How can a content management system support your customers better?
11 Apr 2022
6 mins
When your business generates a lot of content, you need a content management system (CMS) to have any chance of controlling it efficiently and cost-effectively. Yet in a recent survey carried out by the Content Marketing Institute, 33% of companies indicated that they don’t have the right technology to manage their content. This can cause pain for businesses in many ways, but here I want to focus on how it compromises customer service and support. Not just because this is a major issue for any business, but because to address it effectively you can't just use any old CMS.
Even many companies that do have a CMS are struggling to meet customer expectations for information findability – and that's because their CMS isn't structured to manage the sheer volume and variety of content now generated. Let's dive into why this is the case and what the solution is.
Customer support must meet customer expectations
When a customer has a problem or a question and they go looking for an answer, they expect to be able to find the right information immediately. They may search for it themselves or contact your business by phone or online chat – either way, they don't want to have to enter a million search terms or queries, or be driven crazy by hold music while a customer service representative tries to hunt down the answer. Expectations for customer support, whether self-service or mediated by a rep, have risen sharply in the age of Google, Amazon, and other companies providing relevant, personalized results at speed.
Information findability and trust: a customer support problem
So what's the problem? Why are we continually frustrated by poor customer support experiences, even from businesses using a CMS to manage their content?
The example of insurance provider California Casualty is instructive. Their document management system held content as documents, as most traditional CMSs do (these could be PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets or other file formats), and there was a lot of it. With around 35,000 stored documents, 90% of the company's employees were spending between 30 minutes and an hour, every day, searching for information. And it was so difficult to reliably update documents that even when staff found something relevant, they didn't trust its accuracy. Despite the efforts of the company's dedicated knowledge management team, content that was duplicated in different documents had discrepancies that caused confusion, and there was little they could do to improve the situation. As a result, customers were often kept waiting while staff tried to find the right information for them.
It's clear to see that whether your customers are contacting you or searching for information themselves, if you don't have a single source of truth that can easily be navigated and searched, their experience is going to be unnecessarily frustrating. And that could well mean they'll choose a competitor that provides a better experience.
Structured content: a customer support solution
The solution increasingly chosen by businesses is to invest in a specific type of content management system: a component content management system (CCMS). The defining difference between a traditional CMS and a CCMS is that whereas a CMS stores content as documents, or unstructured content, a CCMS stores content as a set of smaller related components, which are then combined in automated ways to create publishable deliverables such as PDFs, web pages or other formats. A component within a CCMS could be a word, phrase, paragraph, series of paragraphs, image, video, table, graph, or any other ‘piece’, 'chunk', 'atom' or ‘module’ of content.
Why manage content this way? Because when you structure content by breaking it into components, you can do a lot of things that transform its findability. And that also means you can update it more easily to ensure that it's accurate and trustworthy. Here are some of the ways that a CCMS can make information more findable and trustworthy, both for your customer support representatives and for your customers in self-service contexts:
- Single source of truth. A CCMS lets you COPE – create once, publish everywhere. Hold a description of a product feature as a component and use it in the product manual for every product that has that feature. When the feature gets updated, you just update the component and cascade it to all the places it's needed. No more worrying about out-of-date documents eluding discovery. No more worrying about content accuracy. Your CCMS will let you reuse content efficiently while also managing different versions where necessary, including – if you have the right CCMS – versions in different languages.
- More granular findability. When you apply metadata to content in a CCMS to help categorize it for findability, you're doing so at a much more granular level than when you tag content at document level. Again, the right CCMS will give you powerful tools to categorize your content consistently and effectively, which is the ideal foundation for delivering relevant search results to customer problems and queries. This means, for example, that in response to a customer search you can automatically direct them to the specific part of the product manual that has the answer, rather than just directing them to the product manual and giving them further work to do to find the answer.
- AI-powered customer self-service. With the right CCMS you can go even further, using semantic AI to deliver the kind of relevant, personalized results that your customers increasingly expect. You'll also find that your content can be exploited by AI-enabled chatbots and voice assistants for more human-like self-service interactions.
Tridion Docs: delivering the one right answer
Learn more about how to turn your content into a single source of truth with Tridion Docs, our intelligent content platform that is the number one CCMS on the market. Deliver the one right answer your customers are looking for, quickly and cost-effectively.
Arpita Maity
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