Customer Support Content Strategy

My current company, Metronome, has signed a definitive agreement to join Stripe.

I will not be taking freelance clients for the foreseeable future, but if you’d like to touch base just to chat content strategy, please feel free reach out!

Do a search for “content strategy” and you’ll find a mountain of information on marketing content strategy and very, very little (if any) information on using the general framework of content strategy in other areas of your business—areas just as critical to your bottom line.

In my 10+ years of experience in startups and tech, one thing I’ve seen over and over again is this single, common blind spot: customer service content. Specifically, your help center, customer service emails, and other customer support communications. This is a hole in your bucket. It can often be the invisible finger on the scale of your churn rate and can also be the unnoticed drag on your bottom line. Why?

  • The wrong tone at the wrong time can leave users feeling judged, misunderstood, and frustrated. At scale, something as seemingly small as an inappropriate tone can tarnish your startup’s reputation, leaving long-term negative effects on your business.
  • Poorly written content can leave customers confused and frustrated. Some may not even read it if it’s too long! If they never get their questions answered, they may never learn to use your product well enough to stick around.
  • Too much content in your help center makes it difficult for users to quickly find what they’re looking for. They may:
    • give up and (you guessed it) never learn to use your product well enough to stick around.
    • email your support team, driving up operational costs by wasting your team’s time on questions that should be findable on your site.
  • Not leveraging content efficiently means your customer service team isn’t working at top speed, costing time and money through unnecessarily repetitive interactions. It also may mean redundant content maintenance if answers can be found both on your website and in the response email—and if both aren’t maintained, those sources can quickly get out of sync, leaving incorrect information to confuse your customers and, in extreme cases, potentially put you in legal hot water.
tl;dr If your content isn’t clear and isn’t deployed efficiently, you’re probably losing customers and money.

LET’S WORK TOGETHER!

The fact is, if your users can’t find answers for themselves and they want to continue using your product or service, they have to contact your support team. This might not look like a problem in the earliest days, because you’re learning from your customer interactions and the volume of those interactions probably isn’t high yet. But as your business grows and you want to scale more rapidly, this quickly becomes an area that can hobble your business. If you address your support content strategy early on, you can have the systems and processes in place to manage that volume at scale.

“Stephanie’s exceptional ability to transform complex ideas into accessible and engaging content played a crucial role in enhancing various aspects of our user experience, most notably improving our chatbot’s performance to achieve an impressive 71% self-service resolution rate.”
— Raphael Barbo, Sr. Director of Customer Experience Strategy & Operations, Quizlet

In my time at LendingClub, I executed a content strategy that increased our content’s discoverability by +33% and averaged $265,000 in monthly conversion. A couple of years later, I did something similar at Quizlet, decreasing incoming ticket volume by 21% with strategic changes to the content ecosystem and tooling. At the fairly conservative estimates of 160,000 tickets/year for a B2C business, and each ticket costing your business $5, that’s an operational savings of $168,000.

As your customer base grows, you continue saving at that rate for the life of the business—so long as your content keeps up with product changes and with customer questions.

🤔 Curious? Here’s a quick look at one of my content strategy projects that increased user self-service by +70%.

If these kinds of impacts sound like something you’d like to have in your business, I’d love to see how I can help. Whatever your need, I’ll bring years of creative, strategic writing experience to your project.

LET’S WORK TOGETHER!
“Stephanie was always prepared to offer recommendations and a smart, balanced perspective. In our time working together, she created countless Help Center articles, customer support emails, and conversational chat responses that enabled our customer support teams to deliver exceptional care in a more consistent and scalable way.
— Carla Gray, Sr. Director of Content Development & Strategy, LendingClub