Exceptional Customer Experiences Require Microcontent
By Rob Hanna, President & Co-Founder at Precision Content
Imagine yourself searching for the right information on a product you just purchased. How did it go? Did you find what you were looking for?
It’s these moments that remind us that amazing customer experiences are planned and orchestrated. They don’t often happen by chance. They involve choreography of lots of small micromoments, that are fueled by content. Successful moments require us to offer up the right content, at the right time, to the right person. Doing so involves having a better understanding of the content that we create.
From Documents to Microcontent
We’re on a journey to make content more precise and far more consumable. In structured writing, we’ve seen the movement from document-based authoring, to topic-based, to block-based. As we move along this path, we have to look at how we structure our content, not just for traditional channels, but emerging channels like chat and voice, where we can’t consume information the same way. We are delivering content to consumers who are not looking for information so much as they’re looking for answers to questions.
Then, we need to take those questions and answers and parlay them into a great user experience with our product or brand. The stakes are significant. If we can’t answer our customers’ questions, will they trust us if we upsell products or tell them about our other offerings?
Most importantly, we have to serve the needs of the customers and ensure we encourage repeat business by providing concise, reliable, and quality information about products and services.
Creating Better Structured Content
At Precision Content, we have a research-based writing methodology on how we write better structured content. We start by looking at content and its precision below the topic level, at the block level. By doing this, we ensure that information is usable and easy to consume online. Our methodology requires analyzing material and constructing content using concise blocks of information, with rigorous titling standards and sub-structures to represent different types of information.
Through the transition from print to digital, we’ve seen print documentation added to webpages without thought to the structure of the content. In many cases, people don’t consider how they need to change the content or write differently for digital. Moving into conversational interfaces from digital we have to look at this process again. The steps from digital to voice require increasingly more precision and discipline to be successful.
Four Characteristics of Good Microcontent
It’s not just microcontent because it’s small; Information needs to be modular and packed with metadata to make it function as intended, especially when it is used for conversational interfaces like chatbots or voice. There are four main characteristics of good microcontent.
1. Focus
The mark of good information is a focus on answering a particular question. The block of information will focus on a particular question, but will end up answering many questions because there are many different ways of asking the same or related question and receiving the same type of answer or response back.
2. Structure
Using repeatable words and structures we can introduce automation and provide a predictable experience for users. Structure helps us understand how the content is written. It allows us to ask better questions and get a better response back.
3. Context
We need to understand what content is related to in relation to a much larger taxonomy. Having a conversation isn’t just answering one question. It means you need to thread content together to provide accurate responses to someone who’s exploring questions about a particular topic or product. Staying on a thread within a conversation requires connectedness within the content and speaks to the importance of microcontent.
4. Function
We need to understand the function of a piece of content so we know what the intended reader response is for that block of information. With the same set of information, we can cast it in different ways. But how we do that depends on what we want the user to do with it.
Within our Precision Content methodology for microcontent, we have five intended reader responses that dictate how we write, structure, label, and add metadata to information. These responses include: reference, concept, process, principle, and task. When we’re writing in second or third person, or in an active voice we are focused on what we want the user to do with the information.
We’re ready, but content is not
Voice? Chat? We’re ready for these technologies, but content is not. To make these technologies work, we need to have the content that is scalable to the requirements of these systems.
If we can create content as blocks of information, wrap them in rich metadata that cascades down from the publication onto the topic and block level, we can include a lot of contextual information. With these blocks wrapped in all this metadata, we can use them to do different things far more effectively, and in the proper contexts. When it is updated, it is going to be updated correctly across a suite of products because there’s so much rigour around that reusable chunk of information when using our authoring and topic-based paradigm.
Moving Towards Conversation
User experience includes more than product documentation. Purpose built conversations that build consumer engagement and convey the persona of the organization are not something we can extract from our technical publications or our marketing brochures. Content for conversational interfaces needs to be authored to provide those engaging experiences.
For product documentation, we need to be able to provide very short responses to user questions. But that’s not the entirety of the customer journey and experience with the brand. When we show a video and tell a brand story, this is going to be part of a broader user experience that is supported by the product documentation we created and published through the microcontent channels.
Microcontent needs to fit into the scope of exceptional customer experiences. One user experience may be getting an answer to a question. As they move out of that modality and into exploration and learning we need to be able to transition from a small block of content into a much larger context where the user needs navigation and a table of contents. We need to be able to move seamlessly from a small block to the larger context of that information within a specific modality.
Looking ahead, we have to examine how we write. The technology for conversational interfaces is ready, and now we need to focus on building better, professional content. No amount of technology is going to solve all our content challenges. How we write is crucial. This is our opportunity to write well for the medium and for all the opportunities that conversational interfaces offer.
About the Author
Rob Hanna co-founded Precision Content in 2015 to pursue his goals to produce tools, training, and methods that will help organizations make their high-value content instantly available to all that need it including customers, staff, partners, and even other information systems that need to consume that content. Driving this development is the Precision Content® Writing Methods, based on the best-available research over the last 50 years into how the brain works with information. Today Rob leads his highly-skilled team of content strategists, information architects, writers, trainers, and developers to serve the needs for digital transformation for businesses across North America.