By Sarah Gideon

Albert Einstein once said, “The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill”. Content consumption is superlative for content creation, collaboration, curation, and its distribution. As technical communicators, we often discount the potential of consumer assessment, behavior, and experience. Developing content that fosters increasing engagement with our consumers is often translated as creating additional content instead of consumer-centered, strategic, smart content. “Contalytics” is the union of analytics and user experience with the content that is generated. By leveraging analytics to content authoring platforms, technical communicators can quickly determine what information is most popular, ignored, or missing; and develop road-maps for content improvement. Such a solution can dive even deeper and provide compliance metrics for content, provide prompt feedback on the health of the content, and reduce support tickets.

Relationship between Consumer Engagement and Content Consumption

Following is an example of a customer usage metrics dashboard/report for an authoring platform using an analytical tool. This dashboard displays consumer engagement with content/documentation, and consumer behavior in raising support tickets with respect to the helpfulness of the content/ documentation.

Analysis and Key Strategies

From this dashboard, we make the following observations.

OBSERVATION 1

Group 1 and Group 3 engaged themselves for availing documentation support.

Inference: Group 1 and Group 3 (64.96%) are a set of consumers/customers who are aware that the documentation support is available, and have visited the site where the content is hosted.

Solution: Raising awareness about documentation is the key. The present statistics, though satisfactory, can be further improved by:

1. Providing the customers with easy access to documentation, embedding context-sensitive help links within the product UI, leading the user directly to the documentation space.
2. Improving the search engine optimization (SEO) terms within the content to enhance findability from popular search engine sites.
3. Including tags and HIDs to help customers through the intended journey of reaching where your content is hosted.
4. Developing a social media presence is a powerful strategy which has surplus benefits. As a technical communicator, you can intensify your presence, interaction, and author blogs in product communities and social media to publicizing your content.
5. Developing rich media. How easily your customer can visualize and understand the key features and functionalities of your product is integral to your content consumption. Rich media content such as videos, GIFs, walkmes, and webcasts generate interest among customers for content consumption.
6. Engaging yourself in futuristic content authoring and hosting approaches. This approach should be made an organization goal. Regular sessions on brainstorming, hackathons, and ideas presentation should be conducted to bring in the next generation solutions.

OBSERVATION 2

Group 3 consumed content and did not raise a support ticket

Inference: Group 3 (47.16% of the 64.96%) is aware of the documentation support, availed it, and found it helpful in answering their queries/doubts. Therefore, they did not need to raise support tickets.

Solution: This statistic is satisfactory; however, to maintain the engagement scores, consistency in providing quality content is vital.

OBSERVATION 3

Group 1 and Group 2 (62.84%) are a set of consumers/customers who raised support tickets.

Inference: Group 1 (17.8%) of the customers did not find the content useful and relevant. Group 2 (45.04%) of the customers were not aware of the documentation support. Therefore, they raised support tickets.

The unsatisfactory experience may be because of inaccessibility due to difficulty in findability, login hassles, and/or 508 compliance failure etc.; limited, inaccurate, and unclear content.

Solution: Content optimization and opting the popular ways in which content is most consumed will increase customer engagement and satisfaction.

This example is one such use case that tells you how to leverage “Contalytics” to improve content quality and consumer engagement scores. Similarly, several dashboards can be created around Content Compliance Metrics, YouTube Analytics, and Customer Engagements Score to help interpreting consumer experience and behavior, as a core organizational strength and strategy.

About the Author

Sarah Gideon is a writer for network management and monitoring solution at CA Technologies, and has an experience of three years. She is a part of the analytics team and is passionate about solving problems. Her interests include turning boring, redundant tasks into useful and relevant solutions. She has effectively managed to solve several challenges at her workplace by introducing plug-ins to optimize and add value to key goals and initiatives. Her other interests include SDN network monitoring technologies, rich media content, and analytics.