Speaker Insight [What's this?]

Big question with many possible answers. But thinking very practically, with lack of integration and siloed internal processes, customers will get their content too late.

Remember those Dark Ages and the Reader Comment Forms? Six-month or longer turn-around cycles on updates? Lost market opportunity as competitors came out with more current product and content releases? Your own lost time when you couldn't find the information you needed to solve a configuration issue with your workstation? Content agility is enabling information to help you work smarter, not harder.

We have had direct feedback from customers indicating that they do not differentiate between types of information they get from our company, NetApp. In Information Engineering, we are of course keen to learn what customers like and don't like about our "documentation". But for most customers, it's just information that's either useful or not, that either addresses their needs at that moment or doesn't.

I detect impatience on the part of our customers -- which I'm completely sympathetic with, I feel it myself in products I buy -- who don't want to be burdened with having to understand our internal corporate organization to find and interpret the information they need.

While it's still important to us to learn how customers use our documentation products, this realization about customer experience is starting to have a very positive effect within NetApp. Rather than having an "integrated content strategy" developed theoretically and applied top-down, our customers are demanding it of us from the bottom up. Since our customers are now demanding something that we in Information Engineering have been advocating for years, we now have much more visibility as customer advocates.

Poor integration in internal processes slows delivery, costs more and frustrates staff and customers alike.

When working for a healthcare company: taking it to the limit, documentation can become a matter of life and death...

Increased costs from:

• Authoring
• Translation
• Management

• Inaccurate documentation
• Late deliveries
• Redundant work and effort.

Customer experience, customer experience, customer experience. Organizations need to nurture their customers from initial interest in their product or service, right through the interaction and buying process, through to post-purchase support and communication.

Now that most consumers buy based on content and not touching products, organizations need content to flow, to be consistent, and to ensure the customer experience is the same whatever stage they are at in the purchase process.

I think the biggest barriers to content excellence today are in the areas of collaboration across content sources, communications teams, and customers.

Silos internally create visible silos externally. This makes customers, in short, insanely frustrated.

Not only external customers... the poor support engineer or service person trying to install, maintain or use a complex product is customer. So is the sales person trying to best present a complex product or service. The nature of their role might make them dependant on lots of product data or technical information that they themselves might not fully understand.

If you have a breakdown in how you label, structure, translate or deliver these things because this or that team hasn't checked in with their peers, then the gaps end up in the content consumers' lap. They have to navigate our output, so if we don't establish clear standards to help organise the vast quantity of knowledge on offer we do them a disservice. We also do ourselves a disservice by letting our brand be impacted, and missing cross-sale, upgrade or repeat-business potential. Every touch-point should be considered an opportunity represent the brand and add value.