Product Support at Digimarc
The Problem
Help and support was always a challenge at Digimarc. There was a bit of a "chicken and egg" problem - support is obviously important, but it's manageable with CSRs when your customer base is still growing. To scale, support needs to be handled (to the degree possible) by tier ZERO - ie, a user can find answers on the web without requiring an employee's assistance.
Support content was sometimes inline with product features and benefits. Highlighting the potential problems with your product on the sales oriented pages doesn't help sell them. In this example, "problematic" image types for the product are highlighted in the right column, a bit too close to the normal product information within the information architecture.
When I started at Digimarc, support content on the web sometimes existed on the very product pages meant to promote and sell them. About half the page content might be touting how great the product or service is, and the second half was a litany of potential problems a user could have with that product. Not ideal.
The Fix
Working with our IT, product, and marketing teams as well as our internal product specialists, I cycled through several iterations of our support content. Step one of course was to remove support content from the product pages so that users weren't inundated with additional fear/uncertainty/doubt at the decision point of inquiring about our products or not.
Eventually I moved the content entirely from our corporate site, allowing the corporate site to focus on promoting our products and generating sales leads, and allowing the support content to be organized and navigated separately.
One of the largest challenges was overcoming a long standing company habit of creating archaic PDF documents that were extremely prone to being out of date, but worse, impossible to find with a web search. I more or less took it on as one of my duties to track down these documents, translate them to the web, and to communicate with the subject matter experts on keeping the content as fresh and relevant as possible.
In the last iteration of the support content I was responsible for, I took things one step further, and removed all support forms from the corporate website, and instead worked with IT to have support managed through a salesforce knowledge base, which made it relatively easy to manage and organize from a CMS, but also tied our support forms directly into the salesforce ticketing system for escalated support.
A complete overhaul of the information architecture of the help site, and a total divorce from the corporate site, let new customers find content relevant to them on the sales oriented corporate site. Existing customers now had a place specifically to serve their needs as well.
Users were required to have an existing account with us to file a ticket, which reduced the amount of spam that got through to our support team, but had the advantage for customers of a routing system that ensured their messages got to the correct inbox as quickly as possible.
The Broader Picture
The last iteration of the support content was a real triumph of teamwork. Our web content was the most complete it ever had been, and was more searchable both by users and search engines than it had ever been before. Our support forms were no longer easy to clog with spam, or with inquiries from non-paying users.
Support content was now easy to find on the web instead of hidden in out of date PDFs in emails. Users could easily search the help site independently for topics of interest.
Probably most incredibly though, is that this work was completed via skunkworks, since there was no dedicated customer support department. I worked hard to spearhead the effort, with resources volunteered from our IT, product, marketing, and our support specialist teams.