Content strategy for contact center content
I conducted user research and developed a content strategy for content used by internal customer service agents at a contact center.
Quick info
Timeline: January 2020 to March 2020
My role: User researcher, content strategist
Problem statement
Customer service agents must find accurate answers to customer questions efficiently, otherwise it will take longer to get the customer’s issue resolved. This impacts the customer service agent’s performance and leads to distrust in the content.
Design question
How can we improve the experience of customer service agents to help them quickly find the information they need?
Objectives
Understand customer service agent pain points and content needs
Assess how the current content meets user needs
Develop a content strategy that writers can use to create user-centric content that’s aligned across all channels
My journey
Discover
I worked with my team to conduct user research, which included global user interviews and a survey. We synthesized the data into a spreadsheet and looked for commonalities among our findings.
Through our research we discovered the articles were very difficult to find, which delayed the customer service agent from finding information quickly. Once the customer service agent found the relevant article, the information was confusing or difficult to understand. Often, the article was also very long.
Define
We defined the need for a content strategy that could be used by the content writers who created the content for the customer service agents. This strategy should define the content audiences to keep the writers aware of user needs. Additionally, the strategy should make recommendations based on our user research, such as word count guidance, and create alignment across the content. I identified the need for an accessibility and inclusivity section of the strategy to ensure the content is accessible to everyone.
Develop
As we developed the content strategy, we kept the needs of the customer service agents at the forefront of our work. Additionally, we needed to consider the users of the content strategy, the content writers, to ensure the content strategy could be easily adopted and applied to the articles.
We created personas based on our audiences and created content style guidelines based on content strategy best practices. I led the accessibility and inclusivity section of the strategy, which involved creating accessibility guidelines based on the broader company accessibility guidelines. I shared the guidelines with the accessibility team for their feedback to ensure our guidelines were in alignment.
Deliver
We presented our content strategy internally and shared the internal site with the content writers. To address questions and concerns, we held office hours where we presented on different aspects of content strategy.
Results
This content strategy has led customer service agents to find content faster and understand it more quickly. We continue to iterate on the content strategy as we receive feedback from the writers and stakeholders.
Next steps
I’m currently leading a user research project to assess how the strategy is meeting user needs and what we can improve.
I also led other user research projects where I repeated this process for other contact center and operations teams.