Every Click Counts: Uncovering The Business Value Of Your Product Content Content Operations podcast

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Every click counts: Uncovering the business value of your product content

2d ago 30:55

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Every time someone views your product content, it’s a purposeful engagement with direct business value. Are you making the most of that interaction? In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, special guest Patrick Bosek, co-founder and CEO of Heretto, and Sarah O’Keefe, founder and CEO of Scriptorium, explore how your techcomm traffic reduces support costs, improves customer retention, and creates a cohesive user experience.

Patrick Bosek: Nobody reads a page in your documentation site for no reason. Everybody that is there has a purpose, and that purpose always has an economic impact on your business. People who are on the documentation site are not using your support, which means they’re saving you a ton of money. It means that they’re learning about your product, either because they’ve just purchased it and they want to utilize it, so they’re onboarding, and we all know that utilization turns into retention and retention is good because people who retain pay us more money, or they’re trying to figure out how to use other aspects of the system and get more value out of it. There’s nobody who goes to a doc site who’s like, “I’m bored. I’m just going to go and see what’s on the doc site today.” Every person, every session on your documentation site is there with a purpose, and it’s a purpose that matters to your business.

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Transcript:

Introduction with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.

Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.

Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.

Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.

End of introduction

Sarah O’Keefe: Hi, everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe and I’m here today with our guest, Patrick Bosek, who is one of the founders and the CEO of Heretto. Welcome.

Patrick Bosek: Thanks, Sarah. It’s lovely to be here. I think this is may be my third or fourth time getting to chat with you on the Scriptorium podcast.

SO: Well, we talk all the time. This is talking and then we’re going to publi- no, let’s not go down that road. Of all the things that happen when we’re not being recorded. Okay. Well we’re glad to have you again and looking forward to productive discussion here. The theme that we had for today was actually traffic and I think web traffic and why you want traffic and where this is going to go with your business case for technical documentation. So, Patrick, for those of you that have not heard from you before, give us a little bit of background on who you are and what Heretto is and then just jump right in and tell us about web traffic.

PB: No small requests from you, Sarah.

SO: Nope.

PB: So I’m Patrick Bosek. I am the CEO and one of the co-founders of Heretto. Heretto is a CCMS based on DITA. It’s a full stack that goes from the management and authoring layer all the way up to actually producing help sites. So as you’re moving around the internet and working with technology companies, primarily help_your_product.com or help_your_company.com, it might be powered by Heretto. That’s what we set out to do. We set out to do it as efficiently as possible, and that gives me some insight into traffic, which is what we’re talking about today, and how that can become a really important and powerful point when teams are looking to make a case for better content operations, showing up more, producing more for their customers, and being able to get the funding that allows them to do all those great things that they set out to do every day.

SO: So here we are as content ops, CCMS people, and we’re basically saying you should put your content on the internet, which is a fairly unsurprising kind of priority to have. But why specifically are you saying that web traffic and putting that content out there and getting people to use the content helps you with your sort of overall business and your overall business case for tech docs?

PB: Yeah. So I want to answer that in a fairly roundabout way because I think it’s more fun to get there by beating around the bush. But I want to start with something that seems really obvious, but for some reason it isn’t in tech pubs. So first of all, if you went to an executive and you said, I can double the traffic to your website, and then you put a number in front of them, probably say a hundred thousand dollars, almost like any executive at any major organization is like a hundred thousand dollars, of course, I’ll double my web traffic. That’s a no-brainer. Right? And when they’re thinking of website, they’re thinking of the marketing site and how important traffic is to it. So intrinsically, everybody pays quite a bit of money and by transference puts a lot of value on the traffic that goes to the website and, as they should. It’s the primary way we interact with organizations asynchronously today.

Digital experience is really important. But if you went to an executive and you said, I can double your traffic to your doc site, they would probably be like, wait a second. But that makes no sense because nobody reads the docs for no reason. I want to repeat that because I think that’s a really important thing for us, as technical content creators to not only understand, I think we understand it, but to internalize it and start to represent it more in the marketplace and to our businesses and to the other stakeholders. People might show up at your marketing site, because they misclick an advertisement. They might show up in your marketing site because they Googled something and your market and a blog like caught them and they looked at it. So there’s probably a lot of traffic where people are just curious. They’re just window shopping. Maybe they’re there by mistake. But nobody shows up at your documentation site.

Nobody reads a page in your documentation site for no reason. Everybody that is there has a purpose and that purpose always has an economic impact on your business. People who are on the documentation site are either not utilizing your support, which means that they’re saving you a ton of money. It means that they’re learning about your product, either because they’ve just purchased it and they want to utilize it, so they’re onboarding, and we all know that utilization turns into retention and retention is good because people who retain pay us more money, or they’re trying to figure out how to use other aspects of the system and get more value out of it. There’s nobody who goes to a doc site who’s like, I’m bored. I’m just going to go and see what’s on the doc site today. So every person, every session on your documentation site is there with a purpose and it’s a purpose that matters to your business. So that’s why I want to start. That’s why it matters. That’s why I think traffic is important, but you look like you want to contribute here, so.

SO: We talk about enabling content. Right? Tech docs are enabling content. They enable people to do a thing, and this is what you’re saying. People don’t read tech docs for fun. I know of, actually, I do know one person. One person I have met in my life who thought it was fun to read tech docs. One.

PB: Okay. So to be fair, I also know somebody who loves reading release notes.

SO: Okay. So two in the world.

PB: But hang on, hang on. But this person, part of the thing is this person is an absolute, can I say fanboy, is that, they’re a huge fan of this product and they talk about this product in the context of the release notes. So even though this person loves the release notes, the release notes are a way that they go and generate word-of-mouth and they’re promoting your product because of the thing they saw in the release notes. The release notes are a marketing piece that goes through this person. All the people who are your biggest fans are going to tell people about that little thing they found in your release notes. Sorry. Anyways.

SO: So again, they’re trying to learn. Okay. But, so two people in the universe that we know of read docs for fun. Cool. Everybody else is reading them, as you said, for a purpose. They’re reading them because they are blocked on something or they need information, usually it’s they need information. And then you slid in that when they do this, this is producing, providing value to the organization or saving the organization money. So what’s that all about?

PB: Well, I mean there’s a number of ways to look at this. You want to start with the hard numbers, the accounting stuff, the stuff you can take the CFO. That stuff is actually, it’s pretty easy to do. You can do it in just a couple of lines. So every support ticket costs a certain amount of money. Somebody in your organization knows that number, if your organization is sufficiently large and sufficiently large is like 20 people probably. Maybe that’s not that small, but if you’re a couple hundred people, everybody knows what that number is. So it’s very easy to figure out how much it costs when somebody actually goes to the support.

SO: Somewhere between $20 and $50 is kind of the industry average per call. You may have better numbers internally in your organization, but if you don’t or you don’t know where to start there. Every call is $25.

PB: Yeah. $20, $25. A little more, if you’re in a complex industry. The reality is that when you start comparing it to how much you spend answering a question with content, it’s kind of like, oh, is it a thousand times cheaper or is it 2,000 times cheaper? So it’s not really that big of a difference. The cost of answering a question with content is also pretty straightforward. So all you really need to know is how much are you spending on your content, which is typically speaking just the combination of the people and tools, so people in content operations stack that you’re using to get that content out in front of people. And then the page views. I mean, fundamentally if you exclude search, so take search out of your page views, take home page out of your page views, if you can filter section pages, so just look at actual content pages and then you have to pick a resolution rate.

Obviously, if you want to say 100%, if you don’t have any better metrics, that’s probably too high. Maybe it’s unreasonable, but it’s very simple. It makes the equation easier. If you want to say that 50% percent of people who read what you’ve considered to be like a content page, resolve their issue, that’s probably too low. So pick a number between those two things and you run the multiplication on that and you’re going to find out that it’s going to cost you, in most situations, less than a penny to answer a question, typically way less than a penny to answer a question with content as opposed to the $25. That’s the pure economic math of it. There’s more though.

SO: Okay. So yeah, we did some math and we’re basically saying, looking at this in a tech support centric way, usually we talk about call deflection. Right? So the idea is that every time somebody does not call tech support, you save $25 and spend a penny, a fraction of a penny instead, which seems good. Now interestingly to me, I think, you can look at this as the first time somebody hits that site and hits a content page, costs really a lot of money. Right? Because the people and the tools and the setup and the publishing, but then the next one is zero.

So you’re replacing sort of an upfront planned cost with a recurring cost because every time somebody calls, it’s another 25 or 50 or whatever dollars. So there’s a huge scalability argument here, and I can make a decent case for if you are a startup, a day one startup, you have no content, you have nothing, you have no infrastructure, cool. Hire a tech support person. Let them do their thing for maybe a year, and then look at the top 10 queries that they had and write some docs and deflect off those top 10 queries and handle it that way. But most of our customers, speaking for both of us, are medium to large to incredibly large organizations that have content. We’re not talking about the you have nothing start from scratch scenario.

PB: A hundred percent. When you’re really thinking about where you get the value, both on the accounting side, like saving money, so bottom line stuff, and then also the customer experience, which I think is worth getting into in a minute, that’s really going to take place when you start scaling up. I agree with you that a startup style organization should write content. Even small organizations benefit from it. I think they, small organizations actually benefit in a slightly different way than the deflection, which is the word you’re using. And I’m going to come back to that because I have a pet peeve with that word, but I’ll use it right now for the purposes because we’ve been using it. I think that what, the value that a smaller organization gets is not in the deflection, but it’s actually in the presence. So if you’re trying to show up and you’re trying to compete with larger organizations and you’re doing something, which is technical or considered to be highly important, so you’re in a high technology industry, your buyer is going to go look at your documentation. They’re going to look at your competitor’s documentation as well.

And if your documentation appears to be not that great, it’s very thin, there’s not a lot there, that’s going to be a factor in a buying decision. And I know everybody kind of like, yeah, but it really is, and I can tell you because we’re not a huge organization, that we’ve won deals because our docs were better. We invest in it, as we should. We’re a documentation tool. You know? So it does matter at the smaller end, even if you can’t build a really scalable content operation stack that you probably don’t need.

SO: Now, personally, I’m okay with deflection, and I’ll also say that the key thing here is that if you’re doing additional research on this as a listener, call deflection is sort of the industry term that will help you in your Google/AI searches. But tell us about why call deflection is bad and evil.

PB: Okay. So that is true. If you are talking to executives, you should probably say deflection, but maybe forward-thinking executives would appreciate why I think deflection is a bad term. I think we should use, you’re shaking your head at me. Fine. I think we should be talking about call avoidance. And the reason that I think this is because when most people think about deflection, they’re thinking about it as being very reactive, and it’s that box that pops up when you’re trying to put a support ticket in that’s like, well, have you already looked at this? And by the time someone has arrived at your support site and they have decided that they want to interact with a human, they are annoyed. They don’t want to be there. Nobody visits the support site because they want to. They have made the emotional commitment that they’re going to go and deal with one of your human beings to solve their problem, which is not something they planned on doing today. Nobody wanted to do this when they got up in the morning. So you’ve already failed. And at that point in time, the best thing you can do is get them to a human efficiently without sticking things in front of them and trying to deflect them. So that’s why I don’t like deflection. Avoidance is that that never happened. They Googled it because Google is tier zero support for everybody, even if yours is bad. They got an answer or they ChatGPT-ed it, different topic, there’s problems there. But probably they Googled it. They got an answer very quickly. They solved their issue. You never heard about it. It cost you a fraction of a penny. They had a great experience. It’s how they prefer to get their information, and you avoided the support rather than trying to deflect them to save yourself a couple of bucks when they were annoyed and broke their customer experience.

SO: Yeah. I’m on board with that. It’s just that terminology-wise, we’ve got to work with what we’ve got. But I would agree that avoiding the call in the first place, and I talk about how when people call tech support, they’re mad. If you think about the emotional state of your customer, the tech support person is angry. There’s also the issue that they asked ChatGPT and it said something wrong, and then they call up tech support and yell at you because ChatGPT was wrong, which is, that’s a whole other podcast. So let’s just set that aside for a moment, but okay.

PB: Maybe you’ll invite me back. We can talk about that.

SO: Yeah. So the, it’d be a long podcast and we’ll have to lift our no profanity rule for that one just to get through the topic.

PB: Oh. Special edition.

SO: Special edition. Okay. So you were talking about the value though of a documentation site and we’ve sort of paired it with tech support and with this avoidance, deflection, get them the answers that they need before they get angry at the product. Right?

PB: Yeah. For sure.

SO: How does the customer experience tie into that? And what is the value of the customer experience?

PB: So the value of the customer experience is subjective, but every organization already has an opinion on it. Some organizations place a lot of value in customer experience, have done a lot of work to tie customer experience to the metrics and analytics and things like that they use to track financial performance. Other organizations less. So the first thing I would say is go and see where your organization is relative to their thinking on customer experience. But, as you’re talking about customer experience, other than the support, which I think we’ve covered that quite a bit, for someone who’s showing up your documentation site, really what it’s touching on is a couple of things, what they’re trying to get to. So there’s the discovery aspect of it. And this can be very, very simple or it can be very, very complex. The simple one I like is like let’s say you sell gym equipment and that gym equipment goes out to people who own gyms, as it would make sense, and they’re going to go and they’re thinking of buying a new treadmill or something from you.

They’re going to want to know, is this going to fit in my gym? Can the power I have set up work with it? What are the other details of this product? And then how much information is there to service it? So somebody, once they get past the whole like, okay, I kind of like this brand, maybe this is a good thing, it’s kind of cool, they’re going to go into the documentation because they’re making a purchase that matters to them. And having confidence and trust in the product based on the depth of information that they get prior to purchasing it is a major factor. And this only increases as the economic value and the end implementation, like how critical it is, how system critical it is, increases. So there’s a discovery, evaluation, and confidence, those are the three things I think of, aspect to your documentation or your help site that is there, even if you’re not thinking about it, even if it’s not coming up directly in sales conversations. I promise you, because I have the data that people are doing this during the process of deciding if they want to work with your organization. And that’s the kind of pre-customer experience that’s really, really critical that most organizations are just not thinking about and they’re probably leaving a lot on the table relative to their competitors that either could be advantage or they’re behind.

SO: There was a study. It was a while back, maybe five or 10 years ago that came out from, I always have trouble finding it. It was either PwC or IBM. The gist of it was that 80% of people that were buying consumer products were doing pre-buying research, the technical research. So they were looking at specs and they were looking at how do I install this thing and various other things that we consider to be not marketing information. They were looking at what is traditionally labeled post-sales documentation.

PB: Yeah. Because people care. And the other thing too is like as we move into an economic environment where people are more careful about what they’re spending on, they’re only going to do more research to make sure the things they’re buying are things that are going to last and be supported. I bought a pair of headphones a year ago, and I have an issue with one of them. They’re like the ones that go in your ears, one of them’s not working. I ended up going to the documentation to try to figure it out, and the documentation was so bad I could not make heads or tails of it. And I just gave up and I was like, okay, if I had spent hundreds of dollars on these, I’d go through the process, but they were like 30 bucks or whatever. But I’m never going to do business with that company again. Ever.

If I see another one of the products, I will never buy it. So they don’t know about that experience. But if you have, not even just bad content operations, because frankly their site was, it was kind of nice, it wasn’t bad. I think it could have been better, but you know, funny that I would have that opinion, but it was really the information architecture, so it was kind of the stuff that Scriptorium, Sarah, you guys would help them with. It wasn’t so much they had bad tools. They had terrible organization, and the content was, I’m not allowed to swear, which I wouldn’t anyways…

SO: Sorry.

PB: … but the content was, think of your word, it was bad. It was completely unhelpful. So you can have the best content operations in the world, but without the right information architecture, who cares?

SO: Yeah. This is the infamous if a tree falls in the forest. You know, and to your point, A, the company doesn’t know that your headphones are broken and you’re unhappy, but you just told me, and the next time I’m in the market to buy a pair of headphones, I’m going to remember this story and I’m going to call you, I won’t call you. I’ll send a text and say, hey, what brand was that? Right? And you’re going to tell me and then I’m going to not buy them. So the impact of this failure of documenting, well, actually it’s a product fail, right, but also of support. Because if they had come back with, oh, we’re so sorry, send them in or we’ll send you a new pair, whatever, they could have rescued this encounter, but they didn’t. So the next thing that’s going to happen is that you and every single one of your friends that hears the story will never buy that brand.

PB: Right.

SO: So as we talk about this, the really critical point here though is, I think, there are a bunch of really critical points, but the one that I really want to zoom in on is that the content has to be there. Right? You have to have helpful content that solves the problem that a person is on the website for. And, in your case, it might have been, oh, sometimes this happens and you have to repair them, or you have to this or you have to that, you know, press all these weird buttons in this weird sequence and sacrifice the chicken and stand on your head. Cool.

PB: Right. Which I would’ve done.

SO: Which you would’ve done. But the bigger problem is that you went to their website and we don’t actually know whether or not this problem is fixable because you didn’t find it. Right? You didn’t find the answer. And that means that it’s sort of like a last mile problem. I can write all these really good procedures, they can be super accurate, they can be amazing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You come onto my website, you can’t find the answer your question, it exists, but you can’t find it, right, you, the customer, and so it fails, and now you either, A, tell all your friends that company XYZ is terrible, or, B, you call tech support and you’re mad. Right?

PB: Yeah.

SO: That’s actually the best outcome.

PB: It is. Yeah.

SO: Yeah. And interestingly, we’ve got some, I’ll be very non-specific, but we have a project right now where one of the top tech support topics, you know how you look at what are the top 10 things that people call and ask about, and it’s like, my headphones aren’t working, or how do I return this or whatever. One of the most common reasons that people call their tech support is to ask, where is the documentation? I can’t find it.

PB: Do you have any idea how common that is? I mean, you probably do, but it’s so common.

SO: Yeah.

PB: And we’ve started doing this thing in the process of helping people think through this where we have a very simple tool that we use. It’s a sheet, happy to share it with anybody, and a process where you effectively go through and you just do a very simple 15 to 30 minute interview with X number of support people. You know, we recommend three to five. Some people do more. And you just go through the last 10 support cases, the ones that they worked on, and there’s a few things you mark off, but the idea is to do lightning round, very, very quick. And could this be solved by documentation? And the amount of it that is just looking for documentation, I can’t find it, is so funny. And you’re like, I think that’s a problem. And people are like, wow. But you can’t blame them because people don’t think about these things and it doesn’t make sense that you would because it’s non-obvious, and I think that’s one of the really critical things I want to leave people with.

And I have one other thing that I, you know, we’ve been talking for a while that I want to let people go soon, but this one, I want to zoom in on this for a second. People shouldn’t feel bad that they haven’t thought about this. They shouldn’t feel bad that they haven’t thought about the value of the traffic, the impact of the traffic, the customer experience side of it, the cost ratio of the traffic relative to support people. It really isn’t that obvious. And there’s so much momentum around the way that we’ve done business in having people solve problems for other people in direct communications that even if that isn’t ideal, that’s just the way it’s done and that’s what feels obvious. So don’t feel bad about not having thought about this if you haven’t. Your colleagues shouldn’t either. But it is the way the world is moving, and I think it’s critical to start thinking about it now.

SO: Yeah. And you started this by talking about customer experience needing to be asynchronous. People can get the stuff, self-service when they want it and digital as opposed to call somebody on the phone. So let’s sort of wrap this up and say, what’s your advice to people that know that they’re struggling with this? They know that they have huge tech support volumes and nobody’s happy. And I mean, we know we have a problem. So where should they start? What’s the first step that they can take to begin attacking this thing in a way that will lead to forward progress within a large organization that has as their informal motto, oh, they can just call tech support.

PB: Yeah. So I would say buy-in is always step one, and that means that there’s going to be some selling that has to happen at the organization. You have to get people to recognize the value, the potential, and also the ability to achieve it. So it’s those things when they come together, there can be a ground swell where people are going to actually support these projects and fund them and get involved, and then you’ll have really successful projects. One of the big challenges with getting that buy-in historically has been that there’s no precedent. So when you’re looking for a better website, you already have a website. What if you increase traffic by 10%? You know, people can start to draw some lines between that and sales or the bottom line or value, those types of things. And oftentimes, even organizations that I would say are somewhat up to maturity curve in terms of tech pubs, they don’t have any metrics about their site, like how many people come to it? I don’t know.

They just don’t track it. So there’s not this historical precedent of metrics that can be back to results, and that can create some issues. So the advice that I give organizations that are in that situation is if you are in a technology field and you have a relatively complex product, so something where it breaks, it’s not always obvious how to use it, there’s a reason that people would need to learn about your product for some reason, what our data shows from having done this many times with organizations that fit that profile is that a well-implemented documentation help site, whatever you want to call it, gets about as much traffic as the dot com, the primary marketing site. It tends to be plus or minus 15%. We’ve actually seen as high as 65% of the total traffic between the two sites being on documentation.

That’s a bit of an outlier, but so is 30%. You know, we’ve seen that too. So if you’re want to be conservative, say you’ll get 40% of the total traffic. So four sessions for every six on a marketing site. If you want to be, what we tend to see on an average, just say it’s one for one. If it’s one for one and you don’t have metrics, that’s a target. And you have to ask the internal question, what’s the value of that? If we get a hundred thousand sessions per month or per year or whatever on the marketing site, what if we had a hundred thousand sessions on the help content? Well, those people are there for a reason. Remember? They’re there because they’re not calling support. They’re there because they’re onboarding and using our system better, or they’re there because they’re trying to figure out if our stuff’s going to work for them.

So like how valuable would that be? And once you get the organization to a place where they’re like, oh, that would actually be quite valuable, could we get that, I think 80% of the work is done and well, 80% of the work of getting started is done. And then you probably call somebody like Scriptorium or Scriptorium specifically, if you’re not familiar with this, and you start the process of actually thinking through of how to do it. But I do think the organizational buy-in and giving people in the right head space to think about the value of this is step one, and that’s the process I use for it.

SO: Yeah. I think I would agree with all of that, especially the part where they should call us.

PB: Go figure.

SO: But the key thing in here is, and you said this a different way, but changing the momentum, right, getting organizational buy-in, getting people on board with this concept. The other thing I’ll say is that ultimately one of the biggest problems we face in content ops is that so much of it is invisible in the sense that we’re going to refactor this and we’re going to do it better, and we’re going to produce it faster and we’re going to automate, okay, great, but you’re still producing the same thing. One of the most powerful things we can do early in the process is say to people, look at this portal that we can deliver. Look at this experience that we can deliver. It’s not the first thing or the only thing or even necessarily the most important thing we need to do, because the portal has to have content. Right?

PB: Yeah.

SO: I mean, it’s kind of a chicken and egg thing, but showing people the vision of what can be works typically much, much better than saying we should do structured content because it will help automate things and speed up time to market. That’s all behind the scenes, and it’s not visual and nobody cares. I mean, people care, but it’s hard to visualize. So, okay, I think we’ve promised people a whole bunch of resources. We will put those in the show notes. I’m quite certain that we could go on for a very long time about this topic, but I am going to wrap it up there ’cause I feel like we hit a good starting point for people.

PB: Yeah.

SO: So if there are other questions, I would say reach out to me or to Patrick, because I know we’ve only scratched the surface on this thing. Patrick, thank you for being here.

PB: Of course. Always a blast.

SO: Always good to see you. And we will wrap this thing up, and thanks for being here. Feel free to reach out if you have any other questions.

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