Chapter 7. What does your customer really need?

Before restructuring the content for effective reuse and delivery to customers, you need to determine how well your current content is meeting your customers’ needs and identify any gaps in the content. Simply producing a content strategy based on your current practices or improving the way you produce content will not help customers if you are not producing the right content.

Your content is used by many different customers, both internal and external. Internal customers are those within your organization who use content to assist them in doing their jobs, making decisions, and supporting the customer. External customers are those outside your organization (for example, customers and stakeholders) who use content to get information about your company, such as what products and services you provide, how to use your products and services, and how to contact you.

You may not be able to interview your customers directly, but you can interview people in your organization who do have contact with your customers, for example, staff who work in marketing or customer support. However, you should make every attempt to conduct customer research. Creating content without a solid knowledge of your customer requirements results in ineffective and ultimately costly content because you have to substitute for inadequate content with higher customer support and lost sales.

Identifying customer needs

To determine customer requirements you have to understand customers’ needs in more depth. You need answers to the following questions:

• Can you group your customers into categories? How many categories? What defines each category?

• What content does each customer use and when?

• Is the content for one customer group different from that for another customer group? How is it different? Where does it differ?

• How do customers access your content?

• How do they want to access your content?

• What content do they need to know? What content is nice to know?

• At what level of detail do customers want to see content? Do they always want to see it at the same level of detail, or do they want to be able to switch from very detailed to top level?

• What are their interests in your content?

• What are their goals in using your content?

Conducting a needs assessment

There are many ways to conduct a needs assessment, ranging from formal to informal. Methods include:

• Interviewing people in your organization who do have contact with your customers: marketing, sales, customer support.

• Analyzing existing customer information.

• Gathering new information, in the following ways:

• Using a Web survey.

• Interviewing members of your customer base through a focus group or by telephone or email.

• Testing a key information product (for example, website) for usability.

• Reaching out using social media.

Analyzing existing customer information

If you already have customers you should already have some customer information, though it may not be as focused or as in depth as you would like. Talk to people with the following roles to gain an understanding of your customers.

Marketing

Marketing staff understand who they are marketing the product or service to. They may not know exactly what content customers need, but they’ll have a good idea of who they are. Marketing should be consulted not only on the requirements of customers, but also from the perspective of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), value-added resellers (VARS), and partners because they’re all customers too. Ask marketing:

• Who are the primary customers?

• Where do your customers come from (region/country, referring site, search engine)?

• What platform are they using: Mac, PC, smartphone (OS)?

• Who are the secondary or associated customers?

• What do they know about the customer profile?

• What do customers need to know to make the buying decision?

• What do they think are the most effective ways to reach the customer?

Sales

If you sell a fairly large product or service, salespeople are always in front of prospective customers—or at least they sure want to be! Sales staff deal with customers all the time and have firsthand knowledge of where the customers are experiencing pain. Ask sales many of the same questions you ask marketing as well as ones that relate to the kind of content they need in a proposal:

• Who are the primary customers?

• Who are the secondary or associated customers?

• What do they know about the customer profile?

• Where do your customers come from (region/country, referring site, search engine)?

• What platform are they using: Mac, PC, smartphone (OS)?

• What do customers need to know to make the buying decision?

• What do they think are the most effective ways to reach the customer?

• What kind of content do you need for your proposal? How much is unique to the proposal and how much is reusable content?

• What content do they point the customer to (brochures, the Web, product content, other)?

Customer service

Customer service has an incredible amount of knowledge about your customers. Granted, they’ll most often hear the complaints or frustrations, but that information is fodder for what needs to change and where the content gaps are, and will tell you about the tasks customers are trying to complete. Ask customer service the following:

• Who do they think are your customers? Their answers may surprise you. You may have an audience you never even thought of before.

• What are the most common questions that people ask? This is going to tell you where people are experiencing problems and give you a good indication of what people are trying to do.

Don’t forget to ask customer service about what makes callers happy or what they say “works.” Believe us when we say that most customer service people will remember those who mentioned something good!

Web analytics

If your content resides on the Web, then web analytics can be invaluable in providing you with information about your web visitors. Web analytics are becoming more functional all the time, enabling you to gather ongoing information for continual measurement.

Use web analytics to answer these questions:

• Where do your customers come from (region/country, referring site, search engine)?

• What platform are they using—Mac, PC, smartphone (OS)?

• What did they look at and where did they go on your site?

• What landing pages did they land on? What page did they exit from?

• What keywords did they use to search for information?

• How frequently do they visit your site?

• How recent was the visit?

• How much time was spent on site?

Customer satisfaction surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys are another good place to start. Unfortunately many of them focus on just the product or service and not the site’s content, but even without specific content questions you can still glean some information. If you have content questions, bonus! If not, make sure you do for next year.

Gathering new information

Even if you have good existing customer information you may need to reach out to your customers to gather more detailed information.

Surveys

Surveys are a great way to get top-level information from your customers.

Ask people to take a survey as they access or exit the site. Or ask people to take a survey after they have searched for and used information to determine if they found it useful or not. Be careful not to launch the survey over and over again or you risk irritating your customers. Nothing is more annoying than a survey that pops up every time they do something.

If you have a customer list, email them a survey. Entice them to respond by giving them an opportunity to win free products or services, or an exciting new gadget. Be sure to have an automated response that thanks people for taking the survey.

Think carefully about the design of your survey; free text questions are more difficult to analyze and score while questions that ask customers to score are easier to measure, chart, and use to illustrate business arguments.

If you have customers with whom you would like to grow or deepen the relationship, call them and ask them directly to participate in a survey. Provide them with a customized URL, and make sure they feel that their answers will help you serve them better.

Interviews or focus groups

You can gain really valuable information from a focus group or one-on-one interviews. User/customer conferences are a great opportunity to gather customers together for a focus group. You don’t often get the opportunity to actually talk to “live” customers, so make sure you get the desired results by being fully prepared. Interviews and focus groups let you ask the standard questions, but they then delve down further to expand on the answers to get a rich understanding of customer needs. Be sure to thank all participants afterward for giving you their valuable time.

Customer interviews are critical to understand how the intended audiences use and access your content, and to determine what changes should be made to accommodate them. Customer interviews can help you realize how similar groups of people need similar types of information and if the content they need is there. Customer interviews can also tell you in which format customers prefer to receive information (web static or dynamic, mobile, print).

Refer to Chapter 9, “Analyzing the content lifecycle” for sample questions.

Usability testing

When people think about usability testing, they often think about testing the product. You can test your information products as well (website, mobile site, user guide, help, mobile app, eBook). Define a scenario and tasks that these products need to perform, and then observe their performance. See how they navigate the content, where they get stuck, and what questions aren’t answered by the content.

Social media

Reach out to your community and start a conversation. Track your social media responses and see what people are saying on other influential social media sites:

• Write a blog entry asking your customers for feedback.

• Ask a question on Twitter and track the responses.

• Post a question on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Personas

After you have finished identifying customer needs, consider creating a persona for each of your major customer types. A persona is a profile of a typical customer. It is created based on a series of interviews with actual customers. The persona is not impersonal the way a standard customer description is; you write a persona as though you are describing a real person. The persona has a name, a history, and a set of goals. Personas help authors and designers and others within your organization understand who they are designing the content for. When authors and designers satisfy the goals of the persona, they also meet the needs of users with similar goals. It’s easier to design when you have real people with real goals in mind. The persona makes the design exercise real and applicable rather than abstract.

The concept of a persona was introduced by Alan Cooper in his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. Since then, personas have been used to create marketing campaigns, software, websites, training, and documentation, and of course products. It makes a lot of sense to use personas to create effective content as well.

To create a persona:

• Determine how many personas you require to effectively address your customer base.

• Give each persona a name and a picture.

• Describe the persona. Include as much detail as possible (likes, dislikes, needs, desires, personality type).

• Define each persona’s goals. Design decisions are based on goals, so take great care in preparing the goals.

Summary

Customers are your reason for being. You need to gain an in-depth understanding of your customer so that you can create and structure the content to meet their needs. Use every avenue open to you to gather information:

• Interview sales, marketing, and customer support.

• Analyze existing customer information.

• Gather new information in these ways:

• Use a web survey.

• Interview members of your customer base by telephone or email.

• Conduct a focus group with members of your customer base.

• Test a key information product (for example, website) for usability.

• Reach out using social media.

• Create a persona for each of your major customer categories.