Great content is one of your business’ most important assets. This rings true especially for customer service.

It can enhance your existing customer’s experiences of your products and services, strengthening brand loyalty, as well as create new positive experiences for prospective customers, compelling them to come back for more. Great content really is the secret ingredient that can delight your audience and make your brand’s reputation shine.

However, to achieve great content output, it is vital you have the right technology in place to manage and support your goals. And in a recent survey from the Content Marketing Institute, 33% of companies are failing in this regard.

Many readers will have heard of content management systems (CMS) – a cost-effective and efficient system used for controlling and managing content, from web pages and documents to images and videos. However, for many businesses today, a typical CMS has too many limitations to be considered effective. Issues with information findability and inefficient copy and pasting of content has led forward-thinking organizations to seek out a more structured approach.

The Challenge

When a customer has a problem or a question, they expect answers fast. When that experience leads them down a rabbit hole and they are unable to find the information they need, that feeling of frustration becomes associated with your organization. Nobody wants to spend hours going round in circles or sitting on hold while a customer service representative tries to hunt down the answer.

Information findability and consistency has become intrinsically linked to a feeling of trust and brand loyalty in customers, and it is vital that customer service managers prioritize these issues now. But if your traditional CMS is unsuitable, what’s the solution?

Enter, the CCMS

For unmatched information findability and trustworthiness, you need a specific type of content management system: a component content management system (CCMS). The defining difference between a traditional CMS and a CCMS is that where a CMS stores content as documents, or unstructured content, a CCMS stores content as a set of smaller related components. These are then combined in automated ways to create publishable deliverables such as PDFs, web pages or other formats. A component within a CCMS could be a word, phrase, paragraph, series of paragraphs, image, video, table, graph, or any other ‘piece’, ‘chunk’, ‘atom’ or ‘module’ of content.

Why manage content this way? Because when you structure content by breaking it into components, you can do a lot of things that transform its findability. And that also means you can update it more easily to ensure that it’s accurate and trustworthy.

Adopting structured content is a complete game changer for customer service organizations. With a single source of truth for content, you only need to create your component once before publishing it to the various places its needed. When there’s an update, simply edit the original component and the changes will roll out to every place the component is linked. This ensures content remains accurate and consistent at all times – even in multiple languages.

Furthermore, a CCMS gives you powerful tools to categorize your content consistently and effectively, which is the ideal foundation for delivering relevant search results to customers. When you apply tags to content at a granular level, you can provide your customers with more specific answers to their questions.

Lastly, a CCMS empowers you to take your customer self-service to the next level with semantic AI. With AI-enriched content, not only can you implement chatbots and voice assistants for more human-like self-service interactions, but you can also deliver relevant, personalized results that your customers have come to expect.

About the Author

Fraser Doig is Associate Product marketing manager at RWS.

About RWS

RWS is the global leader in content management and translation technology and services. 90 of the top 100 global companies work with RWS. Tridion Docs provides streamlined end-to-end component content management. It includes easy web-based authoring, reviewing, versioning, translation, and publication management, underpinned by the DITA XML standard. As a true collaborative environment with a familiar Microsoft Word-style interface, subject matter experts (SMEs) in your organization can contribute their knowledge.

Authors and reviewers can work simultaneously in the same document providing comments to each other, tracking and merging changes. Tridion Docs supports global enterprise use cases including single sourcing, product documentation, learning and training, policies and procedures, and efficient translations with delivery to multiple end points such as documents, PDFs, knowledge portals, Intranet, customer facing websites, apps, chatbots, and IoT devices.

Contact RWS here or visit their website at rws.com. Twitter:@rwsgroup, Linkedin: RWSGroup.

Since 2020, more people than ever realized that they didn’t value their jobs and had lower job satisfaction, so they left en masse. Yet, despite the number of people leaving their jobs, the unemployment rate is around 3.3%.

This trend was coined the “Great Resignation,” and recent polling shows that over 40% of current employees are considering leaving their jobs.

Yet, the question remains, where have all the workers gone with the low unemployment rate?

Some have started new careers, switched jobs, or taken on new positions elsewhere. Others have started new businesses, websites, and blogs.

In fact, over 72% of small businesses have a website, so being online is a significant element of running a business these days.

The Power Of Your Website

The value of a website is that it can be a way to increase brand exposure and help you make additional offers to potential clients.

The benefits of a good website can;

• Increase brand exposure
• Enhance brand reputation
• Attract new customers
• Provide added layers to your marketing efforts
• Create local lead generation opportunities
• Help customers “find” your business
• Improves customer relations
• Save money on physical locations, storage, and labor
• Online content helps build a better brand reputation
• Advertise deals and discounts
• Announce employment opportunities
• Add online revenue to your business growth potential
• Allows you to capture visitors’ information for future marketing and targeting purposes
• Educate people about your brand and products
• Build a community

Additionally, a well-developed website can utilize the power of AI, or Artificial Intelligence, to track visitors’ tendencies and interests on your site, allowing you to optimize it based on your visitors’ interactions on your pages.

Chatbots Are Taking over Customer Service

Also, with advanced AI, you can implement chatbots that will take care of Q&A and interact with visitors in an improved customer service role that will reduce labor costs.

For small businesses, that means your visitors can interact with your brand at any time of the day or night, and you won’t need to have 24-hour, on-the-clock payroll, saving you a ton in labor costs.

Chatbots are Ai tools that you program to respond to key phrases and terms with selected answers. These chatbots can help your website visitors to navigate pages and find interesting blog posts and products that match their interests.

Even though people have largely resumed the normalcy of their lives, the impact of the pandemic did accelerate and disrupt a few things.

First, the increased reliance on remote and virtual work has only accelerated what was once a tiny trend among cutting-edge businesses. And two, with the dependence and usage of messaging apps, the acceptance of remote communications through a chatbot has become standardized.

As more and more people have become used to interacting with AI and chatbots, small businesses are better served once they adopt them in their online presence, like websites and social media.

Many small businesses and entrepreneurs have discovered that setting up a website can be easy, but setting up one effectively is a bit more challenging.

Market research shows that a good website enhances the visitor and, thus, customer experience. But a slow, unattractive website can actually turn people away from your brand altogether.

Some quick facts about poorly designed websites;

• 38% of people will turn away from a poorly designed website
• Nearly 40% of people judge a business by its website
• Conversions drop by 20% for slow-loading sites
• Poor user experience causes nearly 50% of visitors to go to a competitor’s site
• Over half of all e-commerce is conducted on mobile
• Consistent branding can increase conversions by 33%

All these facts demand that your website be top-notch for lead generation and brand reputation. In addition, as you grow your business, your website and online presence need to be top-of-the-line. Otherwise, you could see less foot traffic and a drying up of online traffic, killing your bottom line.

Building the website you deserve can take a ton of time and a significant amount of know-how, especially when you begin to incorporate advanced Machine Learning (ML) and AI. So it’s better suited to leave those things to the professionals.

You can find web developers online, you can Google for a web development company, or you can go through and do all the plug-ins and features yourself and hope for the best.

The best part about hiring your website needs a web development company is that they can customize your pages to build better brand consistency within each page, which, as mentioned earlier, significantly increases conversions online.

As more and more people explore their entrepreneurial side, what separates successful businesses from those that fail are luck, hard work, and great strategies to implement their growth. Building a great-looking website can do a lot of the heavy lifting needed and increase brand reputation along the way.

Want to reflect the diverse nature of your business and the breadth of talent within it? Are you global in reach but want to be able to show that you are a people-first company?

Then you should embrace collaborative content as a means of showing these sides of your company. Collaborative content is just what it sounds like: multiple people working together on a single piece of content for your brand.

It can involve people from within your organisation, outside influencers, or even competitors, in some cases. It can be mastered with user-generated content (UGC), providing an alternative to big budget productions. By using smartphones your talented members of staff can capture the moment in a way never previously possible – and enable collaboration on a global scale.

UGC allows you to shoot videos across a number of locations or even countries. Wherever it is, it’s still possible to have the final product compiled and passed through compliance on the very same day.

Here are five ways to engage your dispersed workforce to create collaborative content that sings.

1. Employee perspectives. If you’re interested in showing off the strength and communal nature of your brand, you could invite your employees to share their individual perspectives in a single clip. For example, you could ask your team members to share ‘day in the life’ snapshots of what they do for the organisation as a whole. Use this type of content sparingly, as it may not have as much value for the end user as things like original research or interviews.

2. Interviews and panels. Brief staff members to interview an industry influencer who is well-known in their region or sphere of expertise. By briefing a number of different staff members to do this, you can edit together the interviews, or alternatively create a series of interviews to fuel your external and internal comms channels. Chances are that your interviewee will want to share it with their fans, so make sure someone with significant social clout is picked.

3. Linking clips. Create a series of video clips in which there is a linking element to each one, thus allowing each creator to pass the torch to the next to create a video that follows on, thematically. This will show off the diverse nature of your organisation, while hopefully retaining the social traffic of viewers along the way. You also won’t have to worry about stepping on one another’s toes in the creation process.

4. Training videos. From running payroll to using the latest in-house SaaS software, training videos are an important internal comms tool to help new starters get up to speed in almost every part of your daily operations. There is the potential for these to be unengaging, so why not add some humanity and fun by recruiting staff members to record these videos collaboratively across numerous office locations. 

5. Case studies. Consider ways in which your members of staff can partner up with their clients to create an in-depth video case study. In this way, you can cross-promote their brand in your work and simultaneously show off what your brand can do.

And finally..

It’s important to keep full control over what is made public whilst at the same time empowering your staff or clients to run a little wild with their creativity. The choice should be yours to see what fits and what should be left in on the cutting room floor.

And just because you’re handing over the reins to your employees, that does not mean that you have to let your brand compliance slip. Ensure you stand out from the crowd with professionally produced, fully on-brand animated intros and outros, and lower thirds on all shared content to ensure continuity across all communications. These can easily be created well in advance of any shot footage.

And there’s one other important point to remember. User-generated content is great at enabling brands to be relevant and timely, providing the immediacy of grabbing the moment and gaining much-needed authenticity. But don’t let the quality of your video clips let your brand down. There are three ways in which UGC can do this: stability, light and sound.

Always try to be as stable as you can; control as far as is possible your shooting environment; light your subject well; and elevate the audio to get better quality of sound. If you get all of that right, your collaborative content will shine.

And finally, make it fun, make it engaging or make it memorable.  We should always be asking ourselves: Will be liked and shared? What do you tend to pass on to your connections? Is your video content: Relevant? Engaging? Rewarding? Memorable? If it is, it is more likely to be shared!

About the Author

Alex Hughes is the CEO and Co-founder of video editing platform Binumi Pro. Binumi Pro is a platform and App that allows you to shoot, moderate and share professionally edited video using your smartphone; and Totem, an online virtual hybrid events platform with networking at its heart.

Between March and April of this year, the e-commerce industry has experienced a decade worth of growth. As consumers continue to take their business online, content marketing has never been more important.

While it encompasses a broad field, content marketing is a crucial part of online customer service in today’s world, and it’s quite simple when boiled down to its base components.

Building a successful content marketing campaign

Successful content marketing engages consumers, enticing them to read or watch more. While this can be achieved in a number of ways depending on your industry, it will require high production quality and a lot of thought. Producing informative content focused around answering customer questions will demonstrate your organization’s expertise in its field and help develop a sense of trust. More personable content can help build an emotional connection towards your brand. This may be done through storytelling centered around the customer experience or content demonstrating your organization’s values.

Before planning your campaign, it’s important to understand the difference between content marketing and copywriting. Content writers aim to produce organic traffic, attracting customers to the brand through the value of the content itself, and building brand awareness in the process. In contrast, copywriters aim to produce immediate sales through advertisements. As more consumers than ever turn to the internet for their goods and services, the focus of brands must reflect this if they hope to compete. To be successful, content marketing must be unique and offer some value to the person consuming it.

The importance of content marketing

For many business owners, the value of content marketing is not immediately apparent. This is an understandable view to hold: it doesn’t aim to produce immediate sales the way copywriting does. However with more and more business being conducted remotely, connecting with consumers will be next to impossible for businesses that do not evolve to meet the new climate. With more and more brands competing for attention online, it’s difficult to build and maintain customer loyalty.

This is where content marketing comes in. Producing valuable content can in itself be a form of customer service that will build a sense of trust towards your business. Answering your customer’s most commonly asked questions, sharing expertise, or providing an insight into the workings of your company in video or blog posts are examples of excellent content marketing. These build an emotional connection between the customer and your business, while at the same time acting as customer service.

Content marketing has exploded over the last few years for good reason. The world’s biggest brands understand its effectiveness in increasing awareness and connecting with the consumer. While the methods you choose will depend on your aims as a business, the foundations of content marketing remains the same. Producing quality content that organically engages consumers will always prove beneficial.