We’ve all been there – you receive a new product, new piece of equipment or new software, and the manual that’s supposed to “help” you get started is an information overload filled with technological jargon that makes finding the answer to your question seemingly impossible. Isn’t it time companies learned to deliver simple, easy-to-understand instructions and support?
At Enterprise Connect (News - Alert) last week, I had the chance to speak to Connie Twynham, VP of business development at Innovatia, which provides knowledge services and technology information development solutions, such as end user videos, help files and user guides. It also designs, develops and delivers training and e-learning services for visual learning and remote learning, and provides customer support for everything from Tier 0 to Tier 3 (News - Alert). We discussed the different services Innovatia offers, the biggest trends happening in the communications and collaboration industry and why companies should be aware of knowledge services and the importance of their information as corporate assets.
Innovatia offers four main types of services: documentation, training, technical support and software.
One of the things Innovatia looks at is first-time customer engagement. For example, if a company thinks it has a customer service problem, Innovatia will perform an information audit to take a look at the product, the documentation, the training and help key stakeholders to identify opportunities to improve those assets and positively impact the customer’s experience. It performs a skills gap analysis to identify if a problem can be avoided by training and if so, what kind of training. Innovatia thinks about the total customer experience and how information can enhance the overall product – a better experience means higher customer satisfaction, and that means more product sales.
Innovatia is an all-in-one package: It has the 15 years of customer insight from providing customer technical support, to total design, development and delivery of all of the information assets from user materials to training and support. If offers these services on a project basis or, for some customers, it is the training, documentation or technical support department. “Customers are evolving, and they’re used to getting information quickly. With tools like Google (News - Alert) and YouTube, they want immediate access. We understand that. We can help to design information products better because we have that insight,” Twynham explained. “Because we are a knowledge services and software company, our revenue and research development is focussed on just that. We’re not a telecom manufacturer – we don’t invest in that. We are experts in knowledge management.”
At the event, Innovatia focused on two software products it recently announced. The first is Content Miner, which helps customers reduce the amount of information they manage, and the cost to maintain and translate it by identifying where there is redundancy in a body of knowledge, and where information might be reused. It simply loads these files into a system, and with the press of a button, runs it through the analytics and produces simple to read reports to implement and manage reuse to help companies reduce effort and the cost of translations.
The second is ProcedureFlow, a product that acts as a visual job mapping tool for people to follow procedures easily. The tool also has an automated approval and publishing feature, so new and revised procedures will automatically be sent to approvers before it’s published. Because this product is in the cloud, procedures can be constantly updated in real-time meaning agents will always have access to the most current information. ProcedureFlow is great for contact centers, but can also be used for a number of different uses in various industries.
The inspiration for Procedure Flow came from Innovatia itself – since it runs contact centers on behalf of many companies, it realized a need for this type of solution internally. It developed it, and then pushed it out as a product for customers. Innovatia was able to reduce training time for new call takers from 6 weeks to 4 with the aid of this tool.
One of the biggest trends Twynham notes in the industry today is an emphasis on easy-to-use products. In Cisco’s (News - Alert) Rowan Trollope’s keynote at Enterprise Connect, he showcased how easy it was to install equipment just like if he received it at his own door. He didn’t demonstrate a new communications manager, phone systems or any complex products – the underlying theme is simplicity, she said.
“Sometimes the difficulty in installing equipment is in how much information there is. Sometimes products can be complex, but documentation can make it easier. Companies are designing products more and more for the end-user and Innovatia help by creating information specifically targeted at these end-users,” she said. Among her best practices for creating information documentation is to take out engineering speak and reduce the amount of information.
Learn more about Innovatia at www.innovatia.net.
Edited by Cassandra Tucker