Sunday, October 7, 2012

Giving Customers What They Want: Integrating Content in the Customer Lifecycle

Naz Urbina found himself a back-to-back talk, this one with more of a tech comm focus.

Tech comm isn't about manuals, single sourcing, or even content. It's about transferring contextually relevant product knowledge to staff and customers. This increases customer satisfaction and increases business.

The notion is customer lifecycle. A lifecycle is both cyclical and evolutionary, not linear.

More and more in the software world, getting asked for embedded user assistance.

Rather than have one large system, can have web content management system, component content management system, and document management system, as long as they all communicate with each other.  All province metadata, search, etc. If you call things consistently within all 3 systems, they can integrate.

The benefits of embedded user assistance. It doesn't break user context; it's within the experience. It's fast. It's a learning tool. That learning is both for the user and for you. Analytics can tell you what content users use.

The customer does not care about your org chart.

How do you get where you want to go? Map the customer journey. Map the content model and assets to that journey. Do a gap analysis. Build a modular model to bridge the gaps. And then build a cross-silo strategy to fill the information architecture and taxonomy standards and process.

Content strategy has to be driven by user and task analysis.

You can't assume that the content being dynamically delivered is good. You still have to check, to make sure the content is accurate at the point of use.


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