Customer support is paramount to keeping your organization's lights on.
Customer support or cost savings. Which get’s the priority?
It’s a fickle balance. Do you focus on the customer or the bottom line? Both are critical to the long-term success of your organization.
This balancing act might be fickle, but content plays an important role in helping both sides of this scale.
Customers are happier when they know how to use your product effectively, and content is the main purveyor of customer education. It doesn't matter if that education is preliminary product knowledge or advanced user troubleshooting, the goal is the same: help your customers become confident users.
This warrants a closer look at your content because you certainly don't want your content killing customer experience. Your content should build their confidence in your product and their confidence in themselves.
Here are three ways you can help them and, through that, help your organization.
Create Content That Helps Customers Help Themselves
No offense, but the last thing your customers want to do is call your customer support team. It's time-consuming and they'd rather find answers themselves. Not only that but the more time your CS team spends on the phone fielding questions, the more your support costs rise.
The solution lies within well-built self-help learning content. Focusing on quality learning content empowers customers to answer their own questions and, when support calls do get to your CS team, customer support will have equally smooth points of reference to guide users to answers.
But, what does well-built learning content look like? There are two distinct attributes that set it apart from disorganized content populating too many product "help" sections.
Create Content That's Findable (Searchable, Too)
We've said it plenty of times, but helpful content is findable content. Answers that exist in secret aren't helpful! Publish your learning content where customers know to look. This way, when they have questions, they know the exact place to start their search.
Ah, yes, search. If your learning content is easy to find, but not easily searchable, how helpful is it really? People don't want to sift through hundreds of pages of content to find the one answer they need. Findability is important, but searchability equally so, and not all search is equal.
For the best user experience, it’s important that your search is faceted through thoughtful metadata and taxonomies. Enabling search that’s guided by an intention-based information architecture is paramount to closing the circle on findable learning content by also making it easily searchable and therefore useful.
Create Content In Places They Want To Look
Finally, meet your customers where they are. Dense PDF user-manual tomes aren't the answer and, still, they permeate lots of industries. Support content that's in preferred formats is more likely to be consumed by your customers. PDF, mobile help, documentation portal, chatbot, you name it — deploy your content to the best channels and you’ll have multiple different touchpoints to guide your readers in their journey of being confident users.
The point of all this in decreasing customer support costs boils down to your organization using content to empower its users. The more answers they can discover on their own, the better the content experience is for them. Plus, it puts time back in your hands for building value instead of fielding a never-ending barrage of mundane questions. Content built with customer empowerment in mind is a front-end investment that pays dividends in customer satisfaction, product usability, and support cost savings. Not sure where to start? Let us help you with that.
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