Gerry McGovern, founder and CEO at Customer Carewords, shares how to take better care of customers through the self-service content you provide.
The Age of the Customer
- In recent times, there’s been a collapse in trust…along with a rise in expectations
- Very little trust in organizations — power has shifted to customers
- Need to develop things for customers
- Web = essence of self-service
- Need to have empathy for customers and what they need to do
- Companies are going out of business faster than ever
- Avg. lifespan of a company in 1930: 60 years
- Today: 20 years
- Takeaway: If you don’t put customer first, your biz won’t exist much longer
- Cardinal rule for an organization: “I am not the customer”
The Culture of Volume
- Old world: culture of volume
- Obsession with production and making more and more content
- Misguided reasoning
- If we make more content, we will be more successful!
- Opposite is true
- New world: outcome focused
- Start testing things
- Identify the “old, smelly content” and do something about it
- It’s a driver of value to give people the right content, quickly
- Web teams should manage consumption, not production
Case in Point: Columbia College of Chicago website
- 36,000 pages reduced to 944 pages
- Got rid of content and doubled the amount of inquiries from prospective students
Case in Point: Norwegian Cancer Society
- Did task analysis and switched from biz focus to customer focus
- 5,000 to 1,000 pages (80% decrease)
- Results
- 70% increase in one-time donations
- 88% in monthly donors registered
- 164% increase in members registered
- 384% increase in incoming links
- 80% increase in visitors
Self-Service (and Other) Stats
- By 2020, the customer will manage 85% of its relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human (h/t: Gartner)
- 33% of millenials would prefer to clean a toilet, 23% would prefer to do physical labor than call customer service
- 1 million B2B salespeople in the US will lose their jobs to self-service ecommerce by 2010 (h/t: Forrester)
- Only 51% success rate using self-service on technology websites (h/t: Technoogy Services Industry Association)
- Online advertising spend going up; CTRs have crashed
- Odds of being hit by lightning: 0.03%; odds of clicking on a banner ad: 0.04%
- Technology is not a bridge; it’s turning into a barrier
- Executive distrust of B2B vendor websites
- Online content influences decision making: 88%
- Trust vendor websites: 9%
- We’re creating content that people don’t trust
- What’s the main reason a piece of content didn’t succeed in making a positive impression? 71% say it seemed like a sales pitch
- Marketers: look at us
- 93% connect their content directly to a product or service
Behavioral Studies
- Observe how people do things
- Only need 15-20 people to get reliable stats
- Measure the success of the most important things your customers are trying to do on your website
- Always be testing
The Real Need: A Task Strategy
- We shouldn’t have a mobile strategy or an experience strategy
- We should have a task strategy
- Test for the tasks users actually want to do
- If customers can do what they need to do, we all win
- More blog posts, auto-complete search, feature dumping — not what people want
- They want the right answers for their questions
- We need to focus on helping people succeed
- Don’t listen to customers
- Observe behaviors
- Don’t just go on gut instincts
- TEST ALL OF THE THINGS