiences, announced today that its social help system now integrates with SalesForce.com Help Desk and support ticketing to dramatically improve support agents’ efficiency and customers’ help experiences.

The MindTouch social help platform is revolutionizing the user manual and SaaS customer experiences through a web-based environment that includes a knowledge base, help center, ticketing integration, and help button. Agents using CRM and web-based support ticketing systems have instant access to MindTouch powered help articles and knowledge base assets, thereby speeding time to resolution for customer issues. For support agents using SalesForce.com, MindTouch enables them to quickly pinpoint customers the most relevant content and to easily publish new content to the MindTouch knowledge base, as well as identify gaps in product documentation assets–all without ever leaving the SalesForce interface.

“Salesforce.com views customers as database fields, but exceptional customer experiences are not delivered by a handful of database fields. This is precisely why many of our customers have asked MindTouch to improve Salesforce.com by integrating our social help center,” said Aaron Fulkerson, founder and CEO of MindTouch. “Our customers are upgrading their customer experience and support tenfold by adding MindTouch. Quality customer experiences aren’t just about responding to support requests, it’s about delivering an experience that turns users into product experts and customer advocates.”

New functionality in the MindTouch product release includes:

Faster support resolution (lowered support cost): Support agents provide faster resolution with the help of recommended articles and real-time search delivered by MindTouch adaptive search, a powerful search engine that indexes articles, comments and even the contents of file attachments to suggest the best content for any question.
Happier customers: 65% of software users prefer self-serve help (2011 TNS research). Users do not want to wait for a support response or be forced to sift through forums. MindTouch enables users to self-serve effectively.
Create experts and advocates: Context-rich help delivered just-in-time maximizes user learning and satisfaction, rapidly creating experts to advocate products and brands.

Resources

About MindTouch

An enterprise collaboration leader since 2005, MindTouch turns your customers into happy users and product experts with a cloud delivered social help center. Convert technical, help and product documentation into a two way communication channel that increases support self-service and customer happiness. MindTouch software includes a new kind of product help center, a knowledge base, support ticketing integration and a help button that can be added to any web application in minutes. Millions use MindTouch every day.

Great companies like Cisco, Intuit, Paypal, Autodesk, Hewlett-Packard, Palm, SuccessFactors, RSA, SAP and EMC rely on MindTouch. Read more at www.MindTouch.com.

Who’ll Stop the Rain? Social Product Help Umbrellas Protect You and the Customer

April 24th, 2012 | Michael Stewart | CCMS, content strategy, Customer, Editorial, Featured Post, Product Help, Uncategorized

A recent social media customer service survey by TNS reveals that over half (57%) of consumers head directly online when they have a problem with a brand or product. That figure rises to 71% among 16-25 year old consumers and 65% among 25-34 year olds. The problems and questions of frustrated consumers are being gathered and published all across the web.

The question is: where are the answers coming from? 33% of consumers use on-line forums and chat rooms while 25% have turned to on-line video tutorials (i.e. YouTube), and nearly 20% say they turn to query websites such as Facebook Questions, Yahoo Answers, etc. 11% say they turn to popular related blogs.

Now here’s the problem. When people are facing a question or crisis with a product, they’re looking for quick answers from wherever they feel the best answer is likely to come from. However, more often than not, those answers are nested in forums, community sites, and other 3^rd party web properties, among similar complaints and problems. It’s here that brands and products take a reputational beating, and the solutions offered are often off the mark. Technology, software, consumer electronics and telecom industries seem to be the most vulnerable to reputational losses in these web arenas as they report greater losses attributed to support failures than most other industries.

The report concluded, “By creating digital content that solves customers’ common problems and making it widely available online, businesses can significantly reduce customer frustration and be seen as a user-friendly brand while lowering the costs associated with live agent support. When asked what companies could do to improve the customer service experience, 35% of all respondents, including nearly half (48%) of 16-24 year olds, said “post video demonstrations, tutorials and instructions.”

There answer is simple and cost effective, and in fact saves money and increases revenue. By implementing socially enabled product help your giving your product and knowledgebase assets a life on the web. A key consideration when implementing social product help is SEO. You only win the battle for your users if your content is search engine optimized. By giving your documentation and knowledgebase assets a life on the web, you’ll make sure your prospects and customers are getting the best product information from the most credible source, your company.

Next, your social product help software must take your documentation and knowledgebase assets and optimize them with effective search and feedback mechanisms as well as social engagement tools designed specifically around product help. Nothing deepens brand loyalty more than enabling the customer to quickly find highly relevant information that solves their problem and which expands their understanding of your product along the way.

You’ll also need a robust set of analytics tools. These are essential for understanding how your customer uses your product and the kind of information they’re looking for.

To bring it all together, you should make sure that your social product help integrates solidly with your support ticketing system and CRM as well as having the ability to extend into social networks and expand upon existing authoring tools (if any). By doing so, you dramatically improve your customers’ experience with your brand because your company can quickly respond to and engage the customer at a crucial point. Consumer surveys show that effective support experiences are often weighted more heavily than price in the decision to recommend, renew, or buy again.

Implementing social product help is simple and creates a single source of truth about your products and your brand. Think of social product help as an umbrella, encompassing all the ways consumers expect to interact with your brand while protecting your reputation and the customer experience.

Today, Sugar CRM Launches their MindTouch Powered Support Center

April 5th, 2012 | Allison Dickherber | Featured Post, News

Sugar CRM, the well known customer relationship management (CRM) platform which is “designed to help your business communicate with prospects, share sales information, close deals and keep customers happy” now uses MindTouch to power their comprehensive support center.

Sugar CRM brands itself as the “CRM Made Simple” and their new support site subscribes to this value.

Sugar has done an excellent job organizing support features into easy to navigate categories right on the home page.

Customers looking for forums, how-to steps, embedded media tutorials or documentation can quickly and easily navigate to the correct page and find more specific information within Sugar’s effectively organized hierarchies. Now that’s simple.

Check out Sugar CRM’s new support center for yourself at: http://support.sugarcrm.com/

6 Ways to Help Your Users Help Themselves with Contextual Help

March 30th, 2012 | Allison Dickherber | Customer, MindTouch, Product

Wading through product documentation can be intimidating and downright boring, so users will often ask questions of your support team so they don’t have to deal with the mounds of information which may or may not solve their problem. However, you can turn that trend around by utilizing a contextual help system that makes finding answers easier. Below, we provide six simple ways that you can help your users help themselves by accessing contextual help.

1. Don’t Tell Your Users, Show Them

Rather than replying to user support tickets with detailed answers, send them a direct link to the appropriate page in your product help system where they can find detailed, straightforward and get this – helpful – answers to their questions. It’s also important to make sure that the page you send them to features related content so that they can continue exploring, which bring us to…

2. Direct Users to Related Content

Each page in your contextual help system should link out to another page that has related articles, tutorials, videos, etc. This ensures that users continue to click through your product help as they search for and learn about particular features, helping them to discover more information on the things they want to know about.

3. Provide In-Product Help

Picture this: one of your product users completely lost trying to figure out what a feature in your software does. Or maybe they don’t know how to populate a field. Perhaps they just want to ensure they did something right..