Excavating Customer-facing Content Artifacts from within the Enterprise
By: Paul Burke
Tags: New York, Digital Transformation, Customer Experience, Digital Marketing, Content Strategy

As organizations begin to build omni-channel technology to enable highly personalized engagements and improve self-service, the focus is often centered on the data that can be processed to present a meaningful opportunity to an opt-in customer. Whether through propensity models that can surface a recommended action or the financial data that can provide a customer account usage details, the objective is to engage the customer by presenting the most relevant and value-added opportunity at the right moment. And while the insights and actions rendered from enterprise data are fundamental underpinnings of an omni-channel personalization capability, they are only one side of the experience.

The other side is content. Content is the context that surrounds the data to make it useful. From step-by-step instructions to educational materials to related content to frequently asked questions to relevant definitions, the words and concepts that wrap around a piece of data give the customer the answers they need to make a choice or take an action. Without the support of content, the customer can’t understand what to do.

As an example, think of a first time insurance customer who is trying to understand deductible half way through the plan year. They may be trying to understand where they stand financially to determine whether to pay out of pocket or send a claim to insurance for something that has already happened—like a fender bender or a doctors visit. If all they see is a number, like $1,203, it won’t mean much. They need the contextual and supporting content, like insurance 101 videos or common first time customer questions, to be able to effectively use the data they are presented.

Without focus, this will eventually create a challenge for organizations looking to roll out personalization at scale. Even with a network of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) with deep knowledge about the nuances of their domain, their time is limited to join active work streams and the information they have documented is decentralized. This valuable information is stored in the heads of the experts, in files on local computers, in out of date SharePoint sites, or in secured drives on corporate servers. As a result, when trying to build personalized workflows and triggers in an engagement platform, limited access to at-the-ready content often prevents the workflow from being activated. To deliver, organizations will need a way to source and centralize a massive amount of domain specific information into consumable chunks that are available to an vast array of highly-personalized micro-interactions across a number of channels. And without committing to content, organizations will risk falling behind relative to competitors or continuing to erode satisfaction scores of an increasingly digital-first consumer.

We should think about enterprise knowledge sourcing as an archeological process and hire teams to scout, plan, collect, clean and catalog the nuggets of knowledge within the walls of the enterprise. We should make use of the parallels in method and identify a specific toolset, like componentization and atomization, to specifically address the artifacts from these digital digs.

Given that the need for this skill set is emerging as many of us have recently embraced the possibilities of personalization, there isn’t an existing role in many companies that fills this gap. As jobs of the future are starting to emerge, I’d like to submit the Content Archeologist for inclusion on this list.

Plan View of the Excavations in the Athenian Agora are conducted by the American School of Classical Studies.

What is a Content Archeologist?

The Content Archeologist is a mix of a corporate librarian, an investigative journalist, and a user experience designer. Like its cousin, the Content Archeologists is human (or humanity) centered. They are rooted in discovering valuable things that can be shared with a group of interested people to improve their understanding of a subject. They are centered in information systems, information architectures, and structured information processing methods that allow them to catalog, index, and make sense of the items they discover. They’re judicious critical thinkers who can distinguish value from volume. And they’re bound by craft to ensure the things they bring forward are presented in the most appropriate, accurate, and useful way.

What does a Content Archeologist Do?

The role of a Content Archeologist rooted in a purpose (to discover and surface useful information needed by an audience to enable an action) and framework (a method of identifying, classifying, and cataloging information into a catalog that can be accessed when the contents are requested.) With those elements to guide them, the Content Archeologist follows a very similar process to the traditional one:

They Speculate: They start by defining the potential sites where valuable and significant artifacts might be buried and build a backlog of potential opportunities. In the case of content, they may look for areas within the organization who may have procedures, policies, frequently asked questions, marketing content, and sales literature that may be relevant or interesting to the audiences they represent. They Research: They research to find out what other work has been done in the area to better understand the geography and the opportunity. They may look at market comps from other organizations or adjacent industries to help define “value” for a specific type of content. Then they select a site and prepare to dig. They Excavate: They survey the land, make a strategy, dig, collect, and document the valuable items they discover. They find the information stores within the company which might include the minds of the subject matter experts, the files within relevant business unit network hard drives, or the common questions and feedback from within the call center. They Catalog: They store, label, preserve, and index artifacts according to predefined standards and check the work into a collections facility or catalog. Using a content modularization framework with predefined templates, content atoms, and meta values to index the content, they clean, polish, and contribute the content they have found into a structured knowledge management platform. They Curate: They understand key themes that are or may be of interest to audiences and assemble exhibitions of the best and most compelling examples from their catalog to engage and delight audeinces. Using a content taxonomy, meta tags, and a set of action-specific business rules, the content archeologists pulls content forward to engage audiences based on the specific question they are asking at any point in their customer journey.

Does My Organization Need a Content Archeologists?

Not every organization needs to deliver a personalized customer experience but for those who do, they will need to select an approach to aggregate and optimize the content their audiences seek. While there may be AI-based technologies that can mine hard drives and pull back content from deep within digital files which can contribute to an enterprise digital knowledge solution, robotic processes still lack the judgement of the writer who has an empathetic connection to the audience and the elements of writing style even the best bots cant replicate.

As a consultant, advisor, and experienced content producer, the Content Archeologist can be an efficient partner in centralizing enterprise knowledge, modularizing the content for various sized omni-channel needs, and simplifying the language they find to make it more useful, intuitive, and interesting for the audience. And in so doing, ensuring that the personalized interactions designed to engage audiences and tighten the connection between customer and company will deliver as expected.