The Future of Technical Communication is Marketing

Once a prospect buys a product or service, the content they interact with is no longer familiar. The instructions provided don't look, feel, or sound anything like the marketing and sales materials that introduced them to your brand. Neither does the service contract, the warranty, the customer support website, the product documentation, nor the training materials. The extensive variability in customer experience — and each customer touchpoint — creates a different and inconsistent version of the brand, some that bear little or no resemblance to the brand that executives believe they are building. There are often as many brands as there are touch points. For no good reason, the content experience changes drastically -- and not in a good way. That's why organizations that recognize the importance of a unified customer experience have started rethinking what it means to be customer-centric. Some forward-thinking organizations are reorganizing customer-facing content creators into teams under one roof. They're breaking down the barriers — the silos — that prevent them from collaborating; from creating a unified customer content experience. In this presentation, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, discusses the challenges of content inconsistency and incongruity, and why he thinks the future of technical communication is marketing. This session is part of The Content Wrangler Virtual Summit on Advanced Technical Communication Practices, December 4-5, 2014. Hosted by BrightTALK. Sponsored by SDL, Astoria Software, Acrolinx, oXygen XML Editor, Logos, Scriptorium, and Oberon Technologies. Cost: Free Recording available to those who register. Register: http://bit.ly/1BFnxeU