Improving customer experience with product documentation

Creating consistent and meaningful connections with customers is one of today’s biggest challenges for marketers. While they sometimes struggle to collect and reuse information to develop valuable content, sources are scattered and structured inconsistently. This whitepaper highlights the need to leverage product and marketing content, outlining:

• key pain points experienced through the use of product information
• the value of high-quality information to better engage with prospects and customers
• how product documentation can help your business stand out from competitors
• the need to integrate business content sources and management systems

Product documentation is usually published in PDF format and available for download in a dedicated area of a company’s website. Although PDFs have many advantages regarding layout and formatting, there are some disadvantages with respect to user experience:

• Insufficient search capabilities: Searching for information via a company website or search engines returns the complete PDF document. Users must then browse through several pages of content before finding the exact information they need. 
• Disconnected user interface: Switching from the download website page to the actual PDF document can result in a disruptive feeling for the user as these documents are usually not integrated with the main website.
•  Navigation inconsistency: Lacking integration with the main website, PDF documents don’t allow users to smoothly navigate back and forth between topics or related information. 

Marketing content is easily managed through a web content management system (WCMS), such as Drupal. Product documentation, however, demands more advanced editorial systems.

Managing technical content requires a granular and structured approach to support complex products and workflows:

• On one hand, there are the content component management (CCM) systems. They support content creation, management, translation and publishing of technical documentation across multiple formats and channels.
• On the other hand, there are product information management (PIM) systems. They use a company’s product master data and descriptions to create specific types of product documentation, such as comprehensive product catalogs.

CCM and PIM systems successfully address professional authoring, editing and publishing of product documentation. The integration of these systems and their outputs remains a challenge and often negatively impacts customer experience.

To ensure all potential users will have a consistent experience with accessible, user-friendly documentation, the various content sources and management systems must be integrated. This integration enables companies to do things such as make product catalogs available directly through their corporate websites as opposed to providing them via separate PDFs. The seamless integration of product and website information creates a competitive advantage by improving customer experience and thus increasing revenue from both new and existing customers.

Buyers spend 70% of their purchase decision making process searching for information online before contacting a supplier. The more complete and accessible information you have available about your products and services, the more likely you’ll be considered and selected as a potential vendor. Why? Because providing accessible product content improves customers’ purchase and after-sales experience. The better the experience customers have, the more likely they are to advocate or recommend a product, service or brand to friends and colleagues. This word-of-mouth serves as an effective “pre-sales” process that can increase win rates and revenue.

There are many ways to improve customers’ experience with product documentation. As we have learned from the previous observations, incorporating product documentation with marketing content can greatly benefit customer experience, increase revenue and boost brand advocacy, enabling your business to:

• Ensure information is up-to-date, consistently formatted and published on time
• Enable seamless integration with the corporate website by automating the publication of technical documentation in responsive HTML format 
• Create and present comprehensive online product or spare parts catalogs through the integration of PIM systems with the WCMS
• Optimize the corporate website’s search functionality, as customer searches will be rewarded with more precise answers and more relevant content. 
• Benefit from improved SEO, as detailed and up-to-date information will rank your business higher in search engines results 
• Use customer data and feedback to further personalize and contextualize product documentation.

The following diagram shows how a WCMS can serve as the integrating layer that connects marketing content and technical information, while still enabling each subsystem to autonomously manage its own master data.

This configuration facilitates a wide variety of interesting conversion scenarios and customer experience benefits, such as:

• Tailor information to the customers’ profile. For example, present only applicable spare parts and documentation for a customer’s specific product. This personalization can go even further by using insights from historical customer data, such as location, technical characteristics or buying history.
• Link product documentation and live chat functionality. This allows customers to provide direct feedback on products using “like”, “dislike”, “share” and “comment” functions. This feedback provides valuable insights for both customer support optimization and product development management.
• Website optimization. Integrating product and marketing content also enables further optimization of website design and enhancements to the information that responds dynamically to correctly fit any user device. You can even enrich content with additional media formats, such as 3D animations, video and sound.

Aware of the need to create consistent multichannel experiences, AMPLEXOR developed an end-to-end solution that breaks information siloes and optimizes communication flows, supported by the latest technology, trends and best practices.

AMPLEXOR TechCom Suite aligns the quality of your communication with the excellence of your products. As part of an enriched user experience, we ensure your product information reaches your global audience through seamless integration with our translation platform. We also enable you to leverage customer insights and users feedback to continuously improve customer engagement and drive conversion.