The Role Content Plays in Customer Service

No product is so intuitive that a customer can see it, buy it and use it without a single question coming to mind. That’s okay: we want deeper relationships with our customers and by answering their questions, we can help improve their experiences so that they keep coming back.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean offering individual attention to every customer who is even considering a purchase. While some companies can provide that level of support, many just don’t have the resources to do so. Offering great content, particularly on your website, is the easiest way to improve the customer service experience without having to maintain a huge staff just to answer questions. You may need a full-time content creator, depending on just what you’re selling, but a good writer or video producer can support many times the number of customers that tech support can help.

Understanding the Value of Content

Over all, you may find that your costs drop. But there’s an even more convincing reason to invest in content: you’ll be able to improve your customers’ experience, making them more likely to stick with your product and to recommend it to other buyers.

Consider this scenario: a visitor to your website is on the verge of making a purchase, but she has a question about whether the product will really meet her personal needs. There’s a ‘learn more’ link at the bottom of the product page that takes her to content that answers her question. She’s convinced, in just the time that it takes to read a paragraph. Without that link, though, she might bookmark the product page to do some research later, get frustrated trying to reach you by phone or run a search that winds up showing her that a competitor’s product definitely has the capabilities she needs.

More content, provided that it’s easily accessible to your customers, can make sales. It can also solve support issues or even customer service problems, with less hassle than the other methods that your customers might rely on to get an answer.

Training Your Customers to Use Content

Not all of your customers are going to be prepared to look for answers deep in the links on your website. Making sure that they can access the content that will help them is a two-part process: First, you have an obligation to make content as easy to access as possible. It needs to be organized, easy to find and a logical way for your customers to get the answers they’re looking for. Second, you need to create the right content. You need to make sure that you’re actually answering the questions your customers have, not the questions you think they should have. After all, if your customers aren’t finding useful information on your site quickly, they’re going to be less likely to check your content-based support in the future.

In order to get your customers used to the idea of checking your online documentation and the other content your company has produced, you need to guide them to it. Just having a help page isn’t enough: you need links all over your site that direct visitors to ‘learn more,’ ‘get additional help’ and ‘read a tutorial.’ From your home page to your help page, you need to make sure that your customers know your content exists!

You also need to be proactive in finding trouble spots to address. You should have content that addresses sales questions, support issues and any other point that customers bring up in the process of buying and using your product. You can find many of these issues through user testing, surveys and customer interviews — all work that is easy to put off, but needs to get done. On the plus side, much of that research can be turned directly into content like case studies.

Creating More Content, Constantly

A strong content strategy means that you’ll always need to feed the beast: you need a team constantly creating more content. Writing out answers to the questions your customers have is just picking the low-hanging fruit. If you’re proactive, you’ll find plenty of questions to address, but there’s still further you can go:

• You should offer content in multiple formats, including audio and video. Not all visitors of your site are going to be able to consume content in the same ways.
• You can show entirely new ways to use your product with tutorials and case studies, which allows you to both educate your existing customers and to drum up more business.
• You can solve the problems created by your competitors’ products, conveniently showing how their customers can move over to your products.

Content marketing is becoming a crucial mainstay of most companies’ promotional strategies. That’s good news if you need to create content that serves your customers’ needs, because such content can often do double duty.

You can also take pages out of the content marketing guide books to make sure that you’re able to continue producing content on a regular basis. Treat your support documentation and other materials as a publication: publish new content on a regular basis and promote it just like you may do with your company’s blog.