Improving Customer Support: Targeting the 5 Stages of the Content Value Chain

In order to improve customer support, awareness of the functionality that drives good support is essential. This is what we call the content value chain, and it can be broken down into 5 stages:

Available, Useful, Findable, Engaging, Continually Learning

While many businesses excel in meeting some of these stages, very few go above and beyond to meet all five. That’s because there were no solutions to execute and manage the content value chain until now.

Each stage represents a different point in the customer’s journey. Understanding each stage, whether you use one of these management tools or not, is fundamental to reaching your customers, providing solutions they need, and minimizing business resource exhaustion.

Defining the 5 Stages in the Content Value Chain

Each stage of the content value chain represents a problem/solution used to rank a business’s ability to meet the increasingly demanding needs of its customers from a customer support standpoint. The 5 stages of this chain are as follows.

Available

Does the support material you provide customers cover every function and every scenario?

I like to compare this stage to building IKEA furniture. When opening the box, there are tons of bits and pieces packaged inside. Your imagination takes over and you get the confidence that you can build this piece of furniture without looking at the instructions. But then something goes wrong and you need to take a look—maybe you’ve used the wrong screw, or two identical boards are now not-so-identical after all. But the instructions, as graphic as they are, don’t describe what you need to do to solve the problem. You’re stuck.

Good support content covers not only the initial setup but also every other scenario a customer might face. 52% of customers will give up their self-service search and opt for email or phone, which can cost upwards of $8/contact.

Useful

Is your support content targeted to your audience? In other words, how useful is the content you publish?

A great way to test for usefulness is to read through the content yourself. If you can’t find the answer to a question, chances are your customers won’t either. Make use of customer feedback to address this. If you get the same question multiple times and aren’t able to answer it on your website, that should be a trigger for you to create content focused on solving that problem.

Findable

Can customers easily find the answers they need?

Having good support content is one thing but delivering it to customers is another. SEO strategies, tagging, indexing, and management software are essential in the world of self-service. That’s costly, time-consuming, and taxing on your business.

This is the stage that most companies lack in. You may have the content customers need, but it’s not organized or displayed in a way that’s searchable. And if you rely on Google for self-service support, then neither you nor your customers are confident in your ability to provide answers. The same is true for YouTube and other 3rd-party resources.

The real solution is a 1st-party resource that redefines search for the better.

Engaging

Is the support content engaging?

The goal here is to provide customers with a better experience than they would have received from a traditional customer service team. That means making use of rich media, such as videos, images, animations and interactive content. This helps you not only give more detailed answers but also hold their attention for longer and increase your chances of successfully answering their questions.

Continually Learning

Have you optimized your support content to maximize its effectiveness?

So, you’ve created the content and made it findable but have you taken the extra step to ensure its optimized for user experience? Using data-driven insights to reformat and update your current content is another stage most companies fail in.

You have the tools to monitor customer behavior—see what’s clicked, what’s ignored, what’s searched for, what isn’t. Use that data to your advantage and update the content customers are exposed to for clarity and efficiency.

Targeting Each Stage of the Content Value Chain

It’s important to note that each of the five stages require a different approach. Content needs to be available, useful, findable, engaging, and optimized in order for it to provide optimal customer support.

There are many tools at your disposal to monitor, define, and engage with customers. But most are fragmented, only looking at one or two stages but never the whole pie. You need to develop a comprehensive strategy if you want to provide them with the best possible support experience.

1. Available – cover all the bases. Listen to your customers and how they’re using your product. This will help you create content that covers scenarios outside the scope of your intended use and troubleshooting events.
2. Useful – replicate your audience. We’re past the days of technical speech and in a world where customers connect with brands on a vocal, articulation basis. The best way to be understood is to speak the language of the people.
3. Findable – minimize the effort needed to find answers. Customers are already dealing with a problem. You don’t need to create another for them in the form of searching for a solution. Simplify the process and make your support content accessible.
4. Engaging – make your content interactive. Consumers flock to YouTube because they can visualize solutions. They look up how-to image galleries to see step-by-step how something is done. Engage with your customers’ different ways of learning: reading, seeing, and doing.
5. Continually Learning – use data-driven insights to change your support content. As products age and services develop further, your troubleshooting and support documentation need to adapt. Use user data-driven insights to adjust with those changes, not after.

Conclusion

By targeting each of these stages, and using customer feedback and data-driven insights to optimize your content, you can ensure that customers always get the answers they need in a timely manner. This will save time for both customer service teams and customers, alike.

While there are many tools you can use, the best solution is the most simple. One integration that covers all 5 stages, no need to worry about compatibility or data limitations. That solution is Korra.

Korra gives customer service teams a powerful insights dashboard, tools to connect all your files wherever they live, and an AI-powered search tool for customers to easily find the answers they need all while being displayed in an interactive video.

Get your free trial of Korra today and introduce the power of AI to your customer support team.