A presentation at Strategic Internal Communications Conference in in Toronto, ON, Canada by Blaine Kyllo
Improving the content and experience for agents reduces call time and cuts costs Transform your front-line operations by improving your intranet Good afternoon, everyone. It’s nice to see you all here today. I’m a senior strategist with Content Strategy Inc. We are a consultancy that specializes in content strategy. And I bet that at least some of you are wondering what I mean by “content strategy”. Well, that’s okay. Even those of us who are content strategists find ourselves wondering what it means to do the job. But there’s one thing about content people that’s fairly consistent: we like to define our terms. So I’m going to start there.
Content Meaningful information, in any channel, in any format, for any audience. Let’s start with the word “content”. We define content as being, “Meaningful information, in any channel, in any format, for any audience.” It’s a very broad term, but it can be clarified by context. Content is newsletters and newspapers. It’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram posts. It’s videos and articles and images that go with those articles, whether they are in a magazine or on a tablet. Software and apps are full of content. So are websites.
Strategy “A coherent set of analysis, concepts, policies, and arguments that respond to a high-stakes challenge.” —Richard Rumelt We like how Richard Rumelt defines strategy as being, “A coherent set of analysis, concepts, policies, and arguments that respond to a high-stakes challenge.” This means that strategy IS NOT best practice. It also means strategy is different from tactics, which are the actions and activities that help achieve a strategy.
Content strategy Content strategy guides the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content. –Kristina Halvorson Now let’s define what content strategy means. This is the popular definition and it comes from Kristina Halvorson, a pioneer in the field. “Content strategy guides the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.” I’ll unpack what we mean by this.
Content strategy Content strategy guides the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content. –Kristina Halvorson CREATION
photo: National Archives and Records Administration, National Park Service “Creation” is about developing content. That can be a bunch of snowboarders making a gnarly video series, or a writer at their desk with a pen and paper, or a child building nascent applications in coding interfaces.
Content strategy Content strategy guides the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content. –Kristina Halvorson DELIVERY
“Delivery” is about making content available to people who need it. Newspapers coming off a press and delivered daily, or RSS feeds that automatically push content out to smartphones, tablets, and computers, or streaming services that give us on-demand access to our favourite movies.
Content strategy Content strategy guides the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content. –Kristina Halvorson GOVERNANCE
“Governance” refers to how decisions about content are made and how the people and systems that are involved in content are managed.
Content strategy Content strategy guides the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content. –Kristina Halvorson USEFUL
We focus on content that is “useful”. It serves a purpose. It helps someone accomplish a task or objective in the same way a lightbulb is useful because it enables us to see in the dark.
Content strategy Content strategy guides the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content. –Kristina Halvorson USABLE
This is also about content that is “usable”: the people for whom it is intended can actually do something with it, easily, simply, and without effort. One rechargeable version of Apple’s Magic Mouse may have been very useful, but it wasn’t very usable, because to recharge the device you had to turn it upside down. So you could never recharge this while you were using it.
Content strategy is about ❖ Making sure the content that’s being created is what’s needed to meet the goals of the business. ❖ Making sure that content is being created and managed effectively and efficiently. ❖ Takes the intended audience into account. In addition, content strategy is about… Making sure that this all serves the needs of the business, that it’s being done efficiently, and that the audience for the content is front of mind. Audiences can be customers, or members, or even INTERNAL audiences like staff.
CX “Customer experience” And here’s another term you may not be familiar with. How many of you in the room have heard the term “customer experience”? It’s often abbreviated as CX. It refers to the experience of being a customer of a business.
When it comes to CX, I think we can agree that being on hold with a customer service representative is a poor customer experience. Every time you’re on hold aren’t you thinking about everything else you could be doing with that time? Businesses want to improve customer experience. Every business school and consultant agrees that that improving the customer experience leads to improved business performance. And for many businesses, the customer experience relies on the efforts of a customer service representative.
photo: Flickr/Royce Blair Think about the impact, then, of improving the work experience of those front line employees. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that improving the experience of those on the front line will lead to a commensurate improvement in the experience of the customers they are supporting. Right? In other words, improving the tools that your staff use to do their jobs is good for your business. Today, I’m going to tell you about a success story that proves this notion.
We’re in the midst of a long project with BC Hydro that demonstrates the tangible business impact of improving the work experience for front line employees. By using content strategy to improve the content they use to do their job, we’ve helped those call centre agents work more efficiently and be more satisfied in their job. And that leads to an improved business performance that we can measure.
2003 It starts in 2003.
photo: Flickr/Royce Blair Back then, BC Hydro decided to outsource various frontline customer service functions, including the contact centre. The vendor that was contracted to do this work made the decision to create a repository of information where the call centre agents could look up business rules and procedures.
photo: pxhere Once upon a time, that information would have been developed, distributed, and maintained on paper. But this is 2003.
photo: reddit/Timinator01 This is the age of the World Wide Web.
In case you don’t remember the state of the web in 2003, that was the year Apple released the Safari browser.
Which rendered web pages like this.
The following year, Mozilla would release Firefox. This is what Wikipedia looked like then.
photo: Flickr/Jason Scott For designers and content creators, the web allowed for an explosion of creativity. Of course, by today’s standards, it was tedious. Pages were created in HTML, the coding language of websites. And those pages were often created by people who actually worked using that code. If you were lucky, you could update web pages using software like Dreamweaver, which meant you could do the work without needing to know the code.
By way of example, this is the home page for the Globe and Mail on June 19, 2003. Just look at those headlines. I had completely forgotten that SARS was a thing.
This is the source code from that web page. It’s filled with table code and image maps. These days, sites are built with style sheets and databases that simplify web design and publishing. That sure wasn’t the case back in 2003.
photo: reddit/cvr24 So that’s the environment in which the information repository for BC Hydro call agents was created. They called it ACE.
2018 Fast forward to 2018. BC Hydro decides to repatriate customer service and bring the call centre back in-house.
This means that BC Hydro also takes ownership of the repository. Which has not fundamentally changed since 2003. This is one of the pages from the old system that is still in use today. You can tell that the system hasn’t changed. The pages were built as raw HTML pages and have been maintained as HTML pages using Dreamweaver. The structure of the pages and the content design hasn’t changed in 15 years. The content itself is factually accurate. It is maintained regularly. But because of the system, the people doing the content maintenance have been just incorporating new information into the old designs. This makes it difficult for agents to find the information they need. Imagine trying to quickly find what you are looking for in this sprawling web page. When we asked agents what they needed in a new system, they all begged us to make please not take away “CTRL-F”. They had become reliant on finding information on these dense pages by conducting on-page searches.
Kickoff In early 2018, CSI was asked by BC Hydro to review a number of repositories that had been created by different departments to manage employee knowledge. We looked closely at three, including ACE, the one created fifteen years ago. This is where the content strategy happens. Because information repositories are filled with content. And I want to make this very clear: Information repositories that are used by call centre staff are intranets. They are filled with content created for employees.
Discovery and research ❖ Content audit and assessment ❖ Stakeholder and user interviews ❖ User survey ❖ Technical and tool assessment We start projects like this by conducting discovery. It’s an attempt to figure out what is there and how effective it is. For us, discovery is also about defining the problem. Here are the activities we undertook: we audited and assessed the existing content, we conducted interviews, we surveyed the people using the repositories, and we conducted a technical assessment of the systems.
Lorem Ipsum Dolor Content audit and assessment ❖ Around 8,000 pages ❖ Divided by task: General, Collections, etc. ❖ Organized alphabetically by the title of the page There a lot to be learned simply by looking closely at the content itself, so that’s where we always start. We look to see if there are spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors. We assess how well the content is structured and presented on the page. We determine the effectiveness of how the content is organized in its entirety. The major finding was that there was way too much content, it had no coherent organizing principle, and the content quality was inconsistent. In this example, while there are no spelling errors, capitalization is haphazard, the application of punctuation is irregular, and the sentences themselves are sometimes nothing more than fragments. The writing is also filled with jargon, and while the people using this content are familiar with those terms, research has clearly shown that even if you know what the jargon is, you understand information better when content is jargon-free.
Lorem Ipsum Dolor Stakeholder and user interviews photo: Raw Pixel We also insist on talking to people to find out what their experience is. We’ll talk to three different groups of people: stakeholders who have influence over the content, authors who create the content, and audiences who use the content. Stakeholders tell us what they expect and what success looks like. Authors tell us about the process of creating content and the tools and systems they use. And audiences tell us what their pain points are when they’ve been using the content. What we heard from authors is that the process of creating and maintaining content was slow and tedious. The users, the call centre staff, told us that they had difficulty finding the information they needed. They described the experience of using the existing repositories as having to “wade” through unnecessary content in an attempt to get to what they needed. This is why they had become reliant on CTRL-F.
Lorem Ipsum Dolor User survey One way to quantify the things that we hear in interviews is to take insights from conversations and use them to ask questions in a survey. This helps us to validate those insights, and it also helps us to engage with a larger group.
Lorem Ipsum Dolor Technical and tool assessment photo: Luis Gomes, Pexels We also assess the tools that are being used in the creation and management of content. This can include technical systems like content management systems and digital asset management tools, and also analogue tools such as style guides, process diagrams, and decision trees. The biggest challenge for BC Hydro in this respect was that the primary information repository was built on an old, outdated system that was 15 years old.
Additional findings ❖ Duplicate information ❖ Contradictory information ❖ Broken links ❖ Search was useless Here are some other important findings about ACE. The same information could be found in multiple places, and at times information was contradictory. Given the sheer number of pages and the lack of hierarchy, this was not surprising. It also indicates an issue with governance. Broken links were common, suggesting issues with maintenance. Even searching for the right details failed more often than not. And this is a very common complaint of all websites, both extranets and intranets: “Our search sucks.” What you don’t realize is that an effective search engine relies on two things: a good tool and content that is structured and tagged in such a way as to enable search. Even Google struggles trying to search through crappy content.
Recommendations ❖ Create a single Knowledge Centre ❖ Build it in a modern content management system (CMS) Our key recommendation was to merge the repositories into one, and to build it in a modern CMS. Agents had been using up to four different systems when taking calls from customers. In the new world there would be only two: SAP, which is used to run the business, and a central hub, the Knowledge Centre, that would become the complete repository of BC Hydro business rules and procedures.
Redesign content ❖ Make it more usable: ❖ Easy to find by searching or browsing ❖ Easy to read ❖ Easy to understand And all of that would be useless unless it also came with a complete rethink on how the content was designed. Moving the existing content into a new system would be like putting lipstick on a pig. Instead, content should be rewritten so it would be more useful to the people using it. The content should be easy to find, easy to read, and easy to understand.
When the experience is interacting with content, improving content improves the experience. The term UX gets used a lot these days. In case you’re not familiar with it, the acronym refers to “user experience” and it contributes to customer experience. There’s a good reason that there’s so much attention paid to UX. It’s because we know that improving the user experience is a good way to improve the performance of your business. And when the experience requires a user to interact with content, IMPROVING CONTENT improves the experience.
Solutions and design ❖ Designed a new information architecture (IA) and navigation structure ❖ Created a taxonomy and metadata framework ❖ Developed content types, models, and templates ❖ Prepared style guides (including a glossary) ❖ Author training So these are the activities we undertook in order to make sure that the content in the Knowledge Centre would provide a good experience for the agents: • We designed a new information architecture and navigation to make it easier to find information by browsing • We created an underlying taxonomy and metadata schema to support content findability by searching • We developed content types and models and prepared templates to establish consistent structure to the content • We established content standards and trained authors to enable higher quality content through improved skillsets I’ll show you what all of these things look like.
Information architecture and navigation Information architecture refers to how the content is organized within a website. It describes the hierarchy of information and informs what the site navigation will be. Where the previous repositories for BC Hydro organized content by functional area, the Knowledge Centre is organized by topic. Previously, there were multiple pages that had information about supporting customers in setting up new accounts. One for the general agents, one for agents who specialized in collections, another for work leaders and escalation agents. Now regardless of your team, you’ll go to the same page to get that information. This is one way we’ve been able to project a reduction in total page count from over 8,000 to under 3,000.
Metadata and taxonomy Perhaps the earliest taxonomy you became familiar with is the classification of the natural world, including the animal kingdom, that was initiated by Carl Linnaeus. Taxonomies provide a way of organizing content. Those taxonomic terms are metadata, which is, simply, “data about data”. This could be the date a piece of content was created. Or the name of the person who created it. Or even where the content was sourced from. When we associate metadata with content, we can then connect that content when terms are related, and we can use systems to automatically display content.
Content types Content types share a common purpose and editorial structure regardless of topic or audience. A press release, for example, is one content type. A white paper is another. In the Knowledge Centre we have things like Process Overviews and Process Details. A Script Overview provides the framework to guide agents through certain kinds of calls so they are sure to collect and share the information needed for that context.
Content models For each content type, we create a model, which is a specific description of the different components or elements that need to be included in that type of content. We’re able to provide editorial and technical direction here so that designers can use models to create wireframes, so that developers can use them to create technical templates, and so that writers can use them to create content that is consistent and complete.
Content standards and guidelines Standards and guidelines you may be familiar with are the Chicago Manual of Style and the APA Publication Manual, depending on what courses you took at college or university. These are essential to make sure that the content being created is consistent, and also to make sure that quality standards are being upheld by everyone in the company. BC Hydro has standards for digital content that were not being used by the team creating the knowledge content. We modified those existing standards to fit the specific context of call-centre agents, and all content is now expected to follow these guidelines.
Glossary We’ve also developed a glossary to help BC Hydro start wrangling how it understands terms. Because the same word or phrase is often understood to mean different things throughout the company. What, exactly, does “bill” refer to, for example? Is it a verb, as in “Bill the customer”? Or a noun, as in “Send the customer the bill”? Listing and defining these problematic terms will help everyone. So these are the solutions and designs we brought in to anchor the development of BC Hydro’s new Knowledge Centre.
User requirements ❖ Speed ❖ Accuracy ❖ Ease of use photo: Berkeley Communications And at the heart of all of this work is the needs of the users. Front line customer service agents have unique requirements. They need to be able to handle calls efficiently. They need to be accurate. To do those things they need to be able to navigate to and search for procedural information quickly. When you layer of top of that the high employee turnover rate in customer-facing areas like these, you can begin to understand how important it is to have information systems that are simple, streamlined and uncomplicated to use.
Customer service agents are a key connection point with BC Hydro customers. It’s not good for anyone if the knowledge management system causes delays and results in awkward customer hold time. This is why giving the customer service agents a simple, uncomplicated system is central to a good customer experience.
This is what content used to look like in one of the old repositories. Complex, verbose, and visually unappealing. It’s hard to read.
After our team of technical writers reworked the content to new standards, this is how it is looks now. You’re seeing the result of not just a change in how the content is presented, the look and feel, but also in how the content is written and designed on the page. We’ve made use of subheads to break up the text and make it easier to scan. We’ve used plain language to make it easier to follow. Even the page title makes a big difference. Before it was “New connections” but now, “Set up a new connection” makes it explicitly clear to anyone what this page is about.
Here’s the example from ACE I showed earlier.
This content hasn’t been moved into the CMS yet, so this is just how it looks as a Word document. Even displayed small, here, you can see how the writing is easier to follow. Even the headline on this article makes it easier. It used to be “Credit bureau check” and now it’s in language that speaks to what the agent is doing: “Perform a credit check”. There is great complexity in this content. But the content can be designed in such a way as to make it seem simple. You can still use “CTRL-F” here, but you don’t need to.
Results ❖ Easier to create and maintain content ❖ No complaints Because the Knowledge Centre is being built in an enterprise content management system, it is easier to maintain existing content. It’s also easier to create new pages and link them to existing related content. We knew we had succeeded with this work when we realized, months after the new system had been implemented, we hadn’t received a single complaint about the redesigned and rewritten content.
We’re not done. The work to redesign the content experience continues, and we’ve got a team of technical writers in the middle of rewriting thousands of pages of content to new standards. There are months of work left. And making the decision to spend this time and budget on building the Knowledge Centre was not easy for BC Hydro to make. In the world of content operations and content strategy, we often find it difficult to put a number on content. Exactly how much revenue is generated by various content practices? With this project, we were able to come up with a number.
ROI ❖ Elimination of errors and duplicate content ❖ 25% efficiency gains with redesigned content , 0 4 2 $ r y / 0 00 BC Hydro conducted an analysis of the cost savings that results from agents being able to process calls more quickly and accurately. We can eliminate the time they spend reaching system error messages due to broken links. A conservative assumption is that agents will reduce the amount of time they need to spend finding and comprehending the information by about 25%. Based on standard labour rates and average handling time associated with the relevant calls, that translates to about $240,000 a year. BC Hydro looks to save nearly a quarter of a million dollars annually.
Content debt ❖ There is a cost to not maintaining content and the processes and systems used to create content. ❖ The longer a business waits to do this work, the bigger and more expensive the job will be. Not maintaining the content in your systems is creating debt. And at some point, you’ll have to pay that off. Perhaps that will be when the software your intranet is running on is no longer supported. Perhaps it will be when you realize there are 20,000 pages in it. Or it could be when there’s litigation of some sort because of factually incorrect information on your site.
Lessons learned ❖ Content and content structure matters in a knowledge management system. ❖ Process experts and SMEs are not the best people to develop and maintain your knowledge centre content. We’ve been working with BC Hydro on the Knowledge Centre project for two years now, and both they and us have learned some things. Systems that lack consistent structures and layouts are fraught with inefficiencies, resulting in slow and frustrating task completion. Repeatable effort is a hallmark of a well structured system, resulting in quick and simple workflow In the same way that you don’t ask writers to come up with engineering designs for a new bridge, and you don’t ask accountants to develop your software code or come up with pattern libraries, process and subject matter experts are not the people who should be creating and maintaining the content in your knowledge centre. In the same way you get people who have been trained to do a specific skill to perform that job in your company, you need people who have been trained in the mechanics of content to do the work of content. Look to hire or contract editors and technical writers, and provide your staff with opportunities to expand their skills.
Lessons learned (cont) ❖ Involve the process experts and SMEs in the development of the new knowledge system and structures to get buy in. ❖ Simplifying content search and look-up results in more efficient CSRs, happier customers, and cost savings for your organization. The star performers and “go-to” members of your work teams will be most familiar with the old systems, warts and all. Involving them in the development of the new system alongside they any hired guns brought into transition from old to new, will create buy in and build credibility for the shift to the new knowledge management system. You need this change management technique to break from the old and bring in the new. Workers are happiest when they can find what they are looking for the first time. Organizations like the inherent efficiencies that result in cost savings. Customers like it for the most basic of all reasons: when they call they don’t have to wait, they get to speak with a quick, efficient and happy agent who solves their problem.
Key takeaways for you ❖ Improve your content to improve the user experience ❖ Your content is not a project Improving your content will improve the user experience. In BC Hydro’s case they are able to improve the customer experience by improving the experience of front-line staff, but if you are using content to interact with your customers directly, you will get business benefits from improving that content. Content is not a project. It’s not created and done and you do your business a disservice by ignoring your content. Content requires regular maintenance and attention. Better to create a bit of space in your budget now for regular content operations than to leave things for 15 years and have to pay that content debt then.
Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening.
Podcast! If you’re interested in learning more about how content work is done, I have a podcast you might like.
Lorem Ipsum Dolor CSI Newsletter http://eepurl.com/bTo4PH And you can subscribe to the Content Strategy Inc newsletter for more information about the practice of content strategy.
Questions? I’m happy to take any questions.
Blaine Kyllo ❖ blaine@contentstrategyinc.com ❖ @solocorps ❖ 778-999-7656 ❖ contentstrategyinc.com ❖ Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/bTo4PH
Customer service representatives (CSRs) can make or break the experience for customers, which can have a direct impact on the success of a business. Improving the intranet that supports those front-line workers helps them to operate faster, more accurately, and with more confidence. It can also impact the bottom line.
In this case study, learn how a regional government utility company transformed an aging, cluttered information repository into a sleek, modern knowledge center, and how shaving seconds from phone calls will save the business hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.
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