It’s been a BUSY couple of weeks!
Content about MobileMe draws on a container metaphor. For more, see my UXMatters column.
I recently helped design a music mastering service from soup to nuts. So fun! The process reminded me that content plays a key role in the service experience. I first became aware of this fact a few years ago at Cingular Wireless, where the human-centered design team worked on projects for all customer touchpoints—IVR, store kiosk, customer service representative, website, you name it. Get the content wrong in or across any of those touchpoints, and the service experience implodes. Here are a few specific reasons why well-crafted content adds business value to a service.
The business-customer relationship for a product often is short term. The customer shops, compares, buys, and then the relationship is mostly over. With a service, the relationship often is long term. When a customer signs up for a service, whether a mobile service plan or NetFlix, she often is signing up for a period of time or certain number of uses. If anything requires good communication, it’s a long-term relationship. 
The substance of this communication is largely content.
Of course, the direction of many services is automation, such as paying the service bill online. Automation saves businesses money by being more efficient and requiring fewer employees. Automation often is more convenient for customers, as well. The tricky part? Preserving a personal feel or tone in the service, especially for the long term. How can you make your service seem different from your competitor’s if it is largely automated? One way is through outstanding content that has a distinctive voice.
For the music mastering service I mentioned earlier, the president had a large hand in crafting the content’s voice. I think it largely worked because he designed the service for someone like him. The voice seemed authentic. Also, many of the “web 2.0″ services have extremely informal and human-sounding content, which I think helps create an authentic voice. A huge brand for many products and services that has impressively managed to keep a distinct voice is Virgin. I look forward to seeing how voice evolves as service design grows.
Virgin's unmistakable brash voice is clear even on a log in page.
When I talk to people — clients, UX professionals, interactive marketers — about content, I find an assumption often lurks beneath their comments. What’s that assumption? It’s content = copy. From that assumption follows many other unspoken assumptions that give me the willies:
No, no, a thousand times no! Content is so much more than copy. Content is strategic. This perspective is critical to making the right design and investment decisions for a product or an interactive marketing effort. Here’s my stab at explaining why.
Sure, copy / text is a big part of content…so are these things:
What is more, usually these items have a relationship with the text, such as supporting or further explaining the text. If you think content is only copy, you’re probably neglecting these other types of content. And you’re likely not coordinating them well with the copy.
Businesses are using interactive channels more and more for self-service, where customers can help themselves. Some folks such as Daniel Pink say we’re entering an age of more automation than ever. Also, Forrester reports continue to show that the trend toward self-service is only rising. That means interactive channels are not just conveying a message. They are replacing human interactions. They are providing the service. We can shop online, manage accounts online, pay bills over the phone, receive shipping notifications by text message, check in to flights with a kiosk. So our content needs to provide the “human” factor. It needs to speak like an ingenious sales person, a helpful customer service representative, an affable technical support expert, and more. The content needs to do everything possible to help customers succeed in using self-service.
I’d say that’s a big job you can’t throw together at the last minute. 
Furthermore, usability and technical performance will be important to self-service — but not the differentiator. Thanks to the keen awareness of usability in the interactive and user experience world, everyone will be concerned about usability and technical performance. Your company, your competitors, everyone. It’s obvious a customer can’t get service from a hard-to-use, slow, or buggy application. But usability and technical performance only get you on the playing field. What gives you the winning edge is persuasive, useful content.
Sound far-fetched? Consider this. At the close of 2006, Forrester released a report entitled “Use Persuasive Content to Improve the Customer Experience.” This report calls for less emphasis on the technical aspects of content management systems and more emphasis on the content itself. To quote:
Information and knowledge management professionals who support eBusiness, multichannel, and Web content management initiatives can drive signficant improvements in customer experiences. How? By putting more emphasis on using content to help customers — whether it is providing relevant information when customers buy a product or delivering easy-to-use or understandable content for customer self-service Websites — rather than simply focusing on how to create, manage, and search for content.
Let’s stop treating content like it’s crap work. Let’s get serious about content, for it’s key to helping customers and differentiating our companies, our products, ourselves. Content is more than copy!
As promised in Part I, here are a few examples of content strategies. But first I’d like to add some thoughts to what a content strategy could include.
International Approach / Content Languages
This consideration relates to content context. It covers whether the content needs to be translated and, if so, whether the translation will use a globalization or localization approach. A globalized approach is more of a straight translation. A localized approach may use different words, terms, order of information, and so on to best convey the meaning in that language and culture.
Content Channels
Related to content distribution, this means whether you are using web, mobile, e-mail, print, tv, and the like–or more likely a combination. As multiple channels become more easily available and more widely used by people, this consideration will grow in importance. (For some of my idealistic thoughts on cross-channel communication, see the UXMatters article “Rediscovering Communication.”)
These examples are based on a mix of strategies I actually used or created and strategies I wish I had been in place. :-) A content strategy keeps everyone involved in a project or product development on the same page. It also guides the tactics and implementation details. When debate begins about whether a certain tactic is a good idea, one criteria for the decision should be whether the tactic truly supports the strategy.
So those are just a few examples of content strategies, and I hope they are helpful. I also welcome other examples that you have found useful.