Sharon Burton, customer experience consultant | Managing post-sales customer experience problems

What do we measure in Tec...

In a previous article, I talked about some typical things we measure in Tech Comm and technical writing. I suggested that the traditional KPIs were often stupid. And some interesting suggestions came out of that in the comments. In this article, I’m going to start talking about tech comm in the business context and why that matters. Let’s start with Marketing and Sales. What does Marketing care about?...

Content strategy – ...

When I was 18 years old, I realized I didn’t know much. I also knew this was the nature of being 18 but I still felt I should fix it – I should know more. I was a US Army wife, living in Naples, Italy and for reasons I don’t remember, we had an encyclopedia set. I decided to read the encyclopedia, starting at A and reading to Z. I felt this was a reasonable solution to not knowing. It was, in a...

Wrapping up your content ...

Here in inland So Cal, it’s a cold and pretty year thus far in 2015. Here’s hoping your content strategy heats up this year! The 5 top content development articles last year 2014 was the year when everyone discovered the importance of effective content strategy and content management. Pre- and post-sales content is starting to get the attention it needs to improve the customer experience overall. I...

Are you helping your cust...

Customer segments are the definable differentiations in your customers. For example, your customers over or under XX number of dollars in size, or the number of Spanish speaking customers or really any other way your customer base can divide out. Why is customer segmentation important? Customer segmentation is getting more important to businesses as big data becomes more available. It allows us to better understand...

5 reasons why content cre...

Note: Since I wrote this, I’ve discovered 2 other blog posts on this subject: Mark Baker JoAnn Hackos Clearly, this is an issue. [update added 11/14/14] I’ve spent the last few months getting new content development tools set up or helping to change the workflow. And (in my opinion), no content development vendor has it right yet. Here’s my top 5 reasons why: 5. You have to be an expert in the...

When good content develop...

Some thoughts about how good content development strategies can go wrong. But first, science. Carrying capacity In environmental science, there is the concept of carrying capacity. From Wikipedia: The carrying capacity of a biological species in an environment is the maximum population size of the species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available...

Your content is too expensive

If you’re creating content in Word, FrameMaker, or InDesign, your content costs are far too much and you’re probably getting unhelpful content.

Customer content, such as product instructions, are critical to the customer experience. But developing content in the wrong tool adds unnecessary costs and results in not enough content to meet your customers’ needs.

Read this series to find out more.

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Product instructions are Customer Experience

Do you even know if your product instructions are supporting your customer experience? Are they meeting the content needs of your customers?

More companies are blowing this important Customer Experience touch point. Most companies don’t include the product documents as part of the Customer Journey, much less as part of the Customer Ecosystem.

Read the series to learn more about what product instructions mean to your customer experience.

Read the articles

Onsite or Virtual Content Development Training

Do you have writers who need to brush up their skills? Engineers who can’t communicate? Moving to a new content development tool?

I provide companies with onsite or virtual training in issues around content workflow and content development, as well as tools used in the content development workflow process.

Courses can be customized to meet your needs.

See the list of classes read more