Customer support content: we interact with it every day, yet it remains a fairly esoteric topic. What constitutes successful customer care content? What goes into its production, and what positive impacts might it create for a company or its customers?
For over 15 years, Lisa Ekstrom has been immersed in the design, production and distribution of customer support content. Now, as Creative Director of Marketing and Design, she oversees a wide range of internal and external projects, from usability testing to persona development.
Lisa sat down with us to talk about how all these areas come together, and how—when done right—they can make a decisive marketplace difference for manufacturing and technology brands.
Just to start, Lisa, could you walk us through a day of what you do in your dual role as Creative Director of Marketing and Design?
Sure. Well, for the last few years the focus has really been on client nurturing, which entails a lot of talking to customers. What projects are they kicking off, what are their goals, and how can we help.
So, we spend a lot of our time listening because sometimes you find solutions to their pain points that they don’t know to ask for. There may be a solution out there. Or, you know, maybe they’re thinking they might need one solution but something else might be a better solution or better fit for them.
And then, on a good day, I get to do something creative because I think that’s what roots me in this department.
Customer Support Content and The importance of BRAND
As you go from Marketing to Design, or from internal work to client work, you know—through all that, is there a single mindset or strategic approach tying those different activities together?
It’s interesting because our own company, Tweddle Group, has for a long time been a tricky company to market. We don’t do just one thing—we’ve got diagnostic tools, we build information management and distribution platforms, we do fulfillment, labor time studies, authoring, video production. The full gamut. There’s real diversity there, but all within a niche and extremely specific space.
That translates into lots of practice or training which we can apply when our client projects dovetail with a client’s marketing. And that’s often the case with a lot of our post-sale client deliverables.
As far as what ties it all together, you know, I’m a pretty dedicated—I don’t want to say cheerleader (laughs)—but I am a strong advocate for brand, whether we’re talking about our brand or our clients’.
Brand clarity is important. Brand consistency supports it. When a company has a strong brand, you tend to recognize everything they do—immediately and without having to think about it. Oh, this is Coca-Cola, this is Ford, this is Apple. You see something and right away you know who it belongs to.
Brand is really important.
The other thing we try to maintain is the integrity of the task. A client comes to you with all kinds of concerns, whether customer support content is one of them, you know, that are very easy to relate to. A client is trying to get through their day, trying to make deadlines, being mindful of their budgets, trying to get their job done as well as they possibly can.
A client has their own initiatives, they’ve come to you for help and they might have some frustrations of their own.
Integrity means supporting that as well as you can, and you want to make it really easy for them, as easy as possible.
You have to make their concerns your own. You want to understand what problem they’re trying to solve or identify.
When you deliver on that, it builds trust, and the more trust you build, the more open a client will be to the solutions you offer.
"It starts with asking, ‘What are we selling, and does it address the end user’s problems?’ Once you’ve answered those questions you can create a powerful solution."
Usability and Persona Development
Are there any solutions you see clients becoming more open to as of late?
Absolutely. On the design side of my work, we’re seeing more awareness of the value in usability testing and persona building.
These terms have floated around for a while now. I don’t know if historically it was a lack of understanding of how these things work, or how they might inform a product ecosystem but there’s a greater emphasis on understanding the customer, on understanding the end user. It’s a positive development.
“The end user” meaning your client’s customer.
Yep. And the challenge being, ‘What are we selling, really? Does what we’re selling really address the end user’s problems?’ Once you’ve answered those questions you can really dig in and create a powerful solution or refine an existing solution to make it even more effective.
In this digitized space we all occupy now, it’s very important to offer a really intuitive, friction-free user experience.
If you’re trying to do that without data, it can become a guessing game very quickly.
If people have trouble with your interface, or with the customer support content contained in that interface, if either doesn’t come close to a user’s intuitive expectation, you face a very real risk they’re going to abandon the product completely.
Usability testing is a great way to mitigate that risk.
When you combine persona development with usability testing, now you’re armed with knowing who’s using the product? Why do they use it? What are they getting out of it?
Which allows you to ensure your product will satisfy all those things.
Would you like to walk us through a recent persona development project, so we can get a feel for what that means?
I would! The most interesting one, for me, started back in 2021, and it’s ongoing. We were approached by a recreational products company, and they were bringing out a new version of one of their flagship vehicles.
It started as kind of an experiment—they came to us and said they had three very minimalistic personas.
They had one persona for the New Entrant—someone who’s new to the powersports community. This person has a low DIY quotient. They’re not working on the product themselves, you know. If there’s an issue, they’ll likely just take it to a dealership for repair.
On the other end of the spectrum, they had their DIY User or Do-it-Yourselfer. This person has been into powersports their entire lives, they’re fixing products themselves and might just take the whole product apart just to see how it works and how it’s assembled.
And then, between these two personas, in the middle, they had the Enthusiast. This person is not a total do-it-yourself technician but they do know a bit about the product and they have just enough capability to be dangerous.
They wanted to give us a shot at authoring one section of one of their product support for one of these personas.
It was just a test to see what approaches our team would bring to the table. And, maybe, to see how our contribution might differ from what they were already doing. They wanted to see how we author, and how we organize stuff.
And we jumped at this experiment to see how we might take this client’s information and ultra-fit it out to accommodate all three personas.
So, taking all that information into account, we might move one piece of information into the maintenance section for the hardcore do-it-yourself’er. We added a QR code there to take the mid-level user right to the dealership website with a pre-populated shopping cart to order the recommended parts. The New Owner persona probably doesn’t need to know any of this information, but if they want to educate themselves it’s now out of the way, placed in maintenance where it makes sense.
So, the way the information is structured intuitively lets each of these user types know what content they need to engage with and what content they can gloss over.
By working with the three personas, we’re able to configure the customer support content so that it’s very easy for each user category to hone-in on their desired level of content.
So, if I’m understanding this—you have three user “skill levels”, ownership levels. And they already had this general support content. But your team restructures this existing information so that it speaks to each skill level individually.
That’s it.
And essentially, by manipulating the layout, the location and the presentation of this information, you know, if I’m a mid-level user I can easily find the content that addresses my concerns, and the other content—the stuff geared to the other two personas—becomes “invisible” to me, even though it’s all in the same technical documentation. Is that correct?
That is correct. It’s tricky, because you’d like to print three different versions of the same book but that’s completely impractical.
For sure.
There’s talk in these situations of transferring the content into a website or a dedicated app, which would allow the user to enter their product number and then by answering a series of questions the system could very easily categorize you as a certain type of persona and then highlight the information level you’re most likely to want.
Of course, you could always drill down or roll it back to more top-level information.
But it’s amazing how well this approach works even in static support content.
The thing we continually asked ourselves was, “What’s the number one thing each of these personas needs to see on a given page?”. We always make sure we’re meeting that criteria.
That’s great. I own products where I sincerely wish the support content operated that way. You can stay top-level, you can learn a bit more, or you can get pretty intense.
Yep, exactly.
And I can say, when I experience customer content that way it feels way more personal.
It creates a sense that the product knows or has considered me as a person.
It’s a great experience, because the end user feels like they have a place in the product ecosystem. And if that sounds too abstract or emotional then the thing to follow-up with is that I become way more likely to purchase this brand again. There’s a well-known personal computer company who I think built their brand on this kind of experience (laughs).
"Do your research. That's better than guessing. Early adopters are some of the quickest deserters."
Right. Right. What else emerged from this experiment?
Well, along with figuring out what kind of content would go on certain pages, we established having a table of contents at the beginning of each section and not just at the beginning of the book.
Because, again, if you’re the hardcore do-it-yourself owner, you know what you need to do. You don’t want to sift through every page. You want to get right to your content.
It was insightful for the client to see how to organize the content, how to tag it, how to structure it.
How would you approach this rework to improve the new owner experience?
Appealing to how a novice likely responds to a new brand or product is essential. Do your research, don’t guess. Early adopters are some of the quickest deserters.
For them, they are getting their bearings and don’t always need everything all at once. A great option is to provide them with a handful of critical things they need to get started, pair it with intuitive design choices and always try to meet them where they are in the brand journey.
There you go.
I believe this could go to some really interesting places as support moves into the vehicle cabin. Because once the support content is in the touchscreen, and once that touchscreen is able to talk to the rest of the vehicle, and it gets to know you—a lot of good could come out of that.
If I’m driving down I-75 and I get a flat tire, and that vehicle knows me, it’s not going to try and feed me information on changing my tire. I don’t want to know where the jack is located. (Laughs) If that vehicle knows me, it’s gonna say, ‘Hey. I notice you got a flat tire. Would you like me to call Roadside?’
‘Make the call.’
Yes. Yes, I would (laughs). So, personas lay the groundwork for this future state, where we’ve got a much more custom relationship with the content, and it’s immediate, and it happens in real time.
Stay tuned for part two of our interview. We’ll take a deeper dive into customer support content as an extension of brand, discuss the differences between owner content and service content, and Lisa will share her favorite customer care horror story.
Special thanks to The Cranbrook Institute of Science for hosting our interview and photoshoot.
Original photography by Matt Wong.
