5 Reasons Good Business Content is Gold
If you’re in a business with products that require good content, you may be flushing gold down the toilet.
Simply put, any good content adds value to your products. But what exactly do we mean? What is that value?
Before I get into that, we’ll talk about some business reasons for having good business content. In this context, business content is any documentation that customers need to better understand, use, and benefit from your products.
1 Customers Keep Coming Back
Current customers are already using your product, and reading your documentation to complete tasks and solve problems. They’re expecting that if they ever get stumped there’s a solution in that documentation.
When that documentation fails to help them, customers try searching your help center or knowledge base to find an answer. That’s just more documentation, and it better be good because customers, no matter what the industry, have high expectations and are short on tolerance when it comes to a bad experience. A full 86% will leave after 2 fails, even if they trusted your brand in the past .
Keeping customers is gold, losing them this way is … see the illustration above.
2 You Save Money
When your technical content helps customers so that it’s unnecessary for them to contact support, you’ve achieved what’s known as case deflection. Having a high case-deflection rate is an industry gold standard.
Why? Because running a support organization is expensive. Marketo cut support costs by 20% when they started providing customers with a better content experience (read: deflecting more cases). And Tableau is said to have saved $1.5 million a month by raising case-deflection rates.
Saving money simply by cutting your support organization is never a good approach. A company that’s unable to keep up with support tickets earns more unhappy customers, making them more likely to leave. Good content, on the other hand, keeps your costs down by allowing you to run lean-and-mean support teams that can focus on high-value use cases. More gold saved from the pipes.
3 Customers Like Effective Self-Service
How do we know? At least 75% of customers think that self-service is a convenient way to address their issues, and over 90% would use an online knowledge base if it met their needs, according to one survey. That same survey also found that more than two-thirds prefer self-service over calling for help, but that 4 out of 10 would call support if they couldn’t find a solution themselves. What are the other 6 doing? Giving up and going with someone else’s product or service? That’s gold down the you-know-what.
4 Leads are Converted to Customers
Good content is not just for customers, it’s for potential customers, too. As they hover at the top end of your sales funnel, leads evaluate products and services by reading your content. According to one researcher of B2B marketing, B2B buyers are hungry for good content to help inform their decisions. Surveys show that B2B buyers are consuming more content and using it to make purchase decisions.
That includes technical content. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard a decision maker ask an engineer to evaluate a software product or service by trying to follow its documentation. Over the years I’ve been asked multiple times to evaluate a competitor by reading their technical content. It’s hanging out there, and everyone’s looking. Might as well make it good and transform that curiosity into gold.
5 Oh, Right, That AI Thing
Artificial Intelligence in the form of generative AI (GenAI) could help with help in a number of ways, including:
- Classifying incoming support emails so that they’re both routed to the right agent and include recommendations for solving the issue
- Providing an agent with real-time recommended solutions as that agent is talking to a customer and taking notes.
- Advising customers who prefer self-service to emails and phone calls
All of these require good internal content for the AI to be trained, because one of the main issues in using them is “garbage in, hallucinations out.” Sometime, somehow, someone is going to sell you a GenAI solution for providing your customers with a first line of support. But what they won’t provide you with is good content, and the AI sure isn’t going to write it for you.
There’s a fair bit of awareness in the business world on that issue. Here’s a quote from a recent Salesforce paper on effectively deploying GenAI:
Trust is paramount to making generative AI successful. A majority of
IT leaders are concerned that the technology can produce inaccurate or
biassed content…. One way to mitigate these risks is to train
generative AI models on data that the company produces and owns. This
ensures inputs meet standards of quality and reliability. […]
Getting trust wrong can do significant damage.
Your customers are trusting you, not your AI, but that AI will be serving up your content. It all comes back to trusting the source.
As part of McKinsey’s GenAI overview aimed at CEOs, the company focused on a customer-support use case where GenAI would help “…frontline workers to tap proprietary sources of knowledge and offer the most relevant content to customers.” And again, that all requires starting with good content.
GenAI is a complicated mess of connections, anything could go wrong. Content is under your control, nothing should go wrong.
The Bottom Line
Good content will subtract from your troubles and add to your successes.
Still doubtful that good content equals value? Put your customer hat on. How do you feel after encountering inadequate documentation that forces you to file a case, make a phone call, write an email, converse with an annoying chatbot, or spend hours researching? Not as good as you’d have felt had the documentation answered your question, and quickly.
Simply put, your business needs to offer good content because that has a sizable impact on creating more satisfied, trusting customers. They’ll remain customers, and maybe even become advocates. And that’s gold.
In future postings I’ll show what makes content great and provide practical guidance for creating content that turns leads into customers and customers into advocates.
