Driving Customer Experience with Smart Help and DITA
Improving customer experience is a driving business factor for organizations adopting structured content. Odds are a majority of your customers access content online with the goal of quickly finding specific information to answer a question, solve a problem or learn more about your products.
Help topics can be difficult for customers to find specific information unique to their situation. Generally a user can select help within an application or web site where generic content is displayed. With an exposition of platforms, devices and operating systems not all combinations are covered or too much information is provided. This can lead to confusion, lost time, and a frustrated customer calling a help center to gain assistance.
An interesting trend is smart help, driven by smart content, that quickly personalizes content to display just the needed information. With smart help, the system knows much more about the customer’s profile and personalizes the content on-the-fly. The results provide filtered information that quickly answers a question, solves a problem, or provides specific information.
Smart help draws on the power of DITA to manage the content as topics combined with conditions and filtering. Authors create content topics, with conditions to cover variances of a product, platform and other differences. The DITA topics are combined into a product deliverable using maps that may also include smart conditions.
Smart help works a number of ways – the most innovative approach provides the requested filtering as part of the URL to the server. This occurs transparently to a user and requires little knowledge of the complexities of your product supporting many different configurations. Filtering can also happen while a customer browsers your web site or finds a help topic though search.
Conditions have been used for many years but are resolved too early in the process when publishing static HTML or similar help files. This static content cannot easily be filtered to meet changing customer, device or product configurations.
With smart help, all the DITA content, including the conditions, is published as native XML to an SDL LiveContent server. SDL LiveContent maintains the source DITA content – when it receives a request for a help topic, it automatically applies the requested filtering and instantly displays the content unique for that customer.
A side benefit is smart help easily supports re-branding of content for different partners that resell your applications. With a small change to the URL, different logos, product names and or variances can automatically be delivered from the same source content.
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