Zohra: 0:04

Hello folks, welcome to Season 5 of Inside Techcom with Zohra Mutabana. This season, we are focusing on tools, tips and strategies to elevate your craft. Let's dive right in. Hello listeners, welcome to another episode of Inside Techcom with Zahra Murabana. All right guests. Today I am truly super excited because I have the content wrangler, mr Scott Abel. He is known as the content wrangler. He is a content strategist who helps companies improve the way they author, maintain and deliver information to those who need it. He is also the host of the most popular content-focused webinar show on BrightTalk. I have attended many of those and just learned so much from it. It attracts tens of thousands of viewers annually. He's also the co-author of Intelligent Content, a Primer and the Language of Content Strategy, so he is the content strategist guru in my opinion, and the creator of the content strategy series of books from XML Press. There's a lot more to glean from, so I'm going to keep this super short and with that, scott, welcome to my show.

Scott Abel: 1:16

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here and can't wait to share what I've learned with the audience.

Zohra: 1:20

You're welcome, Scott. In your own words, please tell us what more you would like to share about yourself.

Scott Abel: 1:26

Oh, I think you did a pretty good job. I'm a former journalist, so I was educated as a journalist. That comes in handy as a content professional today the same skills that journalists need. We need to produce great content and, of course, I became a content strategist just by virtue of participating in strategically important content initiatives. So I did not come to the field thinking I want to be a content strategist. How do I become one?

Scott Abel: 1:54

I was a technical writer working in a pharmaceutical company, and they have very strategic reasons to control the content that they produce. For all the reasons you might imagine. Their products are regulated and they're dangerous right under the content that they produce, for all the reasons you might imagine. Their products are regulated and they're dangerous right, and under the wrong circumstances they can harm people, and so they want to make sure the content is correct and right. The strategic part of it is that pharmaceutical companies are patenting their products, and so they're seeking legal protection for their products for X amount of time that the patent covers their product. So for every day that they do not sell their product, they cannot make money off of it. So the product has to be approved, and the content is how they get the product approved.

Scott Abel: 2:37

So I became a content strategist and then realized that I wasn't scalable as a human being. I couldn't grow as much as I wanted to. So I took an entrepreneurial development program and started to grow my company into a consultancy by delegating and hiring other people and growing a little bit. And I did that for a while and then became conference organizer to expand my reach. I wanted to be able to reach more people, so I created Information Development World, which is one of the conferences that I own.

Scott Abel: 3:05

I wanted to be able to reach more people so I created Information Development World, which is one of the conferences that I own. I co-own that with Val Swisher of Content Rules, who many of our viewers may also know of. And in the past I ran a conference, and co-owned it with Ann Rockley, called Intelligent Content, which was to teach technical writers how to do more advanced information creation, management and delivery methods. And that conference we sold to the Content Marketing Institute, maybe 10 years ago, when they realized that marketers could learn from technical writers the techniques that we use to deliver the right information to the right person at the right time in the right language and format. So all those things together, plus a little book publishing on the side, is probably a good way to describe what I do.

Zohra: 3:52

Amazing. You're a trailblazer, in my opinion. Probably when you became a content strategist was there even an awareness about it.

Scott Abel: 4:01

No, in fact I was working as a third party contractor for the pharmaceutical company, so that means that another company managed my relationship. They paid me and took care of my benefits and all that kind of thing, which also meant that they provided me with business cards. And they asked me what would you like your title to be? And so I thought well, what am I doing? I'm not just writing. This pharmaceutical company is really title to be. And so I thought well, what am I doing? I'm not just writing.

Scott Abel: 4:25

This pharmaceutical company is really trying to be strategic about how they create and manage and deliver the content. See, it's not just the creation, right, it's the management and the delivery of it, which meant that we were thinking strategically. So I just said well, we create content and of course we do it strategically. I must be a content strategist. This was 1999. So in 1999, my business card said content strategist. Before there were any books, any websites or anything about content strategy out there. Those terms may have been mentioned, maybe in academic literature or something. Probably for the same reason I put them together as a title. They just made sense. Right, we're doing content and we're doing it, of course, strategically. Why would you do it otherwise, right?

Zohra: 5:09

Yeah, absolutely. I want to understand a little bit more about the content strategy part that you played then and, in your opinion, has it evolved to become more? It is definitely better understood, but has that concept itself evolved into something else or has it, in your opinion, stayed the same?

Scott Abel: 5:27

Well, I think that's a tricky thing to define and to talk about, because humans tend to understand terminology the way that they have been trained to and exposed to, and so many people hear the words content and strategy and they thought, probably like I did in 1999, of course I'm doing my work strategically, I must be a strategist, right, I mean that just means you're not doing things non-strategically. But we didn't have a discipline, we didn't have vocabulary, we didn't have terminology that was the same for everyone. And so myself and some other folks from the technical documentation industry, including Rahel Bailey, who you may have had on your show before, rahel and Bailey she and I were frustrated with this lack of standardization and terminology that people could use that would mean the same things. So we created a book called the Language of Content Strategy and we invited 52 experts to each do the exact same task. Each person was to select one term that a content strategist would need to know in order to do their job well and define it and write a short essay about why you need to know what that word means. And we did that on purpose, because we were frustrated with the lack of standardization and a lack of a common vocabulary amongst content strategists. But we also did it because we thought we can turn this book into a project where we practice the content strategy techniques that we want people to mimic. We will produce the book. So we did. We produced a book, a website, a deck of cards, audio files all from a single source of content. We used technical writing tools to make a book, to make a website all from one source of content, and we were able to publish that content by repurposing it automatically.

Scott Abel: 7:19

And so we ended up with a case study that showed people the power of content strategy, thinking strategically and then applying those techniques to a real world project, which was just our book project, and then taking that a step further by running around from conference to conference in different industries and showing people you can make multiple deliverables from a single source if you think about it strategically. And of course, everybody wants to do that. They hear that and they go oh, that makes logical sense, let's do that. Of course, the challenge to answer the rest of your question is what happened to that discipline content strategy after that? Lots of people glommed onto it and thought this is good, we should be doing strategic work with our content, let's become content strategists, but unfortunately the messaging wasn't very strong about what a content strategist does, and so what a lot of companies heard was we need a copywriter that thinks strategically, so we will get a content strategist.

Scott Abel: 8:15

The strategist doesn't think they're going to sit there and write content all day, because that's what a copywriter does. They think that they were going to think about the ways that are most effective to put in place repeatable processes, with perhaps technology and other things to help tools, and a plan for making all that work right a plan for making it, initiating it, starting it off if you've never done it before. A plan for maintaining it when you start to use it for a while and you realize, oh, things are changing, we need to make adjustments. And then a plan for even moving away from the approach right to a new one. And thinking about all those things strategically is what a content strategist should be doing.

Scott Abel: 8:57

I think the challenge is that lots of people who are writers were glomming onto that title and they changed their title to content strategist and they never really got to do the strategy work, and some people who put their shingle out, so to speak, and said, hey, I'm a content strategist, hire me, were disappointed because the jobs that they were hired for were really nothing more than just writing a bunch of copy, which isn't a bad thing, but it's not the same thing isn't a bad thing, but it's not the same thing Agreed and I loved how you kind of gave that large view of what it was, without a terminology and a clear concept or an outline what it came to be and then what it kind of devolved into it in some places.

Zohra: 9:38

But I think this is my opinion. I'm actually writing a chapter on content strategy with Boffin Education and I'm doing my own research into it and what you shared management and delivery, thinking at a strategic level about content strategy that's something that I practice. Of course, my designation is not content strategist but I think at some level I in my role think about it and I glean a lot of that information from all the Bright Talk conversations. In fact, rahil Bailey's webinar that you had recently, I attended that and I took copious notes from that webinar and it really kind of helped me understand what is to kind of distill that definition of what a content strategist is. I suppose kind of grooming myself to become a strategist, even though my role may not particularly be of that. But I balance both and I think a lot of writers that I've interviewed recently are thinking at a strategic level as they think about management, delivery, even archiving and just the whole content. Lifecycle, and what do you do with it? Looking at your processes and then pivoting when needed.

Scott Abel: 10:45

Yeah, and asking questions that are sometimes challenging to ask. For example, a content strategist really has to talk to the team of content creators that they're going to be working with, and they need to be able to ascertain what the actual situation is. How much content do you have? Why do you produce it? How do you know it does what you think it does? Can you prove that it does that? What happens if you can't prove that? There are so many things that strategists could help do, but a strategist can also be an evangelist, and so one of my other roles I wear another hat.

Scott Abel: 11:21

I'm a content strategy evangelist for a software company called Hereto, which sells a component content management system, a type of advanced information management system that often technical communication shops use to create multiple deliverables in a more effective way than some other approaches. And when I'm doing that work, I may bump into people like you in our industry sector, and we all learn from each other, but it's more important for a content strategist to step outside of the content industry. So, for example, for me, I want to be in places where people are not talking about content. For example, in a manufacturing conference you will hear people talking about how can I streamline the way that we manufacture our product? How can we be more productive? How can we save time? How can we operationalize the way that the factory works so that we don't waste any energy? We don't waste any time or money or people's effort? That same concept is how content people think about operationalizing content production. So we want to create a content factory.

Scott Abel: 12:30

So a content strategist like myself might find themselves at a conference talking about content manufacturing to a bunch of people who do not make content. They make products and they manufacture them, but when they hear they do agile, they are iterative, they are trying to improve every time. They are using the same principles that we use. But what are these tools and techniques that they use? We've never heard of these before, and that's probably because technical documentation invented or helped spur a lot of those methodologies and those approaches that are now being used by other content teams, not just technical writers. So a content strategist can help evangelize, advocate for those kinds of changes in places that are not filled with content people and I think that's part of our role is how do we, as content professionals, explain the value of what we do to others so that they want us to participate in their projects, and they'll seek out our guidance. Meanwhile, we're going to learn from them things we didn't know, and we will become better at what we do.

Zohra: 13:35

Yeah, and I think this is a great segue to our topic at hand that we want to talk about. When you and I talked about it, it was you brought to my attention that customer experience kind of encompasses content and there are teams other than technical writing that have, quote unquote, claimed ownership of it. And how do we, as content creators, reclaim that ownership of customer experience and what its impact has on our industry and the overall business itself? So I'm going to dive right into that question to you, scott. Can you explain, since we're going to be talking about content experience, what is it and what does it encompass in your world?

Scott Abel: 14:20

What is it and what does it encompass in your world? Yeah, and when you hear the words content experience, there's some argument about whether that should actually be a term or not. It is because people use it that way. But let's just step back to customer experience. So let's just say that customer experience is a human experience, and the humans may or may not be customers. They may be prospective customers. Those people are not yet customers, right? They could be former customers. They may be prospective customers. Those people are not yet customers, right, they can be former customers. Those are people who used to be customers but are not customers any longer. And then there are customers. And what does that mean? Is a customer only someone who gives you money? Or is a customer other people in your company who also might need information? Is a customer a regulator, a third party or a board of directors member from your company that wants to do some research? Who are we serving? And so the customer experience needs to be something that's a high level thing, like a top layer, and then you can decide who your customer is. For example, software company technical writers often deal with SMEs who are software developers. Those software developers are called customers, but in their vernacular they call them developers, and then they change the word customer experience to developer experience. See how now it can be content experience, customer experience, prospect experience, regulator experience, developer experience. You can't have all these thousands of different kinds of experiences, so my argument is let's just start with the customer experience. And what is it? And it's most brief Customer experience encompasses everything that the human will experience when they interact with a brand, your company, your organization, your nonprofit, your educational institution, your government agency, whatever it may be, from the first interaction that they have to the post-purchase support for every touchpoint in between. So it's every single thing encompasses the customer experience. Consumers process what they experience, and then they have a feeling about it. They have expectations for the future based on past feelings. So if they've had good experiences with one brand, they have high expectations of the next interaction being equal to or higher than that.

Scott Abel: 16:35

So our job as content professionals is to say where, in the customer journey that they go through in order to become a customer or to stop being a customer or to learn how to become a customer where are they and how can we best service them? Because that's the experience that they want. They want to know that at each touch point, they're getting the attention they need, right? Humans crave attention, so we're really just the content conduit. How do we get the content in front of the customer at the right place in the journey? And that involves content orchestration, which is a strategic tactic. Right? We take those ideas and you can build upon them, and technical writers have been excellent at doing this.

Scott Abel: 17:18

So, to answer your question, how do we know who is in charge of the customer experience? Well, it turns out that Hereto recently did a survey that they're going to release a report on, which was called the state of self-service, where they asked leaders about their digital content and their self-service customer support experiences, and one of the questions they asked was basically like, who's in charge of the strategy? And you would think, maybe, if content is such a key component of every content strategy or every customer experience, that the content people would be in charge. But not often. In fact, sometimes it's the customer experience leadership that's in charge of the strategy for self-service support. You and I know that if you're frustrated already because a product doesn't work, you don't want to be frustrated trying to find the answer. You want the answer to be like the painkiller that takes the frustration away. Right? It's about making good on the promise that we value you as a customer and we want to give you a great experience.

Scott Abel: 18:21

So, as it turns out, customer experience is usually not run by technical communicators. Usually, the strategy is from customer experience, professional leadership, it leadership and customer support leadership. So the people who are actually hearing the complaints and the problems downstream are sometimes in charge of the strategy. Every company is a little different. Now, who's in charge of creating the content? Sometimes it's the technical writers who are in charge, but not always. Well, this begs the question if content is a part of every single customer experience, and customer experience and IT leaders are leading the way most of the time, what do they know about content? Or, maybe more importantly, what do they not know about content? Because what if they don't know that we create modular little pieces of content that metadata can route to the right person at the right time? They may reinvent a new way of trying to get the content to people that's incongruent with the way that we're doing it, which would mean that the enterprise will be doing the same kind of work in multiple ways, using different tools and different approaches, and sometimes different languages and different words, terminology, processes, so it's really kind of a customer experience is kind of the holy grail of content. If you can get closer to being associated with the positive customer experience of your brand, you will be less likely to be on the chopping block because they will see you as important to maintaining the customer experience.

Scott Abel: 19:50

Now why does customer experience matter so much? Intellectually, we know as humans we prefer to run, gravitate toward positive environments and positive things, and we push away or run away from negative. So a bad experience we don't want to have a good experience we gravitate to. We, as content professionals, our job is to create the best content experiences possible. But in order to do that, we may need to work in tandem with the people who are leading the strategy for self-service.

Scott Abel: 20:17

Now why would we care about that money? Because if a technical communication team does not have the charge or the goal from leadership to drive forward the self-service customer experience, why would leadership give the tech comp team money to buy tools? So the budget is sometimes in the customer experience department or the budget is hidden in the IT department, but we don't have access to that. And if they don't think that we're integral to their success. Why would they give us some of their budget to help us buy tools? But my argument is they should be doing that. They should help us buy tools. Excuse me. They should help us in every way that they can to make the experience the best that it can be.

Zohra: 20:58

Thank you. I never thought of it the way you explained it, but now I see how content and customer experience intersect Because, like you said, there is content throughout that customer experience journey and we should be working in tandem. You make an interesting point with why we should be part of this journey, but in my experience, as anecdotal as it may be, it looks like this survey or this poll confirms that, as technical communicators, we are not being seen as bringing value. I have tried to examine this, investigate and come up with my own answers, but why is it that the leadership not looking at the content creators as part of this customer experience journey?

Scott Abel: 21:45

I think part of that is in the way that we phrased that question. So there's an assumption that they are aware of us in order to look at us. How would they know to look for us if they don't know what it is we do? So we are viewed as often these are anecdotes, but I think they'll ring true to your audience we are viewed often as a cost center, not a revenue center. We are often sometimes described in the vernacular as a necessary evil, which seems ridiculous, since there's nothing evil about what we do, but I think that the cost of what we do is considered the necessary evil. They have to pay to have content produced, like documentation, because they don't know what else to do, right? They don't know how to create a great product, so they have to create a product that involves some explanation. If the product was super simple to use, there wouldn't need to be documentation. Like I don't need a documentation for an Apple, like. I'm talking about a physical, like a fruit, right. I know what to do with it and the instruction manual is not necessary, right? That may be oversimplifying it, but I think what's important to note is that we have different audience segments that can help us prove our value. For example, our content is often thought of as post-sale content. So, for example, when you purchase an automobile at least in the United States, in my experience the salesperson, after closing the deal with you, takes you to introduce you to your new vehicle and tell you a little bit about it, and probably put you in the driver's seat and give you the key and show you how to turn it on, and during the process, that person that salesperson probably then introduces you to the instruction manual that's inside of the glove compartment of the car, and that document is a traditional manual. It's something that they give you, but you don't get that manual until you buy the car. It is a post-sale deliverable. Until you buy the car, it is a post-sale deliverable. However, now all that content's on the web and Google indexes it, and so it turns out that about one in five people, according to the survey that Heretic took, they go to self-service options first, and they're prospective customers, so they're looking to see. Does this car have the same irritating feature I don't like about my current car? So I have a current car, I'm not happy, I want to buy a new one and I want to make sure that when I go to the website and look up how do I fix my tire or whatever it is that it's not as challenging as the current car I have. So the technical documentation helps provide me with confidence that I'm selecting potentially a good replacement for the car I do not like and I'm going to get a new car. But technical documentation was never designed to convert people into sales. It was designed to give to them after they buy something.

Scott Abel: 24:32

So one of the things that we need to recognize is that there's tremendous value in our content being provided for prospective buyers. Google will see that content as heavily relevant because it's loaded with rich keywords. There's not a lot of adjectives and flowery words in our content, right, it's very specific. How do you do this, why do you want to do this and what happens if that doesn't work? And those are questions that people ask Google and search engines all the time. If search engines are pushing people to our content and they are, and we know this we need to be able to measure it. So one important thing to recognize and I don't know if your experience is the same as mine, so I'll ask you this question too Do you find it to be a common pattern that a company let's say wwwcompanynamecom as a website, and that's their main website, it's their corporate website and then later they decide they need to have a documentation portal, so they create a new URL helpcompanynamecom or docscompanynamecom, and that's a separate property.

Scott Abel: 25:37

Well, as it turns out, the marketing team usually owns the -com site, and they havea budget and they have resources to help make people aware that they have a website and what they can find there and why they would want to use it, and they spend that money to attract people to the site, and they use google analytics on that site, or some other alternative to google analytics, to understand the metrics. Is the work they're doing providing the turnaround and the payoff that they promised? What are the results? Is the content performing? Turns out, though, that the documentation team isn't usually part of the marketing team, and so they do not have access to Google Analytics or another analytics platform, but when they add those to their site, one of our customers has 67 times more traffic to the documentation site than they do to the dot-com site. And keep in mind the technical documentation team budget for marketing. The site was zero dollars, so they had zero dollars. The marketing team has hundreds of thousands of dollars and yet the documentation content is bringing in 67 times more traffic. So that's one metric that can prove that our content has value. It doesn't prove the money connection, though. It just shows that people are interested, right, and that they're hitting the page.

Scott Abel: 26:53

But what happens if you can be strategic about your content? And what if you could put a small marketing message right next to a documentation topic? And what if you could put a small marketing message right next to a documentation topic? So one of the shows that I host, I had a guest on who had that exact problem. They had a demand their software company. They had a demand generation problem. They wanted to get their customers to upgrade to a new version of the software in order to help the company have more modern infrastructure. And interface.

Scott Abel: 27:22

And in order to do that, they had to email everybody and try to get them to convert. Some people upgraded, some people didn't. Well, if you didn't upgrade, there were a couple of tasks that you'd have to do at the end of the year that were really challenging. They were multiple steps. People didn't remember how to do it. They'd have to look it up every year and do it, and they hated it. So next to that procedure on the website there was a little button that the marketing team was able to add that said hey, if you don't like doing this, you know, if you just upgrade to the software, you'll never have to do this task again because the software will do it for you. Well, that documentation click the people that clicked from the documentation page to upgrade Now click the people that clicked from the documentation page to upgrade. Now one in three people that upgrade to the product are upgrading from the documentation page, not from the marketing page, which means that not everybody's reading the marketing content, but the content that's sought after the documentation, because it helps them overcome a problem. That's where they are getting the value and because marketing is strategically placing a message next to it that's valuable to the customer. It's not just a random marketing message. It's something that says, hey, if you hate doing this, just click here and you won't ever have to do it again. Some people are so attracted to that that they will. So their customer experience is better. They have a better feeling about the brand. They may stay your customer. They may tell other people, oh, they made it so easy, or oh, you're not still using the old version, are you? Did you know that if you upgrade? So now customers are helping other customers upgrade because all because of the technical documentation. So I think we've got a great opportunity for tech comm to be more closely in line with the content that is produced to yield a positive customer experience.

Scott Abel: 29:04

But we don't have the leadership awareness, and so your question was how do we make them aware? And I think that's evangelism and education. We have to go out and sing our songs, we have to praise our work, we have to show the value, and it can't be us whining. Nobody cares about us, we are not valued. That's not going to sell the leadership. That's not a business problem, right, that is a inconvenience and maybe it could be a problem, but it's probably not what the executive leadership is. Staying awake worrying about at night? They're probably worrying will they meet their sales quotas? Will they be able to deliver on the promises that they've made? So we have to figure out how can we align what we do to the leader's goals that are existing, so that they feel compelled to want to know more about what we do, instead of us just complaining that they don't know.

Zohra: 29:52

You know, you brought some interesting incidents that have happened in the recent past. For me, and I think the way I look at it is the way it blends customer experience with the content that we create. In this scenario, we were pushing out a new feature in a very old, established product and we were bringing it. We were kind of trying to promote early adoption, so we had select customers that it was rolled out to, so there was awareness being created, but some of the customers were not seeing it because we were promoting it and they wanted to try it out. And we got feedback through our health feedback.

Zohra: 30:28

This is not fair. When are we getting it? So that, to me, tells me that there's a touch point right there, that they're looking for this feature and they've been waiting for it because we've been talking about it. Marketing has been talking about it, we've been talking about it through our product documentation. Hey, this is coming. But then, once we started rolling it out, some customers started complaining when are we going to get it? And the general availability was a few weeks away. So, to your point, we do use Google Analytics, fortunately, and we are able to gauge. We have millions of users that come to our documentation website and what is their engagement rate? How long are they looking at a topic? I'm able to glean some really good information from that and make iterative updates. And now, when I think about it at a strategic level, I feel I'm not just making content changes, I'm not just adding a note or a tip, but I'm trying to improve that customer experience with that one little content that I'm adding there.

Scott Abel: 31:27

You're like the fine tuning or the fine augmentation of the content. Right, You're saying this is the basic content. What can we do to it to enhance its value? What can we do to detract from the confusion that we've become aware of? And when you have metrics and you have performance data, you can infer things right from the data, but you can also question it. You can say is this true? Let's change our strategy and see what happens. Let's do it a different way and compare the results. And that's not necessarily a technical documentation function, right, that's more of a strategy function. It's more of a business planning function or business analytics function. So technical writers, of course, have to wear many hats and we have to learn a little bit about all of these disciplines in order to be really effective customer evangelists.

Zohra: 32:14

Absolutely, and yes, we have to wear many hats and fortunately or unfortunately, I have never had the opportunity to work with a content strategist, but in some companies that I've been at, where the company has the budget for a larger team, we have roles for technical writers who are writing but also thinking at a strategic level. They're doing more of the strategy than the writing itself and I have definitely benefited from that.

Scott Abel: 32:40

It is a lesson. When you even just watching someone do that work, you can learn from them, and I think that it's important that we all know that we do each do strategic work, even if we're not a content strategist. It's just that sometimes our focus is so limited on what we're trying to produce that we're focused on that deliverable. We're not focused on am I creating a piece of content that can be as flexible and adaptable as possible? That may belong in 20 deliverables? And we don't think that way, because usually we're thinking about the deliverable we're trying to produce by a deadline, right? And so it's part and parcel to how we're organized sometimes and how we're taught to think. And I also think that companies that are more adventurous about how they'll assemble content, they'll take risks, they'll try new things, they learn lessons, and they don't always do it right. They sometimes mess it up and they go oh, we'll never do that again. That's important, right? That helps you understand that you made a mistake that did not yield a great customer experience. For example, if you use the wrong type of content management system to deliver content, you're not going to be capable of delivering the individualized responses that people expect today, and so it's not that Scott says it, it's that customers are getting this experience other places, and so, for example, I always use Netflix as an example. Netflix remembers what program I was watching, it remembers where I am right, and so in order to do that kind of personalization and recommend other things for me, it has to do three things it has to remember something about me, it has to be able to recall that it's not enough just to store the memory. It has to recall the memory and then it has to recommend another thing based on what they know in the memory. So it's like these R's right. It has to remember, it has to recognize and then it has to recommend. And in order to do that, you need to modularize your content.

Scott Abel: 34:40

So a whole slew I mean a major chunk of the technical documentation industry is not doing this. They are creating documents, not pieces, so the pieces can't be weaved together automatically or extracted from the documents easily and then repurposed in other documents. They lack the agility that's necessary to have an automated system, act upon the rules that we set up and deliver that content dynamically automatically without our help. Even though it's all technologically possible and it's not something that you buy you don't buy a content management system that does this magically. You buy a component content management system so you can manage components. But what does that mean? That means that we need to create components. But if you're creating documents that are made of components but you're not creating the components as individual modules, you can't manage them as individual modules.

Scott Abel: 35:33

The power of managing them, the modular pieces, the components, that's where the magic is, because if you want to deliver the right piece of information, it means you want to exclude things that are wrong. And if you could do that with rules, you wouldn't have to create a deliverable for one audience and a deliverable for another audience and a deliverable for another audience. Right, you could single source, publish that and you could have the right pieces show up for the right person based on the metadata that we know. Right, because we have to remember and recall, and then we recommend new content that will help make their experience better.

Scott Abel: 36:07

And if you're in a technical documentation team, especially a software shop, componentized content can help you to overcome the hurdles that you'll have trying to do it the old, traditional way, which is how can we write a manual that's useful to everybody in every scenario? Well, you can't. It's not. I mean you could. It would just be an 80,000-page document that no one's going to really have time or effort to read. So we have to be really cognizant of the customer experience, and I think that's why I think technical communication and customer experience need to be together more closely.

Zohra: 36:41

Yeah, I think you are right when we think about modular content and writing smaller chunks. That's something that even I have struggled with, and sometimes you're thinking only about the deliverable and just getting in front of the customer. So you don't have, even if you have the tool, you may not have the time and we are not given the resources. So you don't have, even if you have the tool, you may not have the time and we don't we are not given the resources. So I think, to address these challenges, it is extremely important to show why customer experience and content creators need to work in tandem and why we need to get that seat at the table early on.

Scott Abel: 37:21

Exactly and you hit the nail on the head. It's the value. It's the value of us working together. It's not the value of us, it's the value Okay, I'll say it a different way In the candy market.

Scott Abel: 37:32

So I'm not a candy person, but this dawned on me as a good example there's a product known as Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and when they first did their commercials when I was a child, I remember seeing these television commercials where two people would be like long lost lovers and they're running through an empty field with their arms open oh, I've missed you so much. And when they run and they bump into each other, they give each other a hug, right. Well, on the commercial for the Reese's candy, the one person let's say the man was carrying some peanut butter, who knows why, in the middle of a field. He was carrying peanut butter, but he was and the woman was carrying chocolate. And they run together. And when they smash into each other to give each other a hug, the man says wait a minute, you've got your chocolate and my peanut butter. And she says you got your peanut butter and my chocolate. Well then, they taste it. The message is they're better together. And so I think that's our message it's better. Together, it's better.

Scott Abel: 38:30

The experience will be likely to be better if you are informed by the people who understand the challenges we have, communicating what to do, how to fix a problem, how to overcome a problem, and that means that we need to have the support people, too, and the training people, right. Everyone needs to come together and help us understand the customer's actual journey, Not the one we imagine that they're going to take, but the one that they really take, the problems they really have with our products, the unexpected things that can cause an experience to be horrible. I mean, just think if you were on a wedding or a very important trip for some reason and your travel went awry, your experience is not going to be good. The only way that it can be salvaged is if somebody goes out of their way to help you overcome your problem in the best way. They know how and content.

Scott Abel: 39:20

People in the technical documentation space tend to be empathetic. That way, we aim to help them. We want really to help, but we're not given all the knowledge we need in order to give the best service every time. But that's true of the customer experience department too. They may have a budget and they may know things we do, but they don't have the tools or the techniques or the knowledge or know-how we do. So they won't be, even if they want to.

Scott Abel: 39:45

They won't be able to deliver the right little pieces of content because they'll be busy creating documents. See what I mean? They can't weave them together on the fly. They can't say we need to create a new set of deliverables by tomorrow and we want to repurpose 85% of our existing content, but then we're going to write a couple of new things. They won't do that. They'll do what everybody does They'll open an existing document and they will duplicate it. They will change the name of the document and then they will go through and edit it and then they will inadvertently leave accidentally some of the old content from the old document and then that content will be produced and provided to people and that will be a less than satisfactory experience for those people because of the way that we created the content, allowed errors to creep in. It allowed old, outdated content to be in there that wouldn't have been in there if we had done it in a more advanced way, innovative way.

Zohra: 40:38

Yeah. So I think through this conversation, definitely collaboration is key and, speaking with marketing, upstream training, support, we are all content creators and, as you think about the customer experience journey, there are touch points with all these different departments, but the sooner we all come together and start talking, the better it is, and I've seen anecdotally the success or the failure when we've not been brought earlier to the table. We've talked about metrics. This is one way to elevate to the top leadership what value we bring, and I've talked to enough guests on my show who have given some great insights on how we need to approach what we need to approach. We need to speak the business language. We need to speak in the language of the executives. With metrics, with the dollar value in, however, we can show how this translates to dollar value. We've talked about metrics. Do you have any insights on how we can convert this information that we've talked so far to the dollar value?

Scott Abel: 41:46

Yeah, I think if we're working more closely with people in the customer experience and the customer satisfaction arena, so that's another team that we could. In some companies there's a customer satisfaction. So keep in mind if you just went plain strictly by the title, remember our discussion earlier content and strategy right, we know what content is and we know we do it strategically. So therefore we're content strategists. If you have customers, you know what those are and you know what satisfaction is. That's happiness, right. Then you know to make your customers happy, you don't do things that make them unhappy. So we need to be working with those teams to determine what metrics and I'll tell you what they collect. So these are from the Horeto survey, the self-service support survey. It turns out that the metrics that they're most likely to emphasize that mean something to them are things like customer satisfaction, customer retention, self-service, traffic and usage, first contact resolution. Did they solve the problem on the first try? Right? Adoption rate if it's a new product or you're trying to upgrade somebody who's an existing customer to a new product. In the example I gave you, technical documentation's intent was not to convert people. But when marketing and tech comm got together, like the peanut butter and the chocolate example. But when marketing and techcom got together, like the peanut butter and the chocolate example, they were able to make a better experience for the customers who did not want to follow that long procedure but had never been tempted to upgrade before, and because they were presented with the upgrade as a solution to the problem they had, they were able to record that as a success. So those are the kind of metrics that we don't collect Feedback, issue, resolution, time, deflection rate, cost per resolution. So we won't be able to get all this metrics ourselves because we don't have access to this. That's why participating with customer experience and customer satisfaction leadership will get you the high level support that somebody at a lower level will listen to you because upper management is ordering this down right, like, please go do this and find out a way to do it. But if we start we're pushing up. We don't have anybody ordering it down right, and so if we start to understand the metrics that matter to these other teams, we could say did you know that we collect metrics today?

Scott Abel: 44:01

You may collect metrics on your website, but you're only collecting the time on the page. I want to know which piece of content converted them and if you have modular content, you can have modular tracking right. If you only have a page as your smallest unit of measure, then you can only measure what happens on how many people clicked on that page. How long did they stay on that page? That's nice. What did they do on the page? What did they find useful? What converted them, what took them to being frustrated, to being satisfied? And so it is complicated.

Scott Abel: 44:34

But it is also not the metrics that we have. Counting the words is about us. Counting the page is about us. Counting how many people did a typo is about us. It's not the customer.

Scott Abel: 44:45

So I think we really have to flip our viewpoint around and if you copy off of mimic other successful initiatives, going and pretending that you don't know a lot about, even if you think you know a lot, go and pretend you don't know a lot. I don't know how much it cost us to do a support ticket. How does this work? Go, be inquisitive, go talk to those folks and find out what they care about, and then weave in what they care about into what you do, and now they see you as trying to help them do what they need to do and they'll be more willing.

Scott Abel: 45:17

Not always will they be receptive, but they may be more willing to help you and, with the help we're combining our expertise, we're going to be able to enhance the customer experience and then measure those things, go back to leadership and say the retention rate is up 10% ever since we did these three things. Now we need to test it to make sure it's these three things that are causing that right, because it's not a correlation, it's not a causation right. We need to know what caused it, and I think that's why we want to team up with customer experience and customer satisfaction, because they care about those metrics and they will be willing to help you figure out how to collect them. The argument with tech writers will be we don't have the money and we don't have any of the tools to do it Right, but those people who have the money need the metrics and they will help you if they can, if you can make a convincing argument, and I think this is something that technical communicators have not had an opportunity until now to do.

Zohra: 46:14

Oh, yeah, I think that is absolutely true. My company has a customer success team and I think they're probably the customer satisfaction because they're really invested in making sure that the customers find success. Exactly To me, until recently, all the other companies that I had worked at did not have a customer success team. And now, when you're telling me and I wonder customer success, what does that mean? And as we continue to talk through this whole customer experience journey, the value of customer success teams makes so much sense to me now. But then it's also all about collaboration and taking this top-down approach.

Zohra: 46:53

In terms of the metrics, I think you gave us some great ways to look at how content can be helpful in sort of giving us the cues to see where we are failing, where we are succeeding, because there is a lot of information to say. This data can tell you some good story and I'm personally seeing it with all the analytics that I'm. In fact, this is my goal for this year to focus on analytics, because I'm not a number person and whatever numbers I can glean from, whatever story I can tell to myself about the product and the content that I'm creating, because at the end, it is about the customer experience journey and, to be honest, there's a lot of negative feedback. But then my goal is to how do we convert that? At least they're telling me. Customers are telling me where the gaps are, where things are failing.

Scott Abel: 47:35

Think about this too. Sometimes we just assume that if we find out what they don't like, we can fix it and then they'll like it. That has nothing to do with satisfaction. Sometimes we just assume that if we find out what they don't like, we can fix it and then they'll like it. That has nothing to do with satisfaction. Sometimes that's us attempting to try to figure it out and we're not scientific about it. So let me tell you that there's a thing called the customer effort score and it measures how much effort a customer must exert to resolve an issue, fulfill a request or answer a question. So think about it.

Scott Abel: 48:01

The things that are the problems are they cannot resolve the issue, they cannot fulfill a request and they cannot find an answer. So if we can help them resolve, fulfill or answer, the score will go up, and that's something that we can actually say. These are three different things. We design content that helps you resolve an issue. We did another one that helps them fulfill a request, another one that helps them answer a problematic question, and then we could gauge the success there.

Scott Abel: 48:29

Anyway, there's a customer effort score and you can Google that. It's put out by the I want to say the corporate executive board, I think developed this and they give you a rating system, one to five, and it's a scoring system right, you can Google it and learn a little bit about it. But that's a good place to start, because now we're not talking about counting the things we care about words and phrases and typos and blah, blah blah, but instead we're asking did the issue get resolved? Did we fulfill their need? Did we answer their question? And if the answer is no, 95% of the time, then you know we have a 95% opportunity to do better.

Zohra: 49:06

Right, yeah, and I think you brought up an extremely important point.

Zohra: 49:11

As I'm looking at my data, it's not about what typo or what missing information am I fixing, but how am I elevating that?

Zohra: 49:19

For example, one of the outcomes that I've had is I meet with my product manager frequently and, based on the feedback, they've prioritized a feature that we thought could be pushed down the road and addressed at a later time.

Zohra: 49:33

There are more conversations happening around that, so sometimes content may not be able to fix what the issue is, but we are starting to talk to customers and tell them we are hearing you and we are going to be working on this and it's an iterative process, but it's coming, so you keep your. I think that sort of even drives up the customer retention because now they may, they will believe you that, okay, my company is listening to me and they want to address the problems that I'm having with this product. So I think the customer effort score where the effort that they're putting in, they're giving us the feedback, and how are we responding to that effort itself. They may have other challenges and we may not be able to address all of that at once, but the fact that they are being heard and listened to also, I think, through your content experience, through their content engagement in a way adds to that customer experience in a positive way.

Scott Abel: 50:23

Definitely. I think you're onto something there. The other thing that you could think about when you think about how to have satisfaction, customer satisfaction is that we do have to track metrics in order to know whether we technical communicators are using our time wisely. Are we able to project a deliverable date based on a certain volume of work? We anticipate that we'll have to do right, and so we do need those other miscellaneous metrics that don't appear to be extremely valuable for customer experience. But that's because, in order to accomplish the work we need to do, to put our contribution into the customer experience right, our content we need those metrics, but that's not to help with the customer experience, that's to help us do our job better. Do we have enough hours in the day to produce a hundred data topics? Right? That's. Those are the kinds of questions we're trying to answer. Do we have enough credits with our software in order to produce all the things that we want to do? You know those are. Those are strategic, tactical things we have to do.

Scott Abel: 51:19

But if we're going to be concerned about customer satisfaction and customer experience, we're going to be connected to sales. We're going to be connected to preventing churn, right? Nobody wants a software company customer to buy something and then not relicense it the next month because they can't figure out how to use it. Well, that's where onboarding comes on right, if we are good at helping with the onboarding experience and we don't just leave it to the UX team and the marketing team but we say, wait a minute, wait a minute, we've got 20 years of experience over here.

Scott Abel: 51:47

There's three things we would do better or differently. Let us suggest some improvements. Those small improvements might be the thing that ticks up that metric and makes the customer satisfaction score higher. Right, because we might have done something that was useful. And they'll be able to measure those improvements, because they're gonna be able to tell the before and the after, and I think that's one of the things that technical writers can contribute to in a really meaningful way reducing the amount of people that wanted to quit our products, keeping the ones loyal who were there so that they want to remain. Our customers continue paying us and maybe even buy new products from us when we release new things because they trust us. Right, and that's not something that technical writers are often asked to do. We're not asked to convert, we're not asked to build trust, we're not asked to build loyalty, but in effect, our great content helps buttress those feelings and when people have a confidence, it's partially because they believe what we're telling them is going to save them time and not waste any time.

Zohra: 52:46

Beautifully articulated and I think all the value so far. What I'm gleaning from this conversation, scott, is having those metrics. That data is super important, collaboratively on your end, individually, whatever you can do to gain that insight. I've been at a company where they did not want to track Google Analytics. What would you say to such companies? One, their documentation is not available, so prospects cannot look at it. Everything is gated and no analytics. We were denied analytics.

Scott Abel: 53:19

Yeah, I mean it's hard to say what the interpersonal complications of an individual situation would be. You know your example, for example, because people are part of the problem and they're also the solution. Right, so the people are what we need to do better. But then sometimes the people get in the way of us trying to do better, so there may be a turf issue sometimes. For example, one marketing team wanted to know why we wanted to have access to their Google Analytics and we're like, because we're at the same company, producing the content for the same customers, that's a good reason, right enough, right there. But that wasn't what they saw. What they saw was we were encroaching in their turf and there was also some fear that we were trying to introduce this new concept of content. You know, componentized content management. What they heard was you're trying to take away our website. We weren't interested in managing their website. We were interested in feeding content into their website, so they didn't have to refashion it. Right, they didn't have to read our stuff and then write some marketing version of it. We could write something that was appropriate for both channels, because we know where it's going to land and then the tool will deliver or land the content where it needs to go, based on the smarts that we can add with the metadata right, the intelligence to the content.

Scott Abel: 54:33

In the marketing team, in the customer support team, in the customer satisfaction team, they're probably not creating semantically rich content. They're probably not creating semantically rich content. They're probably not creating topics. They probably are concerned about SEO because they think it will drive traffic to a web page. But what happens when our content is semantically enhanced and you do a Google search and the content appears on the Google search results page? That means that there's no need to click through. That's called a zero-click search. I want to say somewhere upwards of 60% to 70% of queries about how do I do something are now fulfilled by Google on the search engine results page.

Scott Abel: 55:12

Keep in mind that's a huge shift. It means that the marketers are sitting over here with KPIs how many people clicked on the website? Ooh, let's get that number up higher. And then they hope that they amplify their SEO. You'll search for that and then you'll click, and then that click is the reward. It gets associated with their success. So their success metrics are not aligned with the customer. The customer doesn't care how many times you click through to the website. The customer said I asked Google a question. Google gave me the answer. Guess what? If it's the right answer and it worked, the customer's probably not mad at you and it's probably going to be satisfied, right? At least they won't be dissatisfied.

Zohra: 55:55

Yeah, I think so. To make the case to a company where one the content is gated and it's not being indexed by Google you talk about how quickly can you find? Can a customer Google that content and find it? And if they can, right there you don't have an angry customer and you've improved their customer journey and their customer experience.

Scott Abel: 56:15

And you have no way to count that. So this is the conundrum. So this is the conundrum. So on a conference call with a board of leaders from a company I was helped consult with, the customer satisfaction manager had not really participated. That person like a good idea. But what about our KPIs? Because we get, we get rewarded by how much traffic comes to the site and we're counting how many clicks. And then all of a sudden the customer satisfaction manager unmuted themselves and said pardon me, I realize I haven't been participating very much, but did you just complain that the big problem we have is that that when people click, when they get the answer on Google without clicking that, you don't get to count the click. He was like because we don't exist to count clicks. That's not what our goal is. Our goal is to convert these customers into repeat paying customers who buy a subscription to our software, and what we want is for them to continue doing that. And in order to do that we need to make them as satisfied as possible. So the marketing person said well, what should we do? And he said you should change your KPIs, because clearly that was a KPI that was appropriate for the day that you made it.

Scott Abel: 57:29

But technology changed and now tech writers are able to create more rich content and Google's able to understand it, and it figured out how to display the answer on the Google page. So now we need to change. So on the Google page. So now we need to change. So I think the message for technical communicators is that we have so much potential value that we can add to the customer experience and that we can help leaders understand. But we're gonna need to go out and sell our stories, tell our successes, partner with them and don't go and complain about what we don't have. Instead, say here's what we do have that we can help you with, and if we have these other things, we can even help you more. But let's start with what we can do for you today.

Zohra: 58:05

Yeah, I think this is a great way to wrap up. You gave us exactly what data to look at and how to convert that into our success story. If we can say that story and all that story, all that data, can come from the collaboration with all these other teams, other departments and contribute to that positive customer experience. So I think, so far as I talk to more guests, I've always challenged myself on how do I prove myself as a writer, to be a profit center and not a cost center myself as a writer, to be a profit center and not a cost center and I've learned a lot. But you gave us a lot more insight on how we can really push for that positive narrative rather than, oh, yes, let's talk about our success stories, but what does that mean in terms of data itself? So you gave us a lot of good information there, Scott.

Scott Abel: 58:57

Yeah, and it's also important to know that myself included and other consultants in the space, we learn from other people. So when I said earlier, go and pretend that you don't know something. One of my strategies is that I will go to the accounting department and a client that I'm helping and I will say to the accountant we're trying to figure out how much it costs. And you know, the manager said we got some people, we got some computers and some software. Let's add that up. Am I missing anything else? Yes, and then they have a whole list of a whole. We know we have an overhead, we have insurance, we have a payroll, we have a building and cleaning benefits, like you know a whole bunch. And so they can help you because they understand the money. But they're not often in tune with what we're trying to do. So you sometimes have to use psychology to get what you want. And so I basically go in and say I don't know anything. Thank goodness I'm here with you, the smart accounting person, because my manager is clueless and has no idea how to determine what it costs.

Scott Abel: 59:55

But I was sure that it was more than just the payroll and the software and the computer. And then all of a sudden you've got an advocate, because they hear you respecting them and that they can educate you, and if you're quick about it, you don't hog up a lot of their time. They're usually willing to help you and that then becomes a slide in your slide deck that you give to executives. And guess what? It's not you and I making up numbers, because we have an Excel spreadsheet. It's Dan from accounting who they know. This is the cost of this, and if you could reduce the cost by this much, you would show this much more profit. They know those numbers. We don't.

Scott Abel: 1:00:33

So I think it's inherent in what we need to do to become better professionals, to cross those borders with those other silos and make sure that those people understand we're there trying to help them accomplish their goals and they don't need to know all the minutiae, right? They don't need to know about XML and component content and all the things that we need to know. Just like when you have a brain surgeon, the people helping the brain surgeon need to know what they need to know. They don't need to know how to do brain surgery, and I think that's what we have to figure that out. How do we talk about the hot button issues that our leaders care about in a way that makes sense to them, without flooding them with a bunch of extra minutiae that they don't really care about.

Zohra: 1:01:13

Great advice, and I think at this point I obviously did not stick to the script, because you gave us such great information and this became more of a chat than a guided conversation. Is there any one takeaway, scott, that you would like our audience to remember from this entire conversation?

Scott Abel: 1:01:31

Yes, the companies that are actually focusing on their customer experience and recognizing that technical content is one part of it. It is not all of it right. That experiences everything right, from your voicemail message to the signage, to the way your people behave and interact with folks. So we have to be able to competitively differentiate ourselves. We have to be able to figure out how does the content that we produce help our company differentiate us from the competition? How does it help us retain customers? How does it help us prevent loss, which increases revenue potential? Right, by avoiding a churn, for example.

Scott Abel: 1:02:10

And then how do we set proper customer expectations so that the company that we work for understands what the consumer expects, so that we can more closely align what we want to deliver to them right, and if we can do that, we can also help with branding. It also helps with data and insights, because we have a standardized way of doing things, which means that it's easier to count our things, but only if they're aware of what they are. So we really just have to, I think, go out there and push our message, get out and educate people and explain the ways that we can help them do the things they already want to do. They want to grow revenue, produce less losses, increase the brand reputation, make sure that people are happy about the brand, and they, of course, want to have data to prove all that, because management is going to ask the leaders that we ask for help. What did you do with that money that we gave you and how do we know that it paid off?

Zohra: 1:03:05

Great advice, I think. On this note I'm going to wrap this up. Thank you so much, Scott, for coming on my show, giving us your time and giving us all this valuable insight and just taking us through this great journey of yours.

Scott Abel: 1:03:22

Well, thank you, I appreciate it, and while I'm here today doing this work, I should let you know that there are many, many people who are aware in our industry sector that this is the direction that we should be heading, and you'll see all kinds of vendors and consultants trying to provide advice to help you provide better customer experiences, and that it's just behooves us to pay attention to those things, to learn from them and to adopt whatever we can in practical, pragmatic ways to help our companies deliver the right piece of content to the right person at the right time, in the right format and the language of their choosing, on as many devices as they may want to interact with us with.

Scott Abel: 1:04:00

And that's a big challenge and it takes orchestration that you can't do alone. So partnering with these other teams is super smart and it will help educate them about what we do and help us improve the value. If you do it right, some of these folks will become your allies and they will sing your praises in other parts of the company because they know what you do and they know the value.

Zohra: 1:04:22

I love the plug that you gave Scott. This is empathy, and I love that you sort of brought that to the fore.

Scott Abel: 1:04:29

Well, thank you for that. I appreciate it. I hope I provided some useful information to the audience today.

Zohra: 1:04:34

Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you so much, scott. It was great having you today. Thank you, thank you so much, scott.

Scott Abel: 1:04:38

It was great having you today.

Zohra: 1:04:40

Thank you. Subscribe to the podcast on your favorite app, such as Apple, spotify or YouTube Music. For the latest on my show, follow me on LinkedIn or visit me at wwwinsidetechcomshow. Catch you soon on another episode.