The Owlery

Sometimes, poor documentation is a minor amusement. Other times, insufficient documentation can actually be dangerous. Mostly though, poor documentation is frustrating more than anything. 

Customer service culture varies around the world. Cultural context shapes our expectations of the service we receive in reality. What can we learn from international customer service practices?

While a lot of documentation can be corrective – that is, aimed at troubleshooting problems which have already occurred – there’s a powerful argument to be made that you should invest in preventative documentation.

Customers want to do what is easiest, not what is desirable for your company. They are self-focused, and rightly so. The solution is to align your business goals with your customer’s goals, so that everybody wins.

We recently underwent a total restructuring of our KnowledgeOwl support documentation. In this post, we share that process and offer tips you can apply to your next knowledge base reorganization.

Knowledge transfer will look different in every company. At its most basic, it means getting your people excited about collaborating more and unlocking the latent knowledge held in your business.

There’s a clear connection between your self-service portal and your customer support team, and the customer is in the driving seat. The customer gets to choose.

The topic of this post is contextual help: help that is provided to your users in the context that they need it, without requiring them to switch between tools to find help.

We’re looking at knowledge as it exists in the workplace, and then sharing a Japanese theory of knowledge transfer and knowledge creation (the SECI model).

Proactive customer service is going beyond aiming for customer satisfaction, and instead focusing on customer delight: customers really are number one. It’s the difference between having an ordinary customer experience, and an extraordinary one.