I’ll admit that sometimes us Tech Writers think we’re the unsung customer heroes within organizations. That we’re the only ones who truly care about what users actually need.
In reality, there is so much we can learn from our peers across functions about how to deliver value to customers. There is one function, in particular, that has the most to gain or lose when it comes to creating value for customers. I’m talking about Sales, of course!
In a sales-oriented post by Wilson J. Pang, he describes the difference between a nice-to-have vs. must-have product. Naturally, must-have products are much easier to sell.
Does this mean that it is impossible to sell something that is nice-to-have?
Absolutely not. Matter of fact, you can turn ANY nice-to-have product into a must have by selling its benefits.
Technical communicators are experts at transforming jargon-heavy or complicated material into clear and concise content. The problem is that it is easy to stop there when our job isn’t done yet.
Yes, we have to document functionality. However, the subscription economy requires us to encourage product adoption every chance we get. To help our customers the most, and in a way that simultaneously helps our clients or companies (and therefore paychecks), we must orient our perspective based on user needs.
I’ve learned that fear (or concern, worry, anxiety, etc.) and excitement (or eagerness, fulfillment, joy, etc.) can often co-exist for the same event or circumstances at the same time. I try to leave room for both experiences to be true at the same time.
The future of TechComm will involve writing for humans and machines. Mark Baker began talking about ‘Every Page is Page One’ in 2011. His tenet was transformative and remains relevant. But now TechComm strategy needs to evolve even further to support content extensibility across increasingly dynamic touchpoints.
Any content snippet will need to be able to perform in a variety of ways, many of which we cannot even anticipate. How will our writing, in terms of both structure and word choice, need to adapt?
This post is based on my presentation at STC Summit 2019, the annual conference of the Society for Technical Communication (STC), and incorporates takeaways from Alan Porter and John Bowie.Featured Image credit: Stéphanie Walter.
Customer interactions are becoming synonymous with content interactions. Today, content must be available for more than single-channel troubleshooting, documentation, training, or lead generation. All content must be available across all touchpoints to satisfy user intent at every stage of the customer journey.
But all too often, organizational divisions and siloed knowledge lead to different teams who publish different types of content in different channels.
Spoiler alert: Your customers don’t care.
Invert your perspective to outside-in
Do you care about your customers and incorporate their perspective into your strategy? Your answer is likely an emphatic YES, as it should be! However, that’s not enough to create and sustain an optimal customer experience. Committing to an outside-in approach means prioritizing customer value over what seems best for business (or your team) now.
When it comes to content experience, outside-in perspective means challenging the status quo of how you create and deliver content.
It’s time to evolve to a mature content experience that puts customer value first. What does that look like? The answer is complex in terms of the many variables involved, but simple to describe in terms of what it looks like in practice.
A mature content experience has two main components:
Seamless content delivery – customers can access the exact information they need in whichever channel they are interacting.
Feedback loop to business objectives – all content interactions are correlated to desired outcomes or analyzed for actionable insights to improve products or services.
15% support interactions will be handled via artificial intelligence by 2021 – a 400% increase from 2017
85% support interactions will start with self-service by 2022 – up from 48% in 2018
Both technology and human-controlled processes will need to improve to accommodate these interactions. On the technology side, artificial intelligence and machine learning are already getting incorporated into your tools to automate engagement.
The harder change to make will be, as Gartner recommends, to distribute consistent knowledge across all self-service and assisted channels. Consistent knowledge delivery will be a challenge to achieve because it requires people and process alignment. So we need to start the tough work now to get our content ready for the technology already en route.
Does your content pass the water test? For consistent knowledge distribution, your content needs to be able to adapt into any channel or device just like water can take the shape of any container.
Two of the most important “containers” on the path to ubiquity are conversational user interfaces (chatbots) and voice assistants (smart speakers). These mechanisms need the same content to be delivered with quite different formats—most significantly, either with or without a visual user interface.We must prioritize the experience of the people interacting with these devices to help them get the information they need.
The future of content during this Industry 4.0 era requires certain characteristics identified by the Information 4.0 Consortium:
Molecular
Dynamic
Ubiquitous
Independent
Spontaneous
Offered
Profiled
Incorporate Information 4.0 characteristics for your content to work best for chatbots, smart speakers, and the all-important humans. Approach knowledge as microcontent snippets that are fluid enough for all touchpoints.
While you tackle the challenge to align your teams and processes around user-focused content strategy, ensure that alignment is directly connected to your business objectives.
Content measures to consider:
Conversions – when a user completes desired goals. Identify both your micro conversions (smaller value interactions moving towards a goal) and macro conversions (completed transactions or interactions of monetary value). Measure where and how your content fits into your conversion landscape.
Leading and lagging indicators – measures of activities around content delivery (leading) and the outcomes of content interactions (lagging). Correlate the relationship between indicators to determine which leading indicators are most important to focus on (and act on) to achieve the desired lagging indicators for your business objectives.
Content measures to be wary of:
Vanity Metrics – easy-to-measure (and manipulate) data that doesn’t necessarily correlate to anything meaningful. For new web-based content, perhaps after you upgrade your dated PDF outputs, these metrics can be a good place to start measuring. But repeatedly showcasing page views, sessions, bounce rate, or time on page without correlating to value-based outcomes (like conversions and lagging indicators!) does not provide any actionable insights to improve.
After you become a pro at measuring all the right things, look for actionable insights to improve your products or services. As John Bowie of Edmentum called out in his presentation:
You can’t write your way out of a problem you designed yourself into.
Your customers give you invaluable information about what they want when they interact with your content, which includes their search queries. Evaluate content interactions through the lens of data-driven optimization to ensure a feedback loop to the organization.
Find opportunities to improve in a way that reduces customer effort, which may even eliminate the need for some of your content. This highlights why vanity metrics on their own can be unhelpful or even misleading. More content interactions do not always equal better experiences!
If you are responsible for any type of content in your organization, be prepared to disrupt your own methods to achieve a blended content experience that’s best for your users.
Connect to your customers with knowledge
Content professionals have an opportunity to provide more value to customers than ever before, but it takes enterprise-wide collaboration to execute properly.
Their self-service journey cannot happen successfully without your focus on next-gen knowledge management.
Question: What’s the most important leadership lesson you’ve learned and how is it valuable?
Answer: Identify gaps or needs that you can help solve for and keep your focus there, rather than wasting energy on things you cannot control.
I was happy to see this theme repeated on a recent LinkedIn post comment from David Herder on a post by Tom Johnson:
“As a professional in technical writing, I have built my 30-year career by following one simple objective: Find the gaps and fill them. As technical writers, we are well-versed in writing skills, technical skills, interviewing, design, usability, audience needs, corporate image, streamlining, and the dangers of non-compliance (just to name a few). We can compare/contrast similar projects and point out missing elements. Every project comes with opportunities. Maximize those!!”
I try to stay open to noticing new patterns or opportunities to change my thinking. Lately, I’ve observed a trend of realizing the value in sometimes trying the opposite of original instincts.
Anyone experienced with communication planning or data-driven optimization is used to considering how to refine strategy with incremental changes. But what if we are too used to making small tweaks and completely missing more valuable possibilities?
Now when considering pros or cons of particular choices, I’m trying to consider if an *opposite* (not just alternative) choice might actually be better.
Just because there is a logical reason to do something, doesn’t mean there isn’t a BETTER reason to do the opposite.
Opposite examples
At the Content Metrics presentation that Neal Kaplan and I shared at LavaCon 2018, an attendee said their testing showed that *removing* certain text prompts for return visitors improved their success metrics.
A colleague called out that the biggest value of measuring ticket deflection doesn’t come from the rate increase (success rate), but in analyzing how it *failed* for actionable insights to improve your product/process/content.
Another colleague called out a customer interaction point that we created to increase communication and that *preventing* the need for the interaction altogether would be better for the customer.
Argue against your assumptions
Identifying assumptions is an important part of continuous improvement in business and life. It’s why we benefit from cross-functional collaboration and ask strategic questions. When it comes to fine-tuning to improve outcomes, we must be wary of our our confirmation bias:
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or strengthens one’s prior personal beliefs or hypotheses
Recognizing confirmation bias in action takes deliberate effort. The trigger I’ve set for myself is to notice when I am continually making adjustments to improve a desired outcome. Frustration over a lack of intended results could be a signal to consider an opposite approach.
I hope that, with practice, I’ll be able to identify even more subtle triggers to notice when an opposite action is the best choice.
