Connecting the Dots: Improving the Information Experience for Customers

Customers don't care that they are dealing with mini-organizations within the enterprise. Our job to create a single unified experience.

We're evolving from traditional content, manuals and books, to information that's clunked in topics that wee can package in different ways. This is a way to connect the information dots.

Whatever you do, it has to come back to what do the customers.need. Get feedback however you can. The feedback we received was not only that our customers needed accurate material, they need to be able to find it,

We learned that the information is there. So we had to figure out how to get the information to customers to them where they needed it and in the right way. 

With education services (training), we found they were taking our content and re purposing it, sometimes word-for-word. In some ways, it makes sense, but unless someone clues you in that they are using your material, you can start with the natural synergies. We started with some of our writers working on certification exam questions. Then we found videos that was based on our documentation, so we were able to re-purpose that and put int in our documentation. We created a YouTube channel and put links to it in our documentation.

 Increasing chances for customer engagement is good advertisement that we're addressing customer needs. Feedback mechanisms on content allow us to pinpoint the areas that need attention.

Looks for people sympathetic to your customers to connect with.

A lot of people don't think of content accessibility as something to think about.

One strategy is to provide a unified view of all your content in a consumable format. For example, providing a feature list for all products in one place is a huge win. It also helps you identify your content holes.

Even if you work in silos, people work together when you have one unified truth of information.

When you start using web analytics, as well as feedback mechanisms, you can see what types of topics are getting the most feedback, not just what topics.