Customer centric content management

Organisations create huge amounts of customer-facing content and are putting much time and effort into managing their customer relationships. Yet content remains locked in silos and does not provide maximum value to customers because it is not easily discoverable, lacks consistency from one silo to the next and is limited in terms of implementation and value.
Of course, good customer relationships are at the heart of business success and the way you communicate with customers is critical to that success. Inconsistent, poor quality, incomplete customer-facing content or content that does not assist your customer to achieve their needs whether intended for the web, product documents, or marketing collateral, can have serious consequences, such as brand deterioration; lower customer satisfaction; and even legal liability.
Organisations typically cost justify and adopt content management based on:

Increased content control;
Reduced time to create, manage and deliver content;
Reduced localisation costs;
Increased quality;
Better support of regulatory requirements.

Web strategies
These are all very good reasons for adopting content-management systems, but they do not address the requirements of the customer, the people who use or consume your organisation’s content or, at least, at whom it is ultimately aimed.
Frequently, there is no customer-centric strategy across the web, let alone across all the other points at which the organisation can touch customers with messages, content or functionality. Content does not add value to business goals because it is very difficult to align all aspects of an initiative to the business goals and marketing strategies underlying them, and to do it across the silos (pre and post-sales materials and customer support). Initial gains as a result of process improvement-oriented content management can only be sustained if you address customer needs.
More importantly, it is the customer’s needs that will address the overall organisational needs. This means that the focus must be on the customer. Their needs must be addressed at every ‘touchpoint’ (that is to say, on the web; in print; at call centres; via their mobile phones; at kiosks; in shops, and so on).
Today, you need to provide a seamless experience for a customer from their first contact (pre-sales) through purchase; usage; maintenance; and back through the cycle again as they continue to purchase and use your products and services.
For example, it is desirable to be able to link from materials such as user guides or frequently-asked questions (FAQs) back to current marketing campaigns that would assist your customer in broadening their use of your products or services. Or you could make it possible for someone who is exploring a product with a potential purchase in mind to link to a tutorial to get an understanding of how it works (typically post-sales materials) or link someone from an online user guide to an FAQ, and then into self-service to change some of their options. The customer follows a continuum of discovery and knowledge acquisition, and the corporate content strategy needs to reflect this.

Cross-channel shopping
In addition to the web, you need to focus on carrying the customer experience across the various channels (print, mobile, customer service, and so on). Too often the customer receives a disjointed experience as they make their way through the many siloed communication touchpoints. For example:

An existing customer hears about a promotion and they wonder what it would cost if they added it to the services they already have in place. They can find lots about the costs of the service on the web, but can’t find out what it would cost with their other services, under the terms of the promotion. They call customer services to find out. Customer services does not have any information on the new service (they are working with an entirely different set of content that hasn’t been updated yet) and cannot help;
A customer is considering the purchase of a new product. They can find lots of marketing information, but none that would really give them the understanding they need of the product and its capabilities. They decide not to purchase because they simply do not have enough information to make an informed decision. If they had access to the product usage/support materials, which would offer a full specification of the product, they might have been able to make the right decision;
A customer is trying to work out how to configure a recently purchased product with the specific functionality that they need. They find a relevant FAQ that tells them how that feature should be set, but they do not have that feature configured so they cannot make the adjustment. They give up in frustration and call customer support. If they had been linked to the self-service portion of the site they may have been able to change the configuration of the product on their own.

By thinking in terms of where the customer is at any point in the lifecycle, and providing content for whatever they need or want to do next, we can provide a more unified and effective customer experience.

Building a content framework to support customer content
A content framework is a library of content types and metadata along with detailed guidelines on how to use the framework to create specific customer experiences. A content framework provides the underlying concepts, best practices, guidelines, and structure to enable you to rapidly design, build, test, and deliver an effective customer-centric content experience. This article provides an overview of the components of a content framework.
The development and delivery of content can be haphazard and disjointed, resulting in an inconsistent experience that does nothing to build customer loyalty and solidify their experience with the organisation. You need to develop a framework that can be used as the baseline for all your content delivery that provides a consistent, repeatable structure for success.
A content framework consists of:

Customer needs and task definition;
Relationship-management lifecycle (RML);
Architecture to support the RML:
Content matrix;
Structured content types;
Metadata.

Know your customer
Central to the strategy will be your knowledge of customers. Look at all the research you have on them (for instance, website statistics; customer purchase patterns; customer support; marketing strategies; customer feedback). If you do not have existing research, find ways in which you can collect information (for example, via focus groups; from user group conferences; the knowledge of customer support staff; and marketing staff). Only with a solid understanding of your customer and their needs and tasks can you begin to focus your delivery and your content-management strategy on their needs and requirements.
For example, a large financial institution is developing a marketing campaign for one particular customer segment. They are focusing the campaign on their individual customers, as opposed to commercial or retail. The target audience demographic includes individuals between the ages of 25 and 35. The ‘persona’ sketched out by marketing includes the following:

They are just starting out – in career, marriage, home or family;
They have small, if any, investable assets – less than $30,000 in the bank, perhaps much less;
Their primary financial need is how to make ends meet and start to build financial security;
A reason for contact – the importance of investing early.

Relationship- management lifecycle
The term ‘customer lifecycle’ is becoming familiar to organisations involved in customer-relationship-management initiatives; web-content initiatives; and marketing initiatives. It defines the progression of steps a customer goes through with your company, product or service. For example, a simple lifecycle could include the following:

Explore;
Buy;
Use;
Maintain.

There are identifiable customer behaviours at each stage in the lifecycle. For example, in the ‘explore’ phase a typical customer might want to:

Find out what products are available – not just from your company, but others in the market;
Compare product options – to find out which one is best for them;
Get an understanding of the features of the short-listed items.

An RML builds on the basic customer lifecycle, but defines:

The customer tasks at each stage of the lifecycle;
Content types that help the customer accomplish the tasks;
The directions the customer could move in;
Desired directions for customer movement;
Ways in which you can deepen the customer relationship through information selection and sharing.

When we view a standard customer lifecycle we see customers as an anonymous group, but when we build an RML we start to view our customers as individuals with particular needs. At the simplest level we provide an optimised experience for the customer, and at the deepest level we give each of them the opportunity to tell us something about what they want and endeavour to give back a better, more in-depth set of information and experiences. This builds value for the company and increases satisfaction for the customer.

The underlying architecture
The architecture that will support your relationship-management lifecycle and content-management strategy will include the following:

A content matrix;
Structured content types;
Metadata.

Content matrix
Content types do not exist in isolation. You need to provide a collection or matrix of content types for each phase in the lifecycle. Each content type is related to another or many others and helps to create a complete integrated suite of information for the customer. Integral to the matrix is an understanding of the content flow. The content flow identifies how a customer satisfies their need for information, and identifies the organisation’s desire to move the customer in a particular direction.
The benefits of a content matrix include:

A comprehensive content requirement (with no gaps);
A complete understanding of how customers can use the information;
An identification of desired customer paths through the content;
Plan of action for content creation and positioning.

Structured content types
At each and every point in the relationship-management lifecycle your company needs to provide content to assist the customer in reaching their goals and accomplishing their tasks. This content should be categorised into common, consistent, identifiable content types. For example:

Product overview – a plain English description of the product or service that anyone can read and understand;
Product feature(s) – all the facts and figures about the product or service;
Product comparisons – how your products or services compare to the competition on key metrics;
Testimonials from satisfied customers;
Case studies – illustrating how people have benefited from purchasing and using the product or service.

Content types should be structured to ensure consistent creation, delivery and re-use. A structured content type consists of a group of required and optional content components that combine to form the structure of a piece of content such as a product overview or customer testimonial.
The benefits of structured content types include:

Increased opportunities for content re-use;
More consistent messaging;
Predictable structure to support rules-based personalisation;
Templated authoring;
Reduced cost of content creation;
Reduced localisation costs.

There is top-level structure and there is also internal structure. For example, Figure two illustrates the structure of an overview:

Metadata
Metadata is typically required to optimise search and retrieval, but it provides a much broader role then just that: metadata is integral to the customer relationship and central to the delivery of a satisfactory experience. Metadata makes it possible to identify customer areas of interest; deliver personalised content; and identify relationship-critical content.
Metadata plays many roles in supporting the customer experience, helping with the following, among others:

Search;
Navigation;
Personalisation and relationship management;
Website traffic reporting.

Furthermore, metadata also supports content authoring and content management in the following ways:

Content re-use;
Content retrieval and storage;
Workflow.

360-degree strategy
Customer-centric content management addresses customer needs at every touchpoint, while reducing content costs and improving corporate processes. A customer-centric strategy ought to have the following characteristics. It will:

Identify customer needs and tasks at every point in the customer-relationship lifecycle;
Identify key and optional content required for every phase in the lifecycle;
Provide paths through the content that ensures customer task success;
Optimise content retrieval and delivery;
Bridge content silos to ensure harmonised branding, messaging and content within and across channels;
Optimise content re-use for consistency and accuracy;
Reduce the cost of content creation, localisation, management and delivery.

A content framework plays a critical role in customer-centric content management. It ensures that you have a clear, repeatable structure for your content that ensures you meet customer needs, support organisational goals, and optimise your content-management strategy.

Ann Rockley is president of the content management consultancy, The Rockley Group.She can be contacted by e-mailing rockley@rockley.com