Our blog is outdated and it’s making us look bad

About a month ago, we received this stomach sinking email:

My company has tasked me with looking into knowledge base solutions for our clients and employees, and I’ve been intending to use the HelpGizmo 14-day trial. I noticed in your blog that it’s been quite some time since the last post after a long stretch of consistent posts. In the past, I have noted this type of anomaly as indicative of instability within the company. Mainly I’m just wondering: are you all still around, and is HelpGizmo still a growing and evolving platform?

Ugh. After dealing with the initial embarrassment and shame, I managed to put together a response hoping to turn a not-so-great first impression into a better experience:

Thanks for your email and for checking out HelpGizmo!

The blog is definitely my fault. We are a small team and a newer product. We were blogging a lot back at the beginning before we had customers, but we we now spend almost all of our time working with customers. Blogging has taken a back seat to customer service

In our case, I would say the inconsistency of blogging is due to our success rather than our instability since we’ve been growing steadily since we stopped blogging. But I completely agree that it is a problem. Maybe it’s something we should blog about

Anyway, I’d love it if you would try out a 14-day trial. I’m here to help answer any questions or assist in any way.

I hope this helps!

We never heard back from the prospective customer.

Why we let our content grow old and stale

I’m cringing writing this. As HelpGizmo started gaining more and more customers, we started spending all our time helping customers and working on the product, ignoring the other skills most companies need. I convinced myself it was okay because happy customers are our number one priority and happy customers lead to word of mouth marketing.  Who needs sales and marketing? Like Kevin Hale, founder of Wufoo, said in a lecture called How to Build Products Users Love:

My feeling is marketing and sales is a tax you pay because you haven’t made your product remarkable. Word-of-mouth is the easiest kind of growth, and it’s how a lot of the great companies grow.

It came up every once and a while. Every time we came out with an awesome new feature, we noted that we should probably update the website (and maybe even write some documentation). When people would bring up our website or documentation, we had to admit we hadn’t updated it since last summer. “You should blog about that!” became a running joke because, hey, blogging is one of those important but sometimes difficult tasks in marketing.

As a company that makes knowledge base software, the irony of our outdated content isn’t lost on us. However, like many of our customers, our excuse was that we were just too busy. And that’s what it was – an excuse.

Outdated content – be it your blog, website, or knowledge base – is a warning sign to customers

If you know anything about HelpGizmo, you probably know we love our customers. Like LOVE our customers. Great customer service is one of our company’s bottom lines, and customers are our number one priority.

Our excuse for not keeping up with our content was that we were too busy helping customers and building the features they want.  Thinking about it now, that’s a horrible excuse.

Great customer service means genuinely caring about and valuing each and everyone of your customers. Unfortunately, your outdated content is basically sending a strong message: We don’t care enough to provide you with fresh, relevant content.

Content is part of the customer experience

If you do really care about your customers, you want to provide them with the best resources and experience possible. And your website, blog, and knowledge base are parts of the experience.

Think about this: If your website, blog, or knowledge base was the only experience a customer or prospective customer has with our company, what would it say about you? It’s a sobering thought.

In a “Great Survey Design” training course I help teach for our sister company SurveyGizmo, one of the key points we try to drive home is that, if you aren’t going to do anything with the data from a survey question, don’t ask it. We think of our survey respondents as customers, and it’s bad customer service to ask them to take the time to answer questions if you aren’t actually going to use the data. It’s rude and it often leaves a bad taste in the survey respondent’s mouth, especially when they don’t get a response to negative feedback.

This same idea can easily be applied to all parts of your customer experience, including your blog, website, or knowledge base. It’s bad customer service to invite people to view your content that is sadly outdated and unkempt. It’s makes your company look bad, and it’s telling those people you don’t care about their experience.

Be mindful where others are not

I was feeling pretty bad about letting our content become so stagnant, so I started checking out other companies and competitors we like and respect to see how great they were doing compared to us. Surprisingly, it made me feel better, because I learned we aren’t alone.

Running a business is hard, and there’s always a ton of things that warrant your time – and we only have so much time. Everyone gets off track at some point, and everyone makes mistakes. The important thing is to learn from them and use it as an opportunity to be better.

Your content -  be it your website, blog, or knowledge base – is an opportunity to provide a great experience for your customers and to stand out from the competition. Sure, all your competitors might have outdated content, but you can be better. Maybe no one else is focusing on this aspect of their company, but you can. Disney calls this overmanaging, which is described in an Inc. article by Jeff James:

Every touchpoint must be given deliberate attention, then organized and planned in great detail, so that whenever and however a Guest interacts with our organization, the experience is excellent.

We don’t have the same resources as Disney, but we can definitely strive to provide an excellent experience for our customers however they interact with us. We just have to start somewhere. I’m starting by writing a blog post