LavaCon 2012 Corey Ganser: What Makes a Superhero? Doing What Others Can’t and/or Won’t

October 16th, 2012 | Michael Stewart | 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

3 Strategies for Centralizing Tech Comm

February 27th, 2012 | Amanda Cross | Guest Blogger, Let's Talk Techcomm, Tech Comm

Unless you work for a technical communications boutique that specializes in providing technical information solutions to other companies, there’s a decent chance that your boss’s boss doesn’t really understand what you do.

Being helpful makes people want to include you I think that tech writers in most companies are kind of like the IT guy at the dentist’s office: the rest of the folks are smart and capable, but their expertise doesn’t even overlap. The dentists and dental hygienists think IT is probably necessary, but they’re content to just trust the IT guy to take care of it so long as nothing goes wrong.

Some technical writers like it this way. When people are willing to just let you take care of things, they just take your word for what needs to be done and don’t bug you. Plus, there’s the more nefarious notion that keeping your job and job skills a secret gives you job security because no one else will know how to do what you do.

But that only works for as long as people think that what you produce is necessary, which isn’t going to be as long if they don’t understand your contribution. Besides, when people don’t understand what you do, they can’t imagine new and creative ways to utilize your skills. If you can’t capture your boss’s boss’s imagination with all the cool things you have to offer the organization, then opportunities for exciting new projects can be few and far between.

I say it’s better for your career and esteem not to hoard your tech comm knowledge. Instead, you should share your knowledge freely so that people can have a deeper appreciation for why what you do is so difficult and special and ultimately beneficial to everyone. Here are some methods I use to try to make people around me understand the product documentation effort:

#1 – Internal marketing

Well this one’s obvious: if you want people to know what you do, tell them. We are, after all, professional communicators. This ought to be right up our alley.

Speaking for myself, I try to use lots of interesting channels to make people aware of what’s going on in the Doc team. Read more…

3 Tips for Navigating the Sea of Résumés

January 31st, 2012 | Amanda Cross | Guest Blogger, Let's Talk Techcomm, Tech Comm

If you’re like me, you can’t hire as many people as you need to do the work. But I’ve just had a writer take another opportunity, and now I have to back fill for him. The good news is there are lots of qualified writers out there right now. The bad news is there are also a lot of people applying for just anything. It can be make the hiring situation kind of overwhelming, but I have some tips that I, unfortunately, learned the hard way.

Tip #1: Recognize your job is hard

The biggest mistake I made in my first couple hires was to think that my job was standard fare that anyone could handle. I felt like I was being overdramatic to spend too much time vetting the candidates, when it seemed like it just couldn’t be that hard. Anyone would do.

The tricky thing here is that technical communicators have a very wide variety of skills and a broad spectrum of capabilities. A person can have the title “Technical Writer” and have it mean anything from “I know the source code inside and out, help customers directly with technical issues, and consult with the product manager on the direction and design of the product” to “I get a rough draft from an SME and add page breaks in the right places.” Read more…

Motivating SMEs (even though you can’t fire them!)

January 24th, 2012 | Amanda Cross | Guest Blogger, Let's Talk Techcomm, Tech Comm

In the valiant pursuit of providing excellent product help and other documents, just about every technical communicator out there works with subject matter experts (SMEs). Talking to experts is a normal part of the research for writing a technical document. SMEs are an invaluable resource, but can be challenging to work with sometimes. After all, whatever makes them experts in the first place has the potential to also make them:

Very busy and hard to get in contact with
Frustrated with people who don’t already understand the subject matter
Downright arrogant

working together is a matter of habit My own favorite SME quotes come from back when I was in college. I wrote technical manuals for a high-energy physics lab on campus. Once, after reading my first draft of a document about a piece of machinery in the lab, my supervisor told me, “It’s clear you don’t understand this at all.” That was harsh, but not really rude (and certainly not untrue). It was another time, when a grad student said to me, “I can’t understand why you’re having trouble with this; it’s trivial” that I really got to experience that I’m-too-smart-and-busy-to-bother-with-insects-like-you attitude that some technical writers deal with every day.

Fortunately, there are approaches that you, the technical communicator, can take into your interactions with SMEs to encourage responsiveness and respectfulness, even though you probably don’t have any actual authority over your SMEs.

Prerequisite: be a writer SMEs want to work with

Before you can start pulling the levers of motivating your SMEs, there are a few things you need to do to prepare yourself.
Read more…

2011 #Techcomm Top Influencers

January 5th, 2012 | Aaron Fulkerson | content strategy

Last year MindTouch compiled a list of the most influential techcomm bloggers. This year I am pleased to present an even more robust list.

This year we’re providing:

Top Listeners
Most Influential (a variety of factors impact this, but the primary driver is being followed by topic insiders)
Most Emergent (fastest growing in influence)
Most Followed (on Twitter)
Oldest (on Twitter)
Most Frequent Tweeters

We also complied a Twitter List of the top 400 Twitter-ers and posted this for all to follow and enjoy. You can subscribe to this Twitter list here: twitter.com/MindTouch/techcomm-2011-influencers. The Twitter list is in no particular order, but you will find the top 10 lists below and tomorrow we will publish the entire list of top 400 sorted based on their influence.

The Process

Previously, our team spent literally weeks pouring over a variety of data sources including, but not limited to, Klout, Google Pagerank, Technorati Authority and Twitter. This year we had the benefit of a phenomenal social media analysis tool that hasn’t launched yet (contact me if you want early access). You can read more about this process in our preliminary post.

Replay “Managing Technical Writing Teams” with Scott Abel and Richard Hamilton

March 7th, 2011 | SarahC | Webinar

Here at MindTouch we strive to provide you with an exceptional experience. Delivering valuable conversations through webinars is something we take seriously, which is why we’ve enlisted Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, to help us drive that experience.

Our latest webinar, “Managing Technical Writing Teams” was a discussion between Scott and technical documentation management expert, Richard Hamilton. The two shared their tips and tricks for managing people, projects, and technology selections as well as, real-world advice garnered from documentation managers in-the-trenches. The two conversed about the importance of managers being intimately involved in tool and technology selection, the need for collaborative authoring environments, the value of tackling fear-based perceptions and setting proper expectations. Scott and Richard also discussed how the changing face of communication, social media, and mobile devices are impacting the documentation manager’s universe.

This was a successful webinar – with just over 500 registrants!
Read more…

Forbes: The Evolution Of User Manuals

August 9th, 2010 | Aaron Fulkerson | Uncategorized

Product and services documentation is now a core business asset that can drive revenues.

If your business hasn’t been paying attention to your documentation, you’re ignoring a sales tool and a revenue generator and you need to rethink your priorities.

Forbes just published an article I wrote on the importance of product and services documentation in driving top-line revenue, decreasing support costs and increasing customer satisfaction. Every VP of marketing, VP of sales, community manager, customer service manager and product manager needs to take note of this. I’ll elaborate in another post on how a product can benefit. If you think you know, I’d love to hear your feedback in comments.

Flexibility is Key

June 28th, 2010 | Corey Ganser | Enterprise 2.0

So many times we are surprised at the creative ways that customers are building value with MindTouch. As a robust flexible application platform, MindTouch lends itself to extensive customization easily, allowing users to quickly and easy create powerful applications.

As you may have seen in previous posts, a survey of our users revealed that the majority of MindTouch customers are using MindTouch to create the next generation of collaborative tech support documentation. This phenomenon arose organically, with users naturally gravitating towards the flexibility of MindTouch in creating and editing technical communications.

The key in all of these use cases is the flexibility of the MindTouch platform.

Today’s solutions require flexible platforms that enable structure to emerge, rather than forcing structure on your customers and employees. It is an important distinction that can make or break a successful deployment.

Our latest release, MindTouch Technical Communications Suite focuses on delivering the features most requested by technical communicators. When we looked at how technical communicators are using MindTouch, we saw some great developments in the areas of Authoring, Discovering, and Curating information. It is in these areas that we have focused many of our new features in MindTouch TCS. From our new search engine to powerful curation tools, we’ve added in the features that technical communicators need to quickly create and manage quality documentation sourced from internal and external sources.

The Evolution of Technical Communication

June 23rd, 2010 | Corey Ganser | Enterprise 2.0

As engineers, we are often reluctant communicators. I remember my first job out of college, working in the electrical engineering R&D dept at a now-defunct Fortune 500 company. It is safe to say that “writing the manuals” was usually the last item on the list of tasks for almost every project; nobody wanted to do it, but being the newest person there, it was a task that usually fell to me. A decade ago, technical communication was done with very rudimentary tools, using Word or Robohelp, and distributing documentation updates via CD-ROM.

The growth of technical communication industry is testament to the fact that technical writing is an art all to itself. An outgrowth of what was once only thought of as “manual writing”, technical communication has evolved over the past few years into a much more social, collaborative process. The advent, and staggering growth, of social collaborative technology has changed the world of technical communication forever. Whereas before technical writing was thought of as more of an afterthought, it now sits front and center in the interface between a company and their customers; talk about a crucial positioning!