Content Strategy 

THE CHALLENGE: Create a consistent and unified voice across all areas of the brand.

THE SOLUTION: Senior writers were assigned to departments or projects to develop and implement a content strategy to ensure that the content associated with that project or department was consistent with the overall voice and tone of the brand.

HOW I HELPED:

• Created a customer service knowledge base to be used by customer service representatives to help them communicate with customers in the brand voice and tone.

• Worked with the product manager and UX designer to create the content for a new affiliate network landing page, dashboard and onboarding email series.

• Maintained an editorial calendar for social media and partner communications.

• Worked with the communications manager to create email and blog content for partner communications.

Customer Service Content Strategy

THE PROJECT: In 2017, Goldstar did a major overhaul of its branding, including the voice and tone. The new guidelines were based on a deep body of research into the qualities we wanted our brand to embody, and how to communicate those qualities to users.

The marketing and UI content had been updated to reflect our new best practices, but the customer service team was still working with a knowledge base that hadn’t been changed in many years. The purpose of the knowledge base was to speed up response times in our most common and easily resolved cases, but it wasn’t performing as well as it could. Answers that were too “canned” and lacked critical information were working against the team instead of helping them.

THE TEAM: Once we had settled on our new brand guidelines, I partnered with the Director of Messaging, the Director of Customer Service, a customer service manager, and a senior customer support specialist to overhaul the knowledge base our customer service used to help resolve the most common customer issues.

THE GOAL: My goal was twofold: (1) to create customer communications that matched the new brand voice and tone guidelines, and (2) to improve the content of the communications to reduce the average conversation length needed to resolve customer inquiries.

THE PROCESS: To accomplish this, I met with the stakeholders to understand how their vision for customer communications fit within the brand voice. I also reviewed the research from the brand overhaul, and conducted my own research by studying actual customer service interactions. I also worked on the customer service team, to understand the process firsthand and speak to our customers directly, to help understand their motivations and their feelings.

Then I started creating updated versions of our answers to meet our new voice guidelines, and to address information gaps that were prolonging customer service transactions. I reviewed the new content with the team, then iterated until we were satisfied.

THE RESULTS: The new knowledge base was launched in conjunction with a number of other improvements to introduce more on-site help and added self-help options. The result was a vast improvement in average response and time to resolve cases.

Affiliate Program Content Strategy

In 2020, I began working with the product manager and UX designer to redesign the affiliate network. The original program was focused on content creators, such as bloggers and website administrators. As we increasingly partnered with online marketplaces, we found that we needed to adjust our affiliate program to cater to both of these affiliate partner types. We reimagined the program from the ground up, adjusting the content to create a custom experience for each type of partner. This example to the left is a mockup of a new landing page with a pathway for each affiliate type.

We were in the prototyping stage when the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to bring a halt to this project.