Introduction
Reviews of the Future in an Omnichannel, multilingual and increasingly personalized world.
If we are to deliver the best experience for our customers, we need to rethink how we approach the review process and consider new technologies that allow us to move faster and more efficiently. In this summary of the discussion between Noz Urbina of Urbina Consulting and Dipo Ajose-Coker of Componize we talk about content Reviews – the issues, disconnects, conflicts that are increasingly common despite the promises made by technology.
- What is the problem?
- How do we solve it?
- What are the benefits of solving this problem?
- What are the risks of not solving this problem?
If this problem is solved, what will that look like? How will we know when we’ve solved it? What does success look like?
What are you seeing out there as a consultant
You’re seeing a lot of pain points in the industry with content review. We find that most organizations have some form of extensive centralized checklist-based or template-driven review processes for their structured content, but when it comes to reusable content and multilingual publications, these processes are often missing or are inefficient.
So while organizations are making efforts to improve these processes, there is still a fundamental challenge in connecting a review job to the overall lifecycle of the product content.
Here are some examples of what companies have continued to do instead of evolving their tools and processes to match the times:
PDF reviews
This remains the most common way organizations continue to review their content. This is the equivalent of printing it out on paper! Can you imagine printing out a 600-page service manual in order to redline correct it? What about the disconnect between the author and the reviewer? An asynchronous review, especially when you multiply it by a certain number of reviewers gets increasingly inefficient the more people are involved. The author then has to manually collate the review comments, and there’s usually a period before release where there is a panic search to ensure that all feedback has been implemented accurately.
Line-by-line group review meetings
If you’ve ever done any kind of group review meeting where there were multiple teams within an organization collaborating on something big like a new product launch or campaign launch then chances are good that at some point during those sessions there was someone who didn’t speak up because they didn’t know if they were allowed/weren’t sure what was expected yet etc., which ultimately led to wasted time later during implementation (or worse). There has got to be a better way for everyone involved here!
Source Content reviews in CCMS
While this is the ideal way to do things, especially in regulated industries, organizations are reticent to review source content as components, and rather rely on PDF or output format reviews
Word or Google Docs or similar reviews?
Rare but it still happens, content is drafted in as a processed document and then put on a netwrk or cloud drive and the link shared. While this might work for smaller document sets, it certainly does not cut the mustard for high-level or complex subject matter.
Most tools are still not up to the job
While some CCMS vendors do offer a review interface, it is usually in some sort of proprietary format that while offering a review interface, does not take into account the overall lifecycle of the content. These tools also have a higher learning curve for non-technical writers who have an understanding of structured content.
What are the challenges specific to reuse in structured content
The reuse process is complex. It requires a deep understanding of the content strategy and the information architecture that has been designed to support it. The challenge is not just the technical requirements of reuse, but also the cultural shift that is required to get people to think differently about content. It requires a change in mindset so that all stakeholders see their role as contributing to a common goal of reusable content.
In addition, there are risks that need to be managed throughout the process (e.g., regulatory compliance issues, intellectual property risks).
What are the reasons for reuse of content
The benefits of reuse include:
- reduced production costs (creating and revising content)
- reduced translation and localization costs
- Personalization and customization
- Improved ability to have audience segmentation
- Omnichannel release
What is missing from reviews
It is important to remember that what we are talking about here is not reviewing reviewed content. We’re talking about signaling content that has been reviewed and received acceptance within a system. In this respect, we should not expect the reviews themselves to provide information on whether the content is trustworthy or not. Rather, the organization has provided evidence that supports the trustworthiness of the tools and processes that comprise the review. This means:
- Reviewing content in and out of context
- Signaling content that has been reviewed and received acceptance to avoid repeated reviews of the same content
- Preventing the same debate being repeated with a different set of reviewers in a slightly different context
- Assuring a secure audit trail for the entire process
What is the market crying out for in terms of tools or processes
The market is crying out for tools that are easy to use, and that can be used in a collaborative way. Processes that can be automated so they are not time consuming. The future will see greater demand for these types of solutions as the world becomes more globalized and increasingly fast paced. Reviewers do not want to have to learn a new tool just to perform a review. Simplified tools that are able to follow secure workflows with an ability to manage reminders and permissions.
What are the challenges for reviews of the future
A a review platform that handles the likes and the comments and the feedback coming back from the field, from users, when it’s out there on on the web, or on the Knowledge Portal.
A platform that is able to collate not just comments, but statistics and allows analyses of the effectiveness of the content and lets organizations find out where things are going wrong in the overall system.
A platform that is able to send out and receive many levels of review, from content accuracy, to layout and legibility.
A platform that is able to provide hotspot maps of areas with issues that could possibly be resolved by a design change to the product than repeated topics on how to resolve the issue.
A platform that does not just meta analysis, but also does text analysis.
Translation continues to pose an issue when it comes to the promise of reduced costs with structured content. The deal was that content does not have to be resent for translation. As such most CCMS cannot handle that and just do not send already translated topics to the translation agency. However, language does not work like that. the same sentence can have multiple meanings depending on the context, the phrase before or after it, or the chapter it’s in.
This also applies to personalized content. As such the platform needs to be able to deliver snippets of content that needs to be reviewed, with an ability to zoom out, and zoom out again to see more of the picture, more of the context, before the reviewer/translator acts on it.
Quick Wins
One of the first steps when implementing a review process is to determine the type and level of reviews you will perform. The level of review determines the number of people involved in a given project, as well as the amount of time it takes to complete. The types are used to categorize all departments within an organization, based on how the content impacts their primary role. A regulatory officer will need a different level of review than the marketing officer.
In the short term
- Create levels of reviews
- Create categories of reviews
- Perform continuous analyses and improvements of processes
- Perform regular process audits
- Make sure you communicate the pain points of SMEs to all who will listen, and then to those who won’t
- Compile a list horror stories of consequences of poor reviews and be ready to pull them out at that next budget cutting meeting
For the long term
- Capture and implement reviews and feedback from the field and your customers/users
- Reduce the training required to use tools and processes
- Visualize and simplify processes – the simpler it is, the shallower the learning curve for the reviewer
- Demand more of vendors and tools
- Build, maintain and improve knowledge graphs that allow you to improve audit processes, and traceability and relatability of surrounding context, even relevant staff and information sources.
- Improve meta-analysis, text analysis to automate all the above.
- Autodetect long discussions and flag them to product managers, associated to the metadata like what topic, area, feature, etc. was being discussed?.
Conclusion
The companies that thrive in our omnichannel future are those who can foster a culture of learning from their mistakes and from their successes. They must also be able to capture this information from the field and implement changes based on what works best for their customers – not just what makes them feel good about themselves or gives them something new to talk about at a meeting.
Reducing the training required to use tools and processes is another way that organizations can ensure they are getting better over time as well as reducing costs associated with implementing these tools.
About my guest
Noz Urbina
Content and customer experience consultant. International keynote speaker.
Founder: OmnichannelX; Urbina Consulting;
Author: @thecsbook;
Content Strategist; Keynote; Futurist, Blogger
