Information evolution
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This document discusses various initiatives taken by an organization to improve customer experience and access to information. It summarizes different channels used like technical whitepapers, blogs, forums, videos and wikis to engage customers. Key metrics like top call drivers are analyzed to identify pain points and improve solutions. Search engine optimization techniques are implemented to make information more accessible to customers.
Information evolution
- 1. Realizations That Assisted Information Evolution Kavitha Kanagowder Mainak Roy
- 2. Executive summary Information is available in abundance today for customers to utilize. However, all information is not available in a format that is accessible easily and appealing to the customer’s requirement. This requirement made us to think of different ways in which the information can be provided to customers such as Videos, White papers, blogs and so on. Customer complaints have so far been addressed using the normal technical support. We have tried to address this issue by opening other avenues too. Through these new avenues, we have been able to interact with customers and keep an ongoing engagement that helps customers to get answers to their questions from the appropriate SMEs. Moreover, we researched and tapped other technical repositories where information was available, but not accessible to customers. Such information, knowledge based articles, was scrubbed for better accuracy and made accessible to customers. Not all the information that is available is used by customers. Research based on the most and least used information has helped us in identifying how useful the information we provide is to the customers. We have been able to improve our documents based on these findings. Implementing analytics using Google Analytics for the information placed on different sites has helped us to gather information regarding our customers that in turn has helped us to address specific customer related issues. We have implemented search ability using SEO techniques that have made information more searchable and accessible to the customers. We have enriched the information resources available for the customers by bringing in internal and external wikis. In this paper, we are going to discuss more about the overall initiatives and the relevant positive impacts that we have generated via customer documentation projects. It is not only producing product documents in multiple formats, rather an end to end effort to make sure that our customers are using the documents to solve their real life issues. Transforming Customer Relationships Customers interact with companies using a wide variety of channels, such as voice, online, Interactive Voice Response, chat, email, or social networking. As their usage of multiple channels increases, so do their expectations that companies should be able to follow the history of their interactions across these varied channels, as well as support their needs and preferences regardless of the channel. Dell Rockstar community is taking care of the brand advocacy and brand development for individual products. They are constantly talking to a set of elite customers to build the
- 3. connection and create a great environment for the customers. At the end, the satisfaction factor is important. This means that businesses must be able to have the kind of conversation a customer wants in their channel of choice. Addressing customer issues using the following channels. Technical Whitepapers We develop Technical Whitepapers based on critical use case scenarios. The technical whitepapers are for the advanced users who want to explore more. As part of creating white papers, we post them via multiple social media platforms. The audience is different for different platforms and the sentiments are also different. While promoting the Whitepapers, we consider such scenarios. Created white papers and posted on the Internet since many potential customers search for information on the Web. We have created white papers to convey to the customer that a certain solution is best for a particular problem, thus influencing the decision-making processes of current and prospective customers. Corporate/Self-owned Blogs Proactively, we have followed customers' interactions over different forums and created blogs to provide information relevant to those topics. Company employees, teams, or spokespersons share their views and these blogs were used to announce new products and services (or the end of old products), to explain and clarify policies, or to react on public criticism on certain issues. Corporate blogs, all posts go through a review before they are posted. Some corporate blogs, but not all, allow comments to be made to the posts. Business blogs can interact with a target market on a more personal level while building link credibility that can ultimately be tied back to the corporate site. We enable customers and potential customers with our brands. These engagements are much more effective than traditional marketing channels. Such engagement at the top of the funnel has a greater impact further down. Forums – real time discussions Our open forums allow the customers to interact with the SMEs with their queries. These are important for us to build a long term relationship with the customers. On the other hand, these trustworthy conversations generate more social signals for your products.
- 4. Proactive online processes also encourage customers to use online resources, rather than engendering continued reliance on slower, more costly reactive processes. Customers who feel confident that they can find what they need on the web right away are less likely to call support next time they encounter a problem—resulting in faster service for them and lower costs for the company. Videos Videos are enhancing customer communication and association, helping tech support and driving new businesses. Engage and interact with your customers by using video in several different forms. Videos are much appreciated by the audience. Using a video you can deliver a concise message in a format that customers and potential customers already embrace. All the video elements, including the images, voice over and background music can be leveraged as additional support the helps you to strengthen your BRAND. Another benefit of using videos for content marketing is that they can deliver virtually anywhere, including websites, mobile devices, landing pages, and social networks. Customers can easily access videos through their preferred communication channel. Videos also provide valuable analytics on customer behavior and interactions. Having detailed information on the number of video plays and duration of viewership for a specific video can help marketers gather information on the interests of their customers. For example, a brand that leverages a marketing automation solution can automatically deliver highly targeted content or offers to customers based on their previous interactions with a specific video topic. SEO Implementation In the process to generate information, we have worked on the search ability prospect for individual contents. The content can be a video, a whitepaper, a technical bulletin or regular guides. We are identifying the KeyWords relevant to that particular topic / subject and adding them back at the backend of that platform. The appropriate key words are redirecting the customers to the source in an easier way. Once you have drawn a significant amount of customers towards a specific site, you have a better opportunity to get that information spread across different platforms. Implementing the SEO techniques have helped the organization by reducing the support calls, in another way, saving revenues for our customers.
- 5. Top call Drivers Identify Top Call Drivers are initiatives, to understand which topics/features are driving more customer calls. Once we identify the major pain points, we can define our next release to cover such field issues. Knowing which call types account for the highest volume of traffic is actually helping us to provide more customer focused solutions. While scrubbing the actual data, we look at the following factors: • Average handling time of those specific calls and the trend in volume • Offered solutions (if any) • The quality aspects of these calls • How our contact center members are using in-house resources (documents, videos and whitepapers) to address such complicated problems By focusing on these important metrics we have acknowledged the areas where customers need help. Call Driver Analysis serves as a foundation for classifying the business developments and product performances/features that need improvement. Additionally, the insight gained helped us to pinpoint the call drivers that yield the greatest costs to the company. We are able to deliver better content which is creating differences by providing a better customer experience. Wiki pages Wikis are 2 types; one is the internal wikis, that are maintained to provide for shared- document collaboration and content management within the different organizational sectors. We have the emerging wikis which are maintained for the benefits of customers, employees, partners and so on to share knowledge, best practices, and information about the company products and solutions. These wikis are maintained by SMEs (Subject Matter Expertise) from the organization and provide a lot of value add from the customer focus perspective. The internal wikis work well for the corporate world as they cover two challenging areas, the need for internal review process and document management. The internal wikis have the following benefits: • The wikis serve as a repository of information where employees can share knowledge and learn better. A rich source of information allows employees to be more knowledgeable and they can serve the customers better. They can perform better in their roles, which lead to making the company more cost-effective. • You can also add and maintain small pieces of documentation that sometimes do not fit well into the main release cycle.
- 6. • It is easier to update a topic and maintain it in a wiki. This makes it easier to keep all of your business related information up to date and accurate. • Crowdsourcing - As users come onboard to the company they can read and add to any wiki page they want. As each person contributes the document grows and lives with them, and the information just gets better and better, and guess what, you don’t have to have a dedicated editor to keep that document up to date, your audience is there for you. External wikis act as a source of technical information, and have the following benefits: • Wikis make information easy. The wikis are linked to company domains; hence they are more trustworthy for the external visitors. • Easy to maintain – Editing wikis are really easy as the platforms are flexible and simple. Anybody who has a minimum knowledge of HTML can update wikis for you. • Improving the look and feel and standardizing the information across different pages has drawn more customers to view and eventually use the wikis. • Implementing the SEO techniques has served for better search ability for our customers. Implementation of Google Analytics It’s not only working on the document, we need to follow up the web contents to understand the impact. Are we distributing the documents through a solid platform which has a better reach? Are we using Social Media platforms to broadcast our documents through multiple web platforms? – To understand such scenarios, we have opted for Google Analytics. • Know about your customers who are visiting your websites. Helps you to understand how many new customers are visiting your site. • You can use referral and keyword data to understand the nature of your customers, and how they are reaching to your site. • Site's search engine rankings help you to understand how you are placed across different social media platforms. • Keywords data help you to understand what draws customers to the website. • Implementing data driven dashboards help you to analyze the top pages. • Analyzing the demographics help to understand the spread of your customer base. • Analyzing the age group of your regular users helps you to understand your customer base. • Visually see what areas of your site are the most popular, and help you identify where people are clicking on your site. Follow the “F” design pattern while designing your web page and place the important data accordingly. • Identify the outbound trusted links and track those links periodically. • Identify content that is not being utilized by customers.
- 7. • Identify the type of devices that are being used. This will help you to improve the web page design. Contribute towards the Knowledgebase Articles – Help Tech Support with the updated material KCS site contains knowledge base articles created by Tech Support, Services, and IPS for customer issues and product issues. A few of these articles are outdated, invalid, or incorrect. Task – Analyze and identify valid, invalid, or duplicate articles. • Interlocks with Quality to identify content inaccuracy issues. See workflow • Add valid articles to the Troubleshooting Guide. • Created Troubleshooting Wiki on Dell TechCenter - Owned by InfoDev. • Only one valid article is maintained for each use case scenario. Customer Benefit: • Latest and technically accurate solution provided through the articles. • Easy access to information on troubleshooting issues. • Fewer calls to Tech Support.