As a tech doc professional, you know first-hand how important your content is. But you might not be aware just how critical it can be to other departments such as customer service. Given that 73% of business leaders reported a direct link between their customer service and business performance, it’s worth exploring how this product content can help. After all, the hidden benefits of tech doc across your business are often poorly understood.
That’s why we’ve outlined three ways your tech content is crucial for supporting your customer support team.
#1. Self-Service Options
Customer support teams are always looking for ways to improve customer support efficiency and ultimately, reduce support calls and tickets. This is even more so the case when 40% of customer service and support leaders say call volumes have increased since the pandemic.
But the demand isn’t just coming from the customer support side: customers also want to solve issues quickly by themselves. Unfortunately, only a third of companies offer self-service options such as a knowledge base or portal to allow them to do just that.
For those that do, the technical documentation is often difficult to search and read from, and not consistent with the company’s branding. It is often hosted on websites that are not adapted to technical documentation, inevitably leading to boundless HTML pages and a poor user experience. That’s why Content Delivery Platforms (CDPs) have emerged to help get around this and create an optimized content experience.
What’s a CDP?
Content Delivery Platforms specialized in technical documentation like Fluid Topics collect all the documentation owned by an organization (no matter the initial source and format), restructure and unify it, and distribute the relevant content to all endpoints (product websites, documentation portals, community sites, etc.), devices, and applications, in-context with the users’ needs and environment.
Our solution comes with out of the box self-service portals so that users can access content from a central, vetted knowledge center. Its proprietary search engine facilitates the searching of your documentation, no matter its initial volume, complexity, or diversity. What’s more, it takes into account the user’s preferences and behaviour to always serve the most relevant results, so you can be sure to provide an optimal user experience. As for managing which type of users sees what content, you can simply define access rules using our advanced rights management capabilities.
A CDP such as Fluid Topics also allows you to tailor your documentation portals with ease thanks to WYSIWYG editors and “drag and drop” components. The result? Prospects and customers can access a familiar knowledge center that serves relevant, targeted, and personalized information. With easy access to cohesive documentation, customers feel empowered and able to solve problems on their own. What better way to increase case deflection?
“Our objective was to change the service culture from “call for solution” to “information self-service.” We achieved our goal with Fluid Topics, which allowed us to ensure 24-hour availability of our service knowledge center and greatly reduce support calls and tickets”
said swissQprint, an innovator in digital printing technology.
#2. Omnichannel Customer Service
Customer service are likely very familiar with the term ‘omnichannel’. They already understand the importance of providing a consistent support experience across all the touchpoints customers use to engage with your product or company. Indeed, 9 out of 10 consumers want an omnichannel experience with seamless service between communication methods. But feeding and keeping all support channels up to date with the freshest content is easier said than done, especially as touchpoints increase.
So how can technical documentation help in this regard? Once again, Content Delivery Platforms hold the answer. Thanks to a rich set of native and customizable APIs, they can feed all channels and touchpoints, integrating seamlessly with all existing helpdesk tools and software, whether Salesforce Service Cloud or Community Cloud, or up-and-coming channels such as chatbots.
Take Vaisala, a global leader in weather, environmental, and industrial measurements, for example. As their digital presence grew, they had difficulty in publishing technical documentation to different touchpoints. Every time information needed updating, they would have to duplicate effort in all the relevant documents and repositories while managing dozens of languages.
“Often, if information needed to be updated, content owners had to make changes in multiple places and manually publish it,”
said Katy Greatrex, their Commercial Product Information Manager.
Thanks to Fluid Topics’ Content Delivery Platform, they can now publish and update content consistently for all users, ensuring content is always available in real-time and across all channels.
#3. Augmented Customer Support
Lastly, your customer support team can expect huge gains in productivity thanks to your technical content. Your technical support agents are a major consumer of technical information, needing it to answer user queries effectively. The main problem? They often must sift through disparate pieces of content, whether troubleshooting guides, or user guides, that are difficult to keep track of to do so. In fact, support agents spend as much as 25% of their time searching for the right information.
Fortunately, a CDP such as Fluid Topics provides a unified view of all your product documentation and comes with the advanced search technology we mentioned earlier. Fluid Topics’ users report cutting down their time searching by as much as 60%.
Looking forward, slow replies to support cases and the resulting user discontent are set to be a thing of the past thanks to new generative AI capabilities. Instead of manually writing replies to queries, our GenAI module can automatically generate a response and link to the corresponding documentation. All support agents need to do then is simply edit and/or validate the reply before it is sent to the user, dramatically increasing support agent efficiency.
Suggesting documented answers with GenAI can drastically improve the efficiency of support agents.
Technical Content, the Answer to Your Customer Support Needs
It’s certain then that technical documentation can be a major reserve of business opportunity. With a Content Delivery Platform, your customer support team can optimize their use of technical content, and as a result, improve your Customer Service department’s efficiency. Whether by allowing customers to resolve tickets on their own, feeding all the channels they utilize, or helping customer support agents respond to cases faster, it’s clear that modern content delivery solutions have the features needed to truly revolutionize customer support.
Fluid Topics can make this a possibility, allowing you to build a frictionless support experience, and giving support agents the tools they need to ensure swift resolution of cases and, more importantly, user satisfaction. What better way to ensure your tech doc receives the use and recognition it deserves?
Want to learn more? Feel free to check out our complimentary white paper “Content ROI, achieving and measuring the value of tech doc”. You’ll find our ROI calculator to simulate the exact gains for your own organization.
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