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.

“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.”

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.

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

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

Lithium CMO Katy Keim throws down the gauntlet of shame pretty early in the discussion, noting that “95 percent of [Facebook] and 70 percent of Tweets to brands are ignored.” She says something is “broken” and we agree. At a time when social media engagement is crucial to your brand’s success, those statistics are completely mind-boggling.

So what’s going on here? Where is the disconnect between creating a good customer experience strategy and its execution? We’d better collectively figure it out quickly because Gartner analyst Jenny Sussin says social media platforms may soon become a primary channel of customer support.

Researchers over at Forrester are drawing the same conclusions. As analyst Kate Leggett succinctly puts it,

“Social channels are increasingly important. Online communities and Twitter have seen increases in usage rates in the past three years. However, satisfaction remains low for these channels, as companies have not invested in best practices for managing interactions on these channels.”

In summary, customers want to engage with companies on Twitter and Facebook so they take their issues and compliments to those platforms. Companies apparently know this but haven’t come up with ways to effectively manage these conversations, so comments from customers (and potential customers) are largely ignored.

This is not a good plan and nobody wins here.

Products that help businesses harness and manage conversations across multiple microblogging platforms are part of the solution, but a comprehensive strategy doesn’t end there. Twitter and Facebook interactions alone are far too limiting to take customer support to the level it needs in order to be effective. You need more.

Authoritative branded content and a deeply curated knowledge base on your website give you the building blocks you need to power official responses you offer in places other than your website. This will help you accomplish two important things.

Provide consistent and correct information. Nothing turns away a customer faster than seeing different answers to the same question. While troubleshooting product issues, it’s annoying to find conflicting answers among users. It’s unforgivable when they come from inside the company itself. A solid, in-house, continually updated knowledge base means your customers get the correct answers everywhere, every time.

Burn down information silos that hold your company back. In the early days of web-centric customer service, it was quite common to house product documentation in one area, techcomm in another, and miscellany like FAQs in yet another. It wasn’t the best solution, but it was based on the technology we had to work with at the time (read: not much).

Today’s tools easily turn mountains of disparate, siloed information into a cohesive bank of searchable data that’s easy to both update and manage. Customers and staff can find the right answers, right when they need it. That, friends, is one of the main goals of excellent customer support.

Twitter, Facebook, and the myriad other social networking platforms out there are fantastic ways to engage and groom customers. The people have spoken and decided that’s where they want to be able to talk with businesses, so go hang out with them. Before you head over to the social media snack lounge, though, make sure your house is in order so you can have them over for a full meal.

Image: Extranoise

MindTouch provides the ultimate product support experience for users and customer service agents using a collaborative, self-service platform. With MindTouch, users have access to the most relevant product information minimizing the need to call or email an agent. Our multi-channel solution allows you to track and analyze customer needs and behavior so you can get the right information to them faster. MindTouch delivers a great customer experience which increases customer retention and loyalty, and improves your brand image. If you haven’t seen our latest product announcement, take a look at this MindTouch Overview.

The SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference boasts presentations from SAP executives and thought-leaders about the latest business technology trends and innovations. You’ll have the opportunity to learn best practices and approaches from your peers who have integrated the same SAP solutions that will help your business run like never before.

If you’re at SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando, don’t forget to stop by our booth 2627c.  Come see how the MindTouch solution has dramatically enhanced the product and customer experiences for companies like HTC, SuccessFactors, Autodesk, EMC, Wind River, Blackboard, Intuit and others.We’d like to offer you special access to events at the show. So if you are able to attend, or would like to set up an in-person meeting with MindTouch, contact us.

We hope to see you in Orlando!Click on the banner for information and to register for the conference:

But what if you believe that your user base is a fountain of knowledge worth tapping into? How do you turn lurkers into participating members of your community?

Make the process user-friendly — Nothing turns away an enthusiastic contributor faster than a 29-step registration process just to leave some feedback or advice for another user. While it’s fine, and sometimes necessary, to require contributors to provide basic information in order to join conversations, you risk running off a lot of people by asking for details about their address, hair color, and whether they prefer cats or dogs.

Sure, the temptation is great to mine visitors to your site for information you can share with marketing and sales, but don’t do it. The goal is to make potential contributors feel valued for what they can offer your community, not your company’s bottom line.

Do an attitude check — Is your community approachable? Is it friendly and welcoming or filled with blowhards impressed with their own amazing skills? Even if your community members are made of glitter and unicorn fur, there are plenty of internet introverts out there who are intimidated by large communities with their own ways of doing things.

Some companies appoint established community members to be greeters or mentors who job it is to help newcomers get the lay of the land. The benefit here is three-fold. Helpful members appreciate it when their expertise is recognized, existing members have a reason to participate responsibly to get on the company’s radar, and new members see you care enough to make sure they feel welcome.

Incentivize the troops — Obviously, not every member can be a community leader so figure out other clever ways to encourage participation among users. The incentives you choose should be based on what drives your specific user base. In some cases, unlocking participation-based badges and avatars is motivation enough while the potential to earn discounts or tangible goods carry more weight in other communities. Gamification, incentives, and loyalty rewards are remarkably effective when they’re well matched with the users earning them.

Do nothing — This advice may seem counterintuitive, but it might be the right answer in some circumstances. Take, for example, the small startup with a team that’s already overextended. A few weeks after launch, the marketing team (or, more likely, the marketing person) notices site traffic is off the charts and starts brainstorming how to capture these visitors and hold them close for all eternity.

That’s a noble plan but probably not where your focus should be right then. As we’ve said before, become the authoritative voice in your industry and people will keep coming back. Offer the right answers at the right time, in the right place and you’ll solidify your place in their browser bookmarks. Spend time creating good content and building an excellent customer experience strategy so users want to be a part of your community. Once you’ve built a rock-solid base for them to stand on and a terrific product they’ll be proud to support, then you can figure out how to further encourage members to participate in your community.

We could spend days throwing around more ideas on how to lurkers into contributors but we’d rather hear from you. What’s worked for you? What didn’t? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Image: worthyfm

Overview

We’ve launched some enhancements to our ticketing, chat, documentation and support plans. These improvements will make it easier for you to get the answers you need.

1. To start, we’ve moved to a new ticket management system which uses both email and the MindTouch Ticket Creation Workflow to provide a quicker and easier ticket creation experience.
2. Next, we’ve improved the documentation.
3. Lastly, we’ve launched new Support Plans to complement our Standard, Premium and Enterprise licenses.

How do these improvements affect you?

Well, your support and product help experience should be significantly more seamless.  Specifically, we are improving our toolset and you’ll still have access to the same support channels.

Documentation (NEW)

Still available at http://help.mindtouch.us. Now includes top issues, instructional guides, create ticket workflow and support plans.

Submit a Ticket:  

Available at http://help.mindtouch.us or by emailing support@mindtouch.com.

Phone:  

Still available at 619-795-8459 at the Enterprise Support plan level.

Thanks for being a loyal customer and please feel free to let us know what you think of the changes.

New File Attachments Management

We have completely redesigned the file attachments control to be more intuitive and to add some great new features.

• Descriptions to your files can be added and this is indexed by the MindTouch search engine. This helps provide context about your file attachment without requiring your end users to open it.
• There is a new search control that allows users to search the page attachments. This will filter attachments bases on search queries against the filename and the file description. This does not search the contents of the file, but of course the site wide search still does offer file content searches.
• Sort files by Filename, Modified date, Size of file, and the Added
• The file attachment controls like “Move”, “Upload New”, “Delete” and “View all Versions” were redesigned to be more intuitive.
• Rather than paginated files the experience is an infinite scroll.

Aaron Mars and Theresa Manzo deserve credit for the design and implementation and Corey Ganser for the write up.

Conditional Content Blocks

One of the many highly valued features by content creators using MindTouch is the ability to easily permission content blocks based on a User or Group enlistment. Why is this valuable? While it’s not immediately obvious, this use case is very common. Let’s use a customer example. Blackboard.com, a MindTouch customer, has user personas that are student, teacher, (school) administrator, (system) administrator or Blackboard support agent. Using conditional content, a single MindTouch article can serve different content to each of these viewers to personalize their experience. In the past, accessing this feature in MindTouch was a bit clunky. Now we’ve added the capability to the Format drop-down in the MindTouch Editor.

MindTouch administrators can still set custom conditional blocks for specific user groups in the control panel. These custom blocks will also show up in the Format drop-down. If you are interested in more  information on conditional content, you should read the help article.

For more information on this week’s product release, such as bugs squashed or other new features, you can read the full post at the engineering release blog.

If you have customers, knowledge management is a huge deal companies can not ignore. As the complexity and cost of KM tools becomes more accessible the usage of these tools are spreading to small and medium enterprises that previously couldnt afford the cost or complexity. Moreover, these technologies are getting dramatically better as the become more collaborative. As we’ve mentioned before, all content streams eventually lead back to your company’s doorstep so harness that knowledge and manage it well.

Knowledge management is part art, part science, and maybe even a little voodoo. Here’s the first 25 influencers in our list of folks who really know what KM is all about:

1. weknowmore
2. David Gurteen
3. Dave Snowden
4. Stan Garfield
5. Nancy White
6. VMaryAbraham
7. Jack Vinson
8. Euan Semple
9. Alice MacGillivray
10. knowledgetank
11. Ian Thorpe
12. Richard Hare
13. Peter West
14. Gauri Salokhe
15. Chris Collison
16. #KMers Chat
17. Stuart French
18. KM Australia
19. John Tropea
20. KMWorld Magazine
21. Christian DE NEEF
22. Mario Soavi
23. ewenlb
24. KM Asia
25. Steve Dale

Here’s the entire list of 100 names to know in #KM. Now, before you get riled up because you know that Kate Leggett and Esteban Kolsky are hugely influential and they (or someone similar) are not in the top 100, consider this:

Aaron Fulkerson writes

GetLittleBird does an amazing job of assessing influencers based on a variety of factors native to Twitter (today just Twitter). One principal indicator of influence is the number of influencers that follow a given person on a specific network. In this case, that network is Twitter. If one is not active on the network being measured will they rank highly? No. Does this mean they are less influential? Yes, on that network.

We know there are several profoundly influential people not represented here. However, it should be clear that this list constitutes a core group of influencers in the KM space on Twitter.

Are you on the influencer list? Congratulations, here’s your badge! You’ve earned it for your work in pushing the edges of your field. You’re an innovator who’s elevating and promoting your field. Thank you. Grab the code below and display your badge with pride. You’re in excellent company.

Grab this snippet to add your badge to your website or blog:

<a href="http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/2013/04/10/influencers-in-knowledge-management" title="MindTouch Most Influential in KM"><img src="http://cdn.mindtouch.com/www/KM_influencer.png" alt="Most Influential in KM" border="0" ></a>

Check back to find out who made the list of top 100 influencers in customer support and customer experience or follow us on Twitter to find out right away when we post the next list.

MindTouch Core, the free and open source version, was originally released in July, 2006. That early release was a prototype of what was to come. A year later Core was ranked one of the most popular open source projects in the world by Sourceforge.net.

In 2008, MindTouch introduced a commercial version we named Platform. Core and Platform have been used by many millions of people all over the world and these will undoubtedly continue to be used for years to come. Core has been forked and there are more hosting providers than I could count that provide packages and hosting. All of us at MindTouch are very proud of these two products. They’ve served more people than I ever expected at our humble beginnings in the basement of my condo in Maplewood, MN and Steve’s apartment in Redmond, WA.

Core/Platform has been used to build a variety collaborative applications; these have ranged from Amazon’s social network for book enthusiasts Shelfari.com to social Intranet infrastructures at the largest telcos and even in the Pentagon. When properly installed and configured the product is damn near bullet-proof. Over the years we’ve received awards for the engineering quality and I’ve had the privilege of hearing remarkable stories from all over the world that attest to the durability of our work.

In late 2009, we set a course for MindTouch that would ensure the end of Core/Platform. We were determined to move away from packaging and shipping on-premise software. It just doesn’t make sense to ship software. The effort required to package and test for several flavors of Windows,  various Linux distros and virtualization environments was effort that can be invested in making the product better for customers. It was clear that a cloud delivered product meant we could innovate faster and provide a vastly superior product to our customers.

In 2010, MindTouch launched our first enterprise grade cloud delivered product. We moved from a 4-6 month release cycle to a weekly release cycle and we haven’t looked back since. By the end of 2010 we began the process of upgrading our Platform customer base and informing Platform customers that this on-premise product would be sunsetting over the next two years. Well, it’s been more than two years now. We’ve managed to produce a major version release since then and put out more than the promised two maintenance releases a year for Core/Platform (average was four per year).

Today 90% of our business is on our cloud product. The difference between our cloud offering and the old Core/Platform builds is sufficiently profound as to render the two entirely unrecognizable. These are two completely different products. If you’re a Core/Platform user I encourage you to request a trial of MindTouch cloud. We stopped selling new Platform licenses in late 2011 and today we have a small base of customers that should upgrade because the cloud product is just so much better. If you wish to maintain a MindTouch deployment, but you can not use cloud—presumably because corporate security constraints are more stringent than the Central Intelligence Agency—you can purchase a perpetual Platform license.

What does this mean if you’ve already purchased a renewal this year? Nothing changes for you other than you will not be able to purchase a new Platform license next year. You will still receive the same level of support through the term of your license. If you have an annual license this will expire next year. If you have a perpetual license you can, of course, continue to use this license in perpetuity, but after the term of your support plan purchased this year you will not be able to purchase support again.

What if I have a perpetual Platform license or I am interested in purchasing a perpetual Platform license? Great. Business as usual. However, I strongly encourage you to consider the cloud product for the aforementioned reasons.

Will MindTouch continue to maintain the MindTouch Core code base? No. Today the MindTouch Cloud codebase is already 4 years forked from MindTouch Core.

Will MindTouch continue to maintain SGMLReader, MindTouch DReAM  and continue to contribute to other open source projects you have in the past ?  Yes.

Images by Peter Zoon and Andrew Feinberg.

Our lists go beyond the influencers you might already know and direct you to the ones you should know. Little Bird calls these influencers the most emergent — they may not be on your radar screen yet, but they will be soon.

We’ll announce the top 100 influencers in customer service, customer experience, and knowledge management in the next few days but let’s get started right now with the top influencers in #techcomm. Here’s the first 25:

1. Tom Johnson
2. Sarah O’Keefe
3. Scott Abel
4. stc_org
5. Bill Swallow
6. Alan Houser
7. Anne Gentle
8. Ellis Pratt
9. Catherine Hibbard
10. David Farbey
11. Thomas M. Aldous
12. Char James-Tanny
13. Sharon Burton
14. Larry Kunz
15. Matt Sullivan
16. Arnold Burian
17. Rahel Anne Bailie
18. STC Summit
19. Scriptorium
20. Michelle Sander
21. Jack Molisani
22. Tech Comms
23. Ivan Walsh
24. Ben Woelk
25. Ankur Jain

Now go check out the full list of the top 100 influencers in #techcomm. Because we want to make your life easier, we’ve also compiled a Twitter list so you can follow all of these amazing folks with one click.

Are you on our influencer list? Congratulations, here’s your badge! You’ve earned it for your work in pushing the edges of your field. You’re an innovator who’s elevating and promoting your field. Thank you. Grab the code below and display your badge with pride. You’re in excellent company.

You can use this snippet to add your badge to your website or blog:

<a href="http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/2013/04/04/2013-influencers-in-techcomm" title="MindTouch Most Influential Techcomm"><img src="http://cdn.mindtouch.com/www/techcomm.png" alt="Most Influential Techcomm" border="0" ></a>

Check back to find out who made the list of top 100 influencers in content strategy, customer experience, and knowledge management, or follow us on Twitter to find out right away when we post the next list.

“Content is king.”

“Embrace your user community.”

These are a few of the many key phrases that continually crop up in conversations about customer engagement and they’re clearly very important. Trouble is, they define the why these concepts are necessary but fall short tackling the question of how to make it happen. Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research, Inc, has some answers.

Wang acknowledges that the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty high when it comes to engagement. He says that to be effective, companies need use multiple channels to identify customers, figure out what motivates them, gain acceptance, establish credibility, hold their attention, and keep them coming back for more — all without creating what he calls “channel fatigue.” That’s a tall order to fill from a very small window of opportunity.

Worry not, fearless business owners. Wang has come up with a scaffold of nine engagement strategies you can build around your company’s customer outreach plan to strengthen your market position and let customers know you’re listening.

Wang outlined his key concepts during a Software Advice video interview at the 2013 SXSW Interactive Festival. His discussion, “Building Your Interaction Strategy with the 9 C’s of Engagement,” takes a hard look at what components are necessary to create a three-pronged strategic approach of people-centric values, delivery styles, and right-time action designed to get results. We encourage you to watch the short video for a clear understanding of how Wang’s action plan works.

Take special note of the “Currency” component, where he share some terrific ideas on non-monetary customer engagement and why it’s important. Here’s a sneak peek from Wang’s guest post over at Harvard Business Review:

The last piece is choosing the right time drivers to provide a why, when, and where in engagement. The goal is to inspire action through context, catalysts, and currencies…. [C]urrencies influence behavior through an exchange of value. Monetary models include traditional cash, bonuses, rewards, and rebates, but non-monetary currencies such as virtual goods, recognition, access, and influence can often be more powerful.

Intangible currencies like recognition and “influencer status” can be enormously motivating to customers. Indeed, entire business models are built around the idea. Fortunately, in-house systems to support up-voting or other methods of highlighting accurate, helpful user-generated content are easy to implement.

An amazing customer experience strategy is no longer just a goal in a dusty mission statement or something that just passively happens while you’re off building the next version of your product. Use Wang’s “9 C’s of Engagement” as a blueprint for taking charge of your customer interaction and making it awesome.

Image: InfoMoFo

Based on customer feedback, MindTouch has made sweeping changes to user and group management that makes the experience easier and faster.  

Managing Users 

Administrators now have the ability to filter users live by the following attributes:

• Status (Active/Inactive)
• User Type
• User Role
• Group Membership

In addition, options for editing users such as adding to a group or deactivating a user will show up when a user is selected.

For more information read the administrator guide. Reading about support for Active Directory/LDAP and single-sign-on might also be of interest to you.

SAN DIEGO, CA. March 28, 2013— MindTouch, today announced a new product experience software application that provides web-based self help, knowledge-as-a-service, user driven machine learning optimization and dynamic content organization with conditional and personalization capabilities.

“What we hear repeatedly is companies want to make the customer experience proactive, not reactive,” said Aaron Fulkerson, founder and CEO of MindTouch.

MindTouch, the company that applies web, social and mobile software innovations to product help, serves a range of Fortune 1000 enterprises and small-to-medium enterprises with software to power product help experiences as a strategic initiative to improve customer support, customer retention programs, inform product strategy and become increasingly effective with content strategy.

“With contextual and personalized product knowledge plugged into all customer channels, you make advocates out of your customers well in advance of them needing reactive help to a specific problem.  We believe MindTouch is the first company to offer product experience software. This is about a proactive customer success experience that stops customer problems before they occur.”

Introducing the MindTouch LightSpeed Content FrameworkThis new MindTouch cloud-based software includes a web based self-service help center, in-product contextual help system, seamless integration with CRM and case management software like Salesforce, SAP OnDemand and Zendesk and with it come powerful performance enhancing features:

With the launch of this MindTouch platform comes the LightSpeed Content Framework, an ultra fast and easy to use, specialized content framework.  Delivering multi-channel product help is now easier, faster and more effective than ever before. Content can be collaboratively authored in a web-based environment that allows subject matter experts from across the organization, or even external partners and customers, to contribute their knowledge seamlessly and rapidly without having to become experts in using an authoring tool. What is more, content within LightSpeed is dynamically organized to maximize discovery. For example, readers can browse linearly, across topics and are presented related knowledge paths to accelerate understanding.

Launching MindTouch HelpRank

MindTouch HelpRank is a collection of new proprietary algorithms that continuously optimize the customer help experience. By analyzing end user and support agent behavior across all customer channels, MindTouch HelpRank dramatically and continuously improves both search results as well as the organization of knowledge within the LightSpeed framework.

Now, for the first time, companies are able to quickly detect trends in customer support, help content, product experience and customer lifecycle and react immediately across all customer channels to improve customer experience.

Industry Perspectives On Growing Importance of Self Service Customer and Product Experience:

• Growing importance of proactive customer care: 29% of enterprises are currently investing in proactive outbound communications according to the Forrsights Networks And Telecommunications Survey. In its recent report “Customers Expect Proactive Outbound Communication,” Forrester’s Kate Leggett wrote, “We predict that the range of channels for proactive outbound will increase, and will include service alerts, workarounds, customized cross-sell and upsell offers, and new knowledge base content.”
• Customer Impatience: 71% of customers require help within five minutes (nearly a third demand help immediately) states the LivePerson survey of more than 5,700 consumers in 6 western countries, which then goes on to show that 48% of these survey respondents said if they don’t receive help within 5 minutes, they abandon the web site.
• Revenue and economic impact: US enterprises lose an estimated $83 billion each year, reports folono, due to poor customer experience resulting in defections and abandoned purchases.
• Corporate costs of poor social help: A survey of more than 1,400 customer care executives by CustomerServiceInTheCloud.com (a community of customer experience professionals) found that when social help fails, 40% of customers pick up a phone and call a company which costs $15 per call; 15% of customers go to an online chat session which costs $5 and 17% of customers send an email which costs $3.

Additional MindTouch Materials

• Using Knowledge-as-a-Service for Proactive Support: offers insights into a proactive support program by MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson.
• Salesforce.com and MindTouch Announce Partnership:This video between MindTouch and Salesforce in the Fall of 2012 talks about how the two companies will work together to integrate products and the value that integration will bring to Salesforce customers.

About MindTouch

MindTouch is revolutionizing the way companies deliver help and product content by applying a decade of innovation from web and social software to make customer support faster, easier and more satisfying. With MindTouch, consumers and support agents get the right answers faster. Collaboratively author or convert existing technical, help and product content into a two-way communication channel that increases self-service support, agent effectiveness and customer happiness. As a cloud delivered product, MindTouch can be deployed in a day and begin delivering value that same week. Millions use MindTouch every day. Great companies like SuccessFactors, Intuit, Paypal, Autodesk, Hewlett-Packard, Palm, HTC, RSA, SAP and EMC rely on MindTouch. Read more at www.MindTouch.com.

Contact:
For MindTouch:
Bret Clement
Clement Communications
303.462.3057
bret.clement AT clementcom.com

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged at MindTouch.com. As I start to write this I find myself a bit giddy. Sure, in part because of what I’m about to share, but primarily because I really miss writing for the MindTouch community. I’m scheduling some time every week to get a post out right now…

…Ok done.

Now about 2012, we crushed it. Here’s how:

• we more than doubled our customers on MindTouch Cloud and
• we increased sales by 450%.

For calendar Q1, 2013 MindTouch has grown by ~30% putting us on track for ~300% growth in 2013. Q1 is typically our slowest quarter though #justSaying.

Some of the new big names we added as customers in 2012 (off the top of my head) included: Blackboard.com, SuccessFactors, HTC (announcment with all the exciting details due out  in April), Wind River, Citrix, XRS Corp, Gensler, RSA, Paypal Germany, Wolters-Kluer, Rogers Communication and Hewlet-Packard. I’ll throw in Zuora as a bonus too because I love those guys.

What do I attribute our growth to? Well, I’m glad you asked. We’re solving a hard problem for our customers and MindTouch does this in a very differentiated way. We’re helping our customers deliver an awesome Product Experience by helping their users receive proactive support across all customer channels. Here’s a nice overview that will help you understand this with more detail: http://mndt.ch/2brief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Bernat

Now, take a good look at it. If you’re like most businesses, your org chart is a pretty standard affair. Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support all have their nice linear slots, with everyone reporting to the CEO at the end of the day. Marketing shepherds your brand around the industry space while the sales team runs around gathering customers. Sales hands off new customers to Support to field post-purchase issues, and so the cycle goes.

That’s a perfectly respectable business strategy but is it the best option? Maybe not. The giant, gaping hole in this inherently reactionary process is that it doesn’t factor in customer experience. Marketing keeps busy behind the scenes building brand awareness and getting eyeballs on your product. Sales teams establish preliminary relationships with potential users but until those users become actual customers, they’re not basking in the glow of a brilliant product support experience. Support teams are fantastic for responding to user issues, but they’re not in the best position to proactively teach your users to become product experts in their own right.

Let’s dust off that organizational chart and look at who’s ideally suited to oversee a grand customer experience: The sales team. Think about it. Sales is in a great spot to help train customers to become their own product experts and position it as an additional selling point. Sales can pre-emptively show users how to get the the right answers with a minimum of hassle instead of simply handing over a toll-free number for the help desk after closing the sale. After all, if you’ve spent a bunch of time and money creating an exceptional product help system, you want people to use it.  Given a choice between diving into phone-tree hell that’s rife with bad hold music and knowing where to grab answers for themselves, which option do you think your customers want?

Getting Sales involved the customer experience doesn’t detract from the valuable input Support and Marketing brings to the table, it enhances it. Support personnel are a bottomless well of product knowledge and the marketing department knows how to capture a customer’s attention. Sales is the ribbon that ties it all together.

If you need more incentive to let the sales team lead the charge toward outstanding customer experience, consider the positive impact it can have on your revenue stream. Christine Crandall, President of New Business Strategies, says sharing the customer experience workload might seem unfair, but an all-hands-on-deck approach is critical to keeping users happy.

“Marketing should share responsibility for revenues and customer experience, but in a recent Eloqua  whitepaper only nine percent of marketers surveyed felt customer experience was the most important measurement of their ROI… Maybe Support should take more responsibility for customer’s lifetime experience, but that department is usually staffed with technical, rather than business, experts and measured on the speed of ‘one-and-done’ instead of persistent satisfaction and engagement.
“So it falls to you Sales. Whether you like it or not, to deliver on the revenue targets you’re beholden to. You’ll need to lead the entire organization to a customer-centric approach; sponsor research on the buyer’s journey, use your customer relationships to understand how the definition of value evolves over time, get the rest of your peers to change their ways to consistently deliver that value, and transform your own cold-callers into relationship stewards.”

If the thought of an org chart sea change terrifies you, start small. Come up with one or two ways Sales can tackle an aspect of your customer experience strategy and test the waters. The worst case scenario is you’ll need to retool ideas until you figure out what works right. The best case scenario is that you’ll have happy, loyal customers who love your product and the way you support it.

Image: cliff1066™

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

Let’s run some numbers

Whether you visit this blog as a CEO, small business owner, MindTouch customer, tech journalist, customer service manager, or you’re just killing time until your dentist appointment, we all have one thing in common. We’re all consumers of something. To that end, we know you’ll nod your head in agreement with some data points we’re about to throw your way.

While discussing the operational details of providing an optimal customer service strategy, Forrester Analyst Kate Leggett crunches some important data:

“Sixty-six percent of customers agree that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide good service. Forty-five percent of US online adults will abandon their online purchase if they can’t find a quick answer to their question.

Why is it so important to deliver on customer expectations?  Customer satisfaction correlates to customer loyalty, and loyalty has economic benefits. Forrester calculates that a 10-percentage-point improvement in a company’s customer experience score can translate into more than $1 billion in revenue. Conversely, poor customer experiences are costly: Our data shows that 75% of consumers move to another channel when online service fails, which can incur a cost of many millions of dollars.”

That’s right, 75 percent of consumers will bail on you if your online customer service isn’t up to snuff. That’s an insanely high number but we’ll bet most readers are thinking right now about how fast they left a company because of a bad customer experience. You may think you can’t afford to worry about the nuances of a good customer experience strategy but, can you afford not to? Are you willing to risk losing 75 percent of your customers over something preventable? Spend some time thinking about these concepts after you leave the dentist.

Caught on video

Savvy business owners know that single-sheet paper documentation or a general support email address buried in a website no longer cuts it as a means to providing outstanding customer service. Many companies now employ an integrated help system with multiple points of entry via online product documentation, continuously updated knowledge bases, and robust ticketing systems. That’s a lot of ways to offer automated self-help. Can you think of more?

1to1Media’s Cynthia Clark says video is the next rising star in the self-service product help arena.

“The benefits of video extend beyond its ability to show customers what they need to do to address their issues, but its availability around the clock means that customers can access the information at anytime they want and at a lower cost, even when a contact center might be closed. [Invodo CEO Craig] Wax notes that while video can be beneficial for all self-service situations, it is particularly effective to address complex issues or ones that involve detailed instructions through visuals.”

Given the popularity of YouTube, vlogging, and other forms of video content, this is a pretty safe conclusion to draw. It’s not a sparkling new idea, though. E-commerce industry experts have been making this case for years and Gerrard Dennis, managing director of TheSimplyGroup.com, has one of the best arguments we know of about the  importance of including video in your product documentation. Commenting on how videos increased sales by 25 percent and cut down substantially on return rates, Dennis tells Econsultancy:

“The key here is that, along with all the other information on the products pages, these videos answer all the questions which customers may have about products, bringing it closer to the in-store experience. In fact, Gerrard argues that this can be better than the in store experience, since ‘you get the most knowledgable member of staff each time, not just the Saturday guy.’”

Take another look at that last remark. Consumers “get the most knowledgeable member of staff each time,” not just a random person who happens to be in a position to answer customer questions. Customer service doesn’t get much more proactive than this, folks. Anticipate what people want to know and have answers ready when they’re looking for them. Whether you produce them in-house or contract out the work to a specialty agency, there’s no denying video tutorials are the next wave. Catch it, ride it.

Maybe we like Whack-A-Mole

Awesome customer interaction isn’t limited to just providing speedy answers or detailed product help. Sometimes its the little things that count. Amazon built a subtle but amazingly effective touch into its drop down menu functionality that makes navigating its site a smooth, delay-free experience. Ben Kamens, lead developer at Kahn Academy, drills down into the predictive technology behind interactive Amazon’s menu feature and why “to-delay-or-not-to-delay” is an important consideration from a consumer standpoint:

“You need that, because otherwise when you try to move your mouse from the main menu to the submenu, the submenu will disappear out from under you like some sort of sick, unwinnable game of whack-a-mole.”

We spend a lot of time here talking about optimizing the customer experience by being proactive and making sure you delight your customers every single time they come in contact with you. This little gem of a detail Kamens unearthed is a great example of how the smallest change on your website can mean better engagement of your customer. Putting this idea to practical use, if part of your product documentation involves lots of drop down menus requiring users to click around for information, take a page from Amazon and give some thought to whether that process is as smooth as it can be. [via Mashable]

 Image: jeff_kontur

Under the new program, Cloud Platform customers can choose from four tiers that range in price from free to $400/month or more. The free option gets you the bare minimum — online documentation, community forum access, and answers to billing questions. The next two levels add direct access to the support team via email or phone for an additional charge. Top level support offers “direct access to the Technical Account Management team” for even more coin.

Okay, wait. $400 a month just to get someone on the phone? To be fair, that also includes consultations with the Google team about application development or best practices for your specific needs, but still, 400 bucks a bit steep just to get some questions answered.

We get that a company the size and scope of Google needs to limit direct access to its customer support team through the use of paid support models or they’d be so slammed with trouble tickets they’d never get anything done. However, unless you’re as huge as Google and have a quadrillion people using your product, consider theirs a cautionary tale on how not to support your customers.

Your company’s most basic support options should already include access to online documentation, a knowledge base, and authoritative content that encourages users to become product experts in their own right. If they’ve paid for your product, then you’re also on the hook to provide a quality support team to answer questions and offer advice. That may seem like a daunting (and potentially expensive) investment for small or medium-sized businesses, but it doesn’t have to be. Lean in close and we’ll tell you why.

Responding to customer issues costs a lot more than preventing them in the first place.

If you’re product support environment is pro-active, you won’t need a cadre of support staff working phone banks and trouble tickets around the clock to serve your customers when they run into issues. Make product information available through great online documentation and a living knowledge base that’s associated with smart and useful content on your website. If you’re a software provider, product help can even be woven right into the app itself. Give users the answers they need, when and where they need them (hint: support@yourcompany.com isn’t good enough). Create a product support structure that lets customers serve themselves and you’ll help yourself in the long run.

No product or service is 100% issue free so, yes, you want customers to be able to contact you directly with questions. They’ll be much happier, though, when getting tangled up in a phone tree or ticketing system is the last resort instead of the first. As a bonus, you’ll free up human and financial resources that can be diverted to development, marketing, research, and all the other components that keep your business running.

By preventing customer confusion you are delighting your customers. You are making your products more competitive, your brand more valuable, and your customers happy. Happy customers are fiercely loyal and love to talk about you to friends and colleagues. Prevention needs to be a huge part of your customer experience strategy because it lowers your costs and increases your revenues.

Due in part to its enormous customer base, Google can get away with charging Cloud Platform customers upwards of $4,800 per year to its customers for the luxury of a phone call, but most of us can’t. The good news is, we don’t need to. Today’s customers want instant, useful, and correct answers that don’t take three hours, nine phone calls, a pocket full of money, or a blizzard of emails to find. Why not make it easy for them? An ounce of customer confusion prevention is worth a pound of trouble support cure.

Image: setev

Big Data, Big Insight

If you want to outrank other businesses in your industry, consumer strategy consultant Mark Ratekin says you’d better pay attention to big data. He defines the newest catchphrase as “the collection and synchronization of disparate data sources with the intent of having a more holistic view of a system and its component parts.” Ratekin urges companies to crunch numbers as if their very lives depend on it — because that’s probably the case. He offers several observations, including these prescient points:

• Having a mechanism and process by which we can understand the inter-relationships of various data provides greater opportunities – and more imperative – to take a more action-oriented analytic approach. Stated differently – analyses that do not focus on action (and business outcomes) will have little value in organizations.
• The complexity of the data systems will require that customer strategists be skilled (or at least conversant) in the theory of data structures.
• As the volume of transactional data grows, the opportunity (and demand) for sophisticated longitudinal analysis and/or complex predictive analytics will increase. Customer strategists will need to be not only more data-savvy, but also will need to be more skilled in the use of complex predictive analytics.

One of the deepest analytical data wells you can mine lies right inside your company’s content. Behavior and curation analytics take a look at how your customers interact with your support team, documentation, and knowledge base for insightful information on what’s working and what needs improvement.

When you’re looking over your users’ shoulders though analytics, you’ll begin to understand how they relate to your product and gain a better understanding of what you can do to provide them even greater value. There’s a lot of buzz right now about big data and new ways to collect it, but don’t overlook what’s already right under your nose.

The Geniuses at BMW

Following the example of other luxury car makers, BMW is soft-launching a new program aimed at offering face-to-face customer service right in the showroom. The “BMW Genius Everywhere” pilot puts iPads into the hands of employees specifically trained as vehicle specialists. The Geniuses aren’t salespeople and aren’t expected to close a deal. Rather, they’ll roam the showroom as “product explainers” and be ready to troubleshoot or answer questions on the spot.

Ian Robertson, BMW board member for sales and marketing told AdAge.com the move is in response the company’s increased understanding that customers want pre- or post-purchase answers which don’t typically fall under the purview of a salesperson.

“The salesman has a complicated job…He has to understand product, he has to be trained and he has to understand financial services. And honestly, it has probably gotten a little too broad. One of the things we considered very carefully: Can we break the process up into bite-size chunks?”

The Genius program is part of a larger customer support initiative expected to take shape later this year. It’s focus is to make the vehicles as user-friendly as possible because as one BMW exec notes, “We engineer a lot of things into the car that are difficult to explain.”

This is a really great approach to customer support and a terrific way to provide an outstanding customer experience with one of the lowest barriers of entry possible. Apple may be a pioneer in the “genius” approach but it’s wonderful to see other companies take a page from their playbook. iPad-wielding specialists may not be right for your business so what off-the-beaten-path methods are you using to help your customers find the answers they’re looking for?

Breaking the Barriers

Nick Milton, founder and director of knowledge management (KM) consulting firm Knoco, agrees with the premise of an MIT Sloan Management Review article on How to Build Collaborative Advantage [PDF]. Its authors assert there are four barriers to KM that affect everyone in a product’s ecosystem from suppliers to users, all of which Milton says can be overcome.  The dichotomy of two barriers in particular stand out:

The unable supplier suffers from the Stranger problem – “I don’t know who to share this with”. This can be tackled through developing a Pull-based approach, so that they share by answering  the questions of an individual or team (through community forums, or peer assist), or by using the concept of the “Unknown User” – the psychological construct that we can bring into retrospects and after action reviews.

The unable user suffers from “needle in a haystack” – they don’t know where to look. Here we need the knowledge assets, that synthesized knowledge that creates the faucet rather than the firehose. We need the expertise locator. We need good search, and we need the places to ask – the community forums described above.

On the one hand, you have a supplier with a wealth of knowledge and nowhere to put it. On the other, you have a user looking for knowledge and nowhere to find it. This was a very real issue when MIT released this paper back in 2004, but there are all kinds of options available today that now pull down these barriers with ease.

Traditional knowledge management systems didn’t allow for collaboration the way today’s solutions do. KM used to be a fairly one-dimensional affair for both the user and supplier, and rarely the twain shall meet. This has been particularly true in the software industry but the proliferation of software-as-a-service has changed all that. Now its possible and even desirable to ensure KM is both collaborative and constantly updated across all support channels.

Check out Milton’s post to learn more about all four barriers to knowledge management, then scan the MIT article to see how far the KM industry has come in less than a decade.

Image: whisperwolf 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Are You in the 91% or 37%? (Be honest, we won’t tell.)

There was a lot of chatter this week over Oracle’s recently released customer experience report. The takeaway message is that failing to provide a good CX will injure your company’s bottom line. (But you knew that.) The results of this study make it pretty clear that although most businesses (91 percent!) want to provide an optimal customer experience, few actually execute strategies to make that happen. In fact, a surprisingly high number of companies (37 percent!) are only just now getting their acts together to implement a CX plan.

Bran Curran, VP, Customer Experience Strategy for Oracle told CMSwire:

“It’s shocking how many companies said they haven’t gotten formal customer experience programs… A brand should engage when a customer asks about a product. This means companies should do things like monitor product communities and customer commentary on social networks, as well as engage customers when they ask a question on a company’s official website.”

Notice Curran says companies should engage customers when and wherever they’re talking about your product. That “wherever” ought to be primarily arenas you’ve created with amazing authoritative content. Put reliable, useful, easy-to-find documentation out there and customers will come to you first for the information they need. Then you can keep on engaging them ad infintium.That sure beats spending all day combing through obscure forums and Twitter hashtags, right?

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Speaking of customer experience, apparently the banking industry is considering ways to incorporate gamification into its user support strategy. The idea hasn’t made a lot of headway in the U.S. yet, but it’s making a big splash in other countries. Banktech’s Jonathan Camhi says:

U.S. banks may have been slower to adopt gamification so far because they have a more cautious attitude toward digital interaction with their customers, says Stessa Cohen, research director at Gartner, an analyst firm. “U.S. banks are a little more reticent. Look at how they use Facebook. They use it to push info; they don’t engage [with customers],” she points out. But Cohen predicts that banks here will have to take a serious look at gamification and how banks in other countries are using games as they try to outdo each other in digital customer experience. “I think we will definitely see more banks incorporating gamification. The focus [U.S.] banks are putting on customer experience will definitely take them there,” she says.

Whether gamification is appropriate for your product depends on several factors, including user demographics, your business objectives, and whether you’re able to provide incentives customers actually want. Think carefully before adopting this strategy because some people really hate it.

Can You Hear Them Now?

Are you talking to your customers, or at them? To be the authoritative voice in your industry means listening to your users and, equally as important, responding to them. A stellar content strategy means being ready to talk to customers about what concerns them right now, not simply telling them what you think they need to know. Sure, users must be able to access fantastic documentation, but they also want a rapport with their product or service provider that let’s them know the company is proactively listening.

Digital agency Firstborn’s Alex Krawitz and Eugene Chung say getting good at agile content development helps you meet this goal.

“Agile means using real-time interactions and behavior monitoring to drive a more agile approach to creating and deploying branded content focused around the consumer. It seems obvious now that any effective approach to content has to put the consumer at the center and must be able to adapt based on cultural trends and consumer insights.”

Are your content creators agile? Can they twist-and-pivot as the customer culture and climate dictate? The article is filled with terrific tips and real-world examples of companies who use this approach with great results. (We’re not entirely convinced that “figital” is a word, though.)

Image: Toms Bauģis

Atwood maintains the quality of community management software that corrals these conversations is so abysmal that business are often forced to cobble together solutions from their existing customer support software. The problem, he says,  is that “customer support isn’t the same as community.”

There’s a kernel of truth in that statement, but when you have users who want to help then it’s important to let them — and not just to stroke their ego in the hope of building consumer loyalty. Part of the reasoning behind opening up documentation to the community is the idea that the community is smarter than the company. Don’t be afraid to mine golden input from people who are knee-deep in your product because, after all, this kind of collaboration has a pretty well-proven track record.

While crowdsourcing may be the goal, forums aren’t the way to get there. As Atwood perceptively points out, community-provided support can become a quagmire of obscurity that makes it difficult to find relevant answers quickly:

“At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers….Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already.”

Agreed. But, now, let’s be honest. The only thing more infuriating than having to wade through a metric ton of irrelevant chatter to find an answer is finding out the answer you finally come up with is wrong.

This is why authoritative content is your friend. Actually, authoritative content is your best friend. You should really think about marrying authoritative content. Historically, forums were a necessary evil born from a lack of good tech options for providing online user documentation. That’s not an excuse anymore. Now you can, and must, get the right answers to your customers exactly when they need them, and get it right the first time.

If there’s a lot of chatter and discussion surrounding your documentation then, guess what? You’re not providing a quality help experience. Forums, discussion groups, support tickets, help desks — those should be last ditch options for your users, not a first line of defense.

I think we can all pretty much agree with Atwood that forums are the dark matter of the web. Do you really want that to reflect your brand? Doubtful, especially when all the tools (software solutions) and resources (help agents, developers, consumers) for better help options are right at your fingertips.

In case you’re tempted to ignore the notion that users might someday turn to each other for troubleshooting tips or anecdata, we have some news for you. They’re already doing it. Let’s kick around some statistics from a survey conducted last year:

• 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.

• 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.

Is your first reaction, “Hey, great! Let users help users, that’s one less thing we have to worry about. Now we can focus on putting together a 350-page how-to manual for our site instead”?

Oh, that’s probably not a good plan.

The trick to finding a good balance between encouraging community participation and ignoring it altogether lies in using tools that continually harness the good bits of crowdsourcing. You want a solution that allows users to offer assistance while still retaining control over the moderation process so the signal to noise ratio Atwood refers to doesn’t get out of hand. Authoritative content is what keeps users from a having bad help experience and ultimately abandoning your product. Even kittens like it.

Get out on the playing field with your customers and be ready to referee when necessary. Give them the answers they want, the first time they go looking. Today’s consumers want to be engaged throughout the lifetime of their association with your product, not just until they’ve made their buying decision. Customer support may not be exactly the same as community, but that’s sure where it begins.

Image: Jack Amick

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

GeniusRocket CEO on the importance of crowdsourcing:

Peter LaMotte announced this week he is stepping down as CEO of GeniusRocket to take over Digital Practice for communication firm Levick. LaMotte, widely regarded as crowdsourcing leader, says he learned plenty about crowdsourcing during his time with GeniusRocket. In particular, “there are far more industries that can benefit from [it] than those that can’t.”

LaMotte cautions businesses against saturating a project with so many voices that the signal-to-noise ratio becomes unhelpful:

“I will be the first to say I am biased. But this idea using crowdsourcing as the infinite monkey theorem is wrong. You don’t need a hundred monkeys on typewriters, you need a dozen really smart monkeys that have been trained to use typewriters. Ok, maybe I’m getting a little too fancy for my own good. The point is, don’t waste your time with participants that don’t understand or have the capacity to solve a problem, find people to work on a crowdsourcing project that have some measurable level of skill. It saves everyone time and effort. This was the basis of curated crowdsourcing and I still stand by its value.”

Overlook analytics at your own peril:

We talk a lot about the importance of crowdsourcing and multi-channel engagement, but let’s not forget the role analytics play in a good customer experience. Don Keane, VP of marketing and product strategy for Angel, says crunching customer-interaction stats is a critical component of a good help system:

“In 2012, businesses began to realize the value of real-time, actionable reporting and analytics to better understand their customer interactions and understand where and how customers are choosing to connect to their business. In 2013, I expect more and more businesses will want to see the data behind their interactions with customers in order to measure results and make improvements.”

One great thing about emerging customer-engagement technologies is how much easier it is to get into the minds of the people using your product or service. If you’re trying to think of ways to access analytics and gain a competitive edge in your industry, we have a few ideas.

Banking on social engagement:

We’ve noted previously how forward-thinking companies are beginning to understand how deploying social help systems reduce customer churn and increase revenue with existing customers. In that vein, MindTouch client Intuit had a busy week. It acquired social payment startup Payvment and detailed plans for more than 20 new products launching in the coming months. Company CTO Brad Smith told Techcrunch:

“Social is huge for us,” said Smith. “We are looking at trends and how they will shift in the next 10 years and how companies will operate. And what we’ve found is that we no longer want to be consumers. We want to be participants: we choose what we want so we have to make our products configurable from actions to interactions. When you have 60 million customers who can share their wisdom, it can help power people as individuals.”

Intuit is a great example of a company that used to social engagement to become a leader in the personal finance industry. It will be interesting to watch where they head in the coming years as spending and investment habits change with the economy.

Social business is alive and kicking:

Enterprise software analyst  Michael Fauscette ponders the timely question, “Is Social Business Dead?” and concludes that nothing could be farther from the truth:

“Why is social business so compelling and why is there an irresistible force pushing businesses down this path? There are several forces at work that create pressure to change. Fundamentally though, the Internet, or more specifically the hyper-connectivity it provides, is at the bottom of all of this. The Internet opens up new economic / business models, it changes the pace of competition, it globalizes the local, it redefines the term “relationship”, it provides an open, democratized publishing platform, it offers a new way of consuming technology (cloud / everything as a service) and redefines influence. Layer on top of that the proliferation of smart mobile devices that creates an always on / always connected society with the capability to leapfrog infrastructure and remove technology barriers, even in emerging economies. Finally add in the explosion of data and the growth of systems of decision that can take that data and make sense out of it, in support of real time, rapid business decision making.”

Fauscette nails exactly why social business has exploded and why it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Be sure to check out the rest of his terrific post to learn what strategies companies need to be thinking about if they plan to make the most of this exciting proliferation of opportunities.

Image: Chapendra

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