A Good Content Strategy Gives A Business A Friendly Face

If your iPhone fails to light up or the screen of your Mac starts dropping pixels, you have a place to go. Owners of Apple devices can make an appointment at their local Genius Bar, drive down to their nearest Apple Store and talk directly to someone who sounds like they know what they’re talking about.

Android or Windows users have no such luck. Try calling Google or Microsoft to find out why their device isn’t working and after spending minutes climbing through a call tree, they’ll emerge, if they’re lucky, at some call center in Bangalore.

While Apple’s customers get to feel that the company that supplies their devices is close, knowledgeable, passionate about their products, and smart enough to fix them, Google and Microsoft’s customers have a much more distant relationship with their suppliers. That proximity is one of the reasons that that Apple has become such a familiar brand with such loyal supporters.

Few companies have the resources to mount live customer support bars for their products in hundreds of retail outlets around the world. But many are trying to do something similar.

The content strategy that we created for COSEV@D, one of France’s leading direct insurance agencies, for example, was integrated into the company’s sales and customer support methodologies. Instead of trying to guide customers through a sales funnel, we built an infrastructure that helped their staff deliver their content in a simple and engaging way. We offered simulators that helped clients get a better feel of the investment they’re about to make, and tutorials to help them better understand financial products that are very complicated to people who are not insurers.

It was all part of a content strategy whose goal was to personalize the company. We couldn’t put a website visitor in a room with agent but we could provide the information an agent would supply, and in an equally friendly manner.

Customers weren’t talking to a logo. They weren’t trying to contact a giant office filled with thousands of staff that they have to search to find someone whose job it is to help them. As soon as they reached the site, they got to see content that answered their questions, and engaged them.

It was a solution that lies at the heart of every content strategy. Whatever the company and whatever the strategy itself may contain, the aim of content is always to raise the quality of the audience and to improve the experience of the customer.

Customers receive information that they might not realize they lack or need to know, but learning it enhances the way they use the product. And they absorb that information in a way that’s not just enjoyable but which is also an experience in itself. Receiving the information teaches and creates a relationship with the person who supplies it. It turns the brand into a person.

In this series of blog posts, we’re going to explore the content strategy of customer support. We’ll explain the different kinds of content that a company can use, describe how they work and reveal how content-driven customer support doesn’t just solve, or even pre-empt, problems. It creates an entirely new form of engagement.

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