Editorial
The Gist
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Content drives loyalty. Outdated or confusing help content can quickly erode customer trust and loyalty, especially in highly competitive industries.
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People shape content. Technical writers and content architects are essential for creating clear, accurate and well-structured customer support information.
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Maintenance is essential. Ongoing knowledge management helps content stay current and useful, and it prevents costly customer experience failures.
I was recently in Europe, where I used an app-based car rental service to get to the airport. After arriving, their online help said to drop the vehicle at a particular garage in a specific spot. After arriving in the garage, those specific spots didn’t exist. The app’s help site didn’t prove helpful, and when I called their support line, their autoresponder disconnected me.
As my flight time approached, I called again. I maneuvered my way through the automated system, and I eventually connected with a live agent who told me I had to go to a totally different garage. Delayed 30 minutes, I nearly missed my flight, and I probably won’t use that car rental service again.
Out-of-date information isn't a minor issue that support teams can cover for. It's part of the customer experience that can undermine customer trust. This is especially true as self-service help is the most common route for customer support.
There are a few crucial points to making sure that your customer experience is consistently excellent when it comes to content delivery. These include tracking how customers want to experience content, having the right personnel to build that content and maintaining ongoing knowledge management.
This trifecta changes the customer loyalty game by serving content that’s well-crafted, relevant and actually helpful.
Table of Contents
- How Content and People Shape the Customer Experience
- Invest in Content Architects and Technical Writers
- Knowledge Management Matters More Than Ever
- The Link Between Content and Customer Experience
- Core Questions About Content's Role in Customer Experience
How Content and People Shape the Customer Experience
As we move more toward online and in-app interactions powered by AI assistants, these tools are only as helpful as the content they’re connected to. The relationship between users and content, along with the ways customers access and interact with that content, is crucial to understanding the modern customer experience.
This isn’t one-size-fits all. In a tech-driven experience economy, customer journeys may take different looking paths, but one thing remains constant. When a customer needs information, it’s your job to provide good information. That means accurate, concise and complete information for the situation.
People have limitless options at their fingertips for any given service. Car rentals are a perfect example of this; there are plenty of choices that are nearly indistinguishable in the product they provide. And my experience proves the point that poorly designed or maintained content can easily tip the scales of customer loyalty, especially in highly commoditized markets.
They could have avoided this in a few ways.
Related Article: Customer Loyalty in the Experience Economy: The CMO's Perspective
Invest in Content Architects and Technical Writers
There’s no place for haphazard content in good customer experiences. And while anyone can attempt to write help content, certain professionals do it best.
Technical Writers
These are the bridge builders in the world of technology and communication. They connect complex information with people who need it to solve problems, complete tasks or understand systems. These writers have a knack for translating intricate details into clear, accessible language. The best technical writers distill and focus information. They accurately project themselves into the shoes of the customer, and they craft experiences from that viewpoint.
Content and Information Architects
While content architects and information architects are often distinct roles, the higher objective is very similar. That’s to build systems, rules and patterns that allow the best customer experience. These people are the content organizers who recommend the best approach to structure content so that it can be easily reused in various situations, across channels and devices. Content architects are concerned with content's larger, systematic behavior, governance and design.
Building a Strong Foundation for Help Content
Well-built content begins with the architects who map out how customers will move through your content, and it then goes on to the technical writers who communicate how things work in plain language. This content creation symbiosis is crucial to build a content architecture that’s easy for humans and machines to understand. This way, when a customer needs help, they’re not running into the wall of chatbot helpers that don’t understand their queries. Or, when customers are reading documentation, it’s actually well-written enough to clearly explain solutions to relevant user problems.
Investing in the right content designers and writers is an investment in customer experience. But it can’t stop there.
Knowledge Management Matters More Than Ever
With the right personnel in place to make sure your help content is truly helpful, you have to keep it that way. Too often, help documentation is treated, even if not purposely, as a one-and-done project. Or it’s shuffled into a backlog to get cursory reviews on a quarterly basis (and that’s generous).
Much like the old adage that 90% of development is maintenance, most of the cost of knowledge content is maintenance. Since help, service, training, onboarding, documentation and other types of knowledge content reflect an organization’s current product and services, they have to change at the same pace the company advances.
This is entirely different from content like this article. This article will likely never be updated, and that’s entirely fine (Editor's note, don't rule it out, Patrick! We love updating existing content down the road). It’ll still be true and valuable in five years. The challenge is that most leaders who aren’t close to knowledge content don’t consider this fact at all.
Content upkeep complacency is a customer loyalty killer. My car rental story is just a small example. Imagine the ramifications of help content being outdated for medical devices or financial technology.
This is where knowledge management comes into play.
Knowledge Management
This is the implementation of systems and processes that actively expand codified knowledge, enrich and organize it for locatability, structure it for use in all channels and maintain the full lifecycle, including actively destroying assets which are ROT (redundant, obsolete or trivial).
Effective knowledge management keeps your content useful for customers today, tomorrow, and in the years down the road. As your knowledge base expands and improves, it will set you apart as an authority among competitors and further solidify customer loyalty.
How Help Content Impacts Customer Experience
This table compares key content characteristics with their direct impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty.
| Content Factor | Positive Outcome | Negative Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Accurate, up-to-date information | Customers solve problems quickly and independently | Frustration builds when directions or policies are wrong |
| Clear, concise writing | Fewer support escalations and smoother journeys | Ambiguity leads to confusion and lost trust |
| Structured content design | Content is discoverable across channels and devices | Customers can’t find answers—even if they exist |
| Active knowledge management | Content stays aligned with evolving products and services | Outdated content creates gaps in the customer journey |
| Skilled technical writers and architects | Information is presented from the user’s point of view | Help content feels disconnected or overly technical |
The Link Between Content and Customer Experience
Whether negative or positive, the way customers experience your content reflects on how they experience your products and services. The two are inherently connected.
If someone has chosen your business, at minimum, your content shouldn’t make them regret that choice. Content is a powerful asset when properly developed, but if you can’t fully invest to make it a strategic advantage, you should, at the very least, make it good enough not to be a detractor.
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By keeping these key points in mind, companies can bring customer experience to the forefront and create content that turns curious consumers into loyal customers.
Core Questions About Content's Role in Customer Experience
Editor's note: As more customer support shifts to self-service, help content becomes one of the most important—but often overlooked—parts of CX. These core questions explore how to improve content, keep it relevant and protect loyalty in the process.
Knowledge management ensures that content remains accurate and useful over time. It involves processes for reviewing, updating, organizing and retiring content so that customers always access the most relevant information. Without this, even well-written content quickly becomes obsolete—leading to broken journeys and increased support costs.
Technical writers, content architects and information architects are essential. Technical writers ensure clarity and usability. Content and information architects provide the structure and governance to make content scalable and reusable across channels. Together, they create systems that allow help content to be accurate, contextual and accessible.
Because help content is often the first (and sometimes only) support a customer encounters, any inaccurate or outdated information can instantly lead to frustration, delays or lost trust. In self-service environments, poor content doesn’t just fail to help—it actively hurts the experience. And in commoditized markets, that’s often enough to send a customer elsewhere.
Because customers view content—especially help content—as part of the product itself. If that content is confusing, incomplete or incorrect, it reflects poorly on the brand and the product. Helpful content reinforces trust. Unhelpful content undermines it. That makes content a make-or-break moment in every customer journey.
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