by Aaron Fulkerson, CEO and Co-Founder of MindTouch, who is also a part of the Salesforce Contributor Network.
If you work as a content creator, you probably know that the rate of change in the field has always been high. Now, however, it’s accelerating even more rapidly thanks to technological innovations — especially the increased ubiquity of artificial intelligence (AI).
After years of working with various brands and with the people responsible for the brand’s visibility and strength, we feel confident saying that automation and AI won’t eliminate content jobs. However, they will transform them dramatically.
New versions of content jobs will be rather different from what they look like today. What does this mean for content creators? Evolve now, because old content jobs are quickly becoming obsolete. Fortunately, the new content professional’s role is more important than ever.
The New Content Creator
The old “technical writer,” “documentation manager,” and “knowledge manager” roles are disappearing. In their place are the new “content experience manager” and “director of content experience” roles. Why? This is because, now, key performance indicators that matter most are no longer focused on reducing costs, but on metric-driven optimisation.
The new content creator will focus on three things:
- Customer renewals and upsells
- Customer acquisition
- Brand engagement
As a content creator, you need to measure your impact on these three metrics or your job may be automated. The content experience manager, for their part, strategically and measurably affects the organisation. Hallmarks of the content experience role include customer-focused thinking and taking an outside-in approach, rather than approaching content production from an inside-out perspective.
The content experience manager is metrics-driven and takes a cross-departmental perspective, spanning silos and bridging departments. Finally, the new content professional examines the customer journey holistically.
Trends Driving the Shift Toward the New Content Professional
Five irreversible trends are driving this shift.
The first is simple customer preference.
Self-service is undeniably the preferred channel for at least 81% of all customers. Moreover, it’s a strong preference, according to 2016 data from an Aspect survey.
The second driving trend is the disruption of indirect models.
Companies that don’t directly engage with customers will be disrupted. So, a business’ survival will depend on programmatic learning from their customers. Self-service is the key to driving direct engagement for businesses that have been missing out, making it the key to customer understanding and therefore survival.
Remember: Familiarity drives affinity.
The third trend to remember is that customer success is dominating support functions.
The metrics that matter are that 90% of revenue comes from existing customers. This trend suggests that companies without subscription models will be out of business within five to eight years.
This means renewals and upselling are simply more important than customer satisfaction score, first call resolution, and mean time to resolution.
Content analytics and maps drive all key metrics and content drives engagement, especially when the product doesn’t foster engagement on its own. Indeed, content is what makes customer success scalable.
Publishing content in a well-structured way is critical to your ability to make maps of customer micro-moments and drive them back into marketing, customer renewal, and sales channels.
This way, everyone on your team understands what drives conversions through the e-commerce experience most effectively.
The fourth trend shaping the role of the content professional is new channels, which demand new content approaches.
Almost 60% of searches are done on mobile and 20-25% of searches are done by voice commands. In a world where consumers use text and conversational platforms to communicate, conversational AI platforms (chatbots) will be the next big platform shift in interfaces.
Meanwhile, by 2025, IoT could generate more than $11 trillion in economic growth, and the augmented reality /virtual reality field is expected to surpass $162 billion (up from $5.2 billion in 2016) by 2020.
All of this means that PDFs and other static documents will not be used. You need to start to create content which fits new channels and also consumers who are using them.
Yes, break/fix (knowledge base) content (used to be done by humans) can be automated. However, content creators will need to produce content that systems will be able to use, so that customer support interactions can be automated. This means that documentation, training, and best practices will still require humans. So will coordinating departments like marketing, sales, and success.
The Bottom Line: Being the Content Experience Manager
So, what does it all mean? In the AI and automation era, a customer-first mentality is paramount. Be metric-driven. Think about how much budget you could command if you could show management micro-maps of how to achieve better renewal and upsell numbers from your customers.
That’s exactly what a well-informed, talented content experience manager can do for a business — driving customer renewals, upsells, and new customer acquisition through robust brand engagement.
Be cross-departmental and holistic in your thinking. No one outside the company cares what departments there are in the company or how they’re cobbled together. How can your content affect channels like support? What do they need to get your content to customers? Identify another department to engage with and “blend” content for an optimal product.
Think about better content experiences. Customers want the information they need at any particular moment. Give it to them by putting their needs first, and don’t make them figure out which department the information comes from.
Google favours content that puts customer needs and preferences first. This is done by answering user questions fast and by engagement as measured in time-on-site and page views.
Ditch your PDFs and other dated or cumbersome delivery methods that look like a bounce to Google and which would hurt your rankings. Instead, think about micro-moments, dynamic content, and the customer journey.
One final thing to consider is that AI is just ‘stealing’ the cut-and-paste, repetitive part of your job. The creative, big-picture aspects of content experience that demands a deep understanding of human customers are going to become more important than ever.
The article first appeared on Salesforce Blog.
Lava is an authorised Salesforce Partner in Malaysia and has more than a decade of experience in cloud solutions which includes marketing automation, CRM implementation, change management, and consultation. We pride ourselves in not just being a CRM partner but in also understanding the needs of our customers and taking their business to the next level.