madmarch.co.uk

Online help for a complex financial application

Help articles and support tickets

Stage 1 – offer help articles in the secure section of your online service

Start with a simple list of help articles giving in-depth information about customer issues.

Feed back analytics to the Marketing team – which articles are being used most regularly?

Stage 2 – enable ‘recommended’ articles based on customer data

Your information is now tailored to the customer’s type and application stage.

Make an ‘All articles’ list available.You may start finding older users want to spend more time

reading and researching as they go. As you build, you learn more about customer types. Your

response handling team can advise you on issues for each customer group

Stage 3 – enable support tickets at the foot of help articles

Offer radio buttons and / or an input box for submitting queries. Feed analytics to the contact centre, Press Office and Customer

Insight to help them anticipate and explain online issues.

Tailored navigation

Your CMS may be powerful enough to work out what application stage the customer is in and serve them appropriate content.

An alternative is to allow customers to self-select their view of the articles with a tailored navigation design.

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Ticket updates from ‘My account’

Your contact centre works the tickets backlog. Alert your customers when a response to their ticket is ready.

You can collate ticket types and issue mass responses – saving individual effort.

You can issue ticket updates for customers who haven’t contacted you – such as customers who haven’t submitted their application.

You can also use tickets for error triage – getting customers to self-report, then giving them updates on your progress.

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How contact centre staff could work tickets

The most basic / low cost way to work the tickets would simply be to set up a new company email box. Online help generates automatic emails with subjects.

As the process matures you can match tickets with work flows so that specific company teams receive the tickets.

You can then issue ticket updates for thousands of customers at once – reducing the need for mass emails or text messages.

Knowledge Management, Press and Marketing teams can turn the customer queries and problems into new content – so that you can proactively address issues and reduce phone contact.

Stage 4 – ticket updates appear with articles

You might avoid adding a ‘raise new ticket’ option. Customers would then need to go backthrough the article list to get to the ticket form. This improves analytics and cuts downon both random queries and abuse.

Searching and sorting

There are several ways to allow users to search the articles: Search box Index – an A to Z or table of contents Time bound – most recent Most viewed, by other customers Personalised – most recently viewed and most often viewed

by the user

The help tools for MS Office applications might offer you useful conventions to follow.

Stage 5 – offer online help within an online application form

You want to make the online application forms as straightforward and clear as possible. Let’s hope customers complete it perfectly, first time.

Nonetheless, an online application can be a complicated piece of software. Customers may also have the ability to submit an application and go back to edit it afterwards. You can’t predict every user journey.

In-depth help, on demand

For the more complex issues and minority use cases many customers will be reassured by offering more in-depth articles.

Prominent ‘help’ links also help your users become experts by offering several routes to find and learn new information.

You’ll also have visibility of the points in the online application where customers want more help.

Prototyping and testing Online Help

Following the Steve Krug approach, you may spend money on an external agency if we have it.

If not, you could run in-house testing using volunteers, setting up testing labs within the company.

Testing with 5 users can identify 85% of usability problems (Jakob Nielsen).

Online Help helps you

One of the advantages of Online Help is that when it’s in place, you’ll be able to gather more insight into how your customers are using the online application. They may visit certain articles more frequently if they run into problems, or if they just want more information.

If you’re aware of an issue which takes a large project to address, add an Online Help article to enable customers and staff to trouble-shoot while development takes place.

Online Help means you can continuously assess and improve your online platforms.

Agile working for better user experiences

As the project develops and you measure how users are interacting with the live system, new opportunities and insights present themselves.

For example, if we find our customers don’t visit help articles, or quickly leave, can consider:

Is the link labelled correctly / prominent? Is the interface usable? Are customers interacting in it in the way

you expected from testing? Are you offering useful content? Are you using customer care

words, or jargon? Is the concept flawed? Is the online form itself all that visitors

really care about? Are you setting the right Analytics goals? Do you need more features? Or do we need to refine the

features we have?… and so on.

Thanks for reading.

Any questions?

#bobbykingux

madmarch.co.uk