How Mastercard leverages technical content to create a better customer experience
Providing exceptional experiences to customers is no simple task – especially when you have over 191 million of them! But innovative companies find innovative solutions to meet the complex needs of a staggering volume of diverse customers. The king of all KPIs that provide insight into customer health is CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score). So when Mastercard’s CSAT started to drop, they knew it was time to take immediate steps to evaluate and resolve the issue.
Mastercard set about analyzing what was impacting their Customer Satisfaction Score and eventually found a somewhat surprising answer: their product content experience was not user-friendly. Customers reported finding it difficult to search for and access the right content that they needed. The Mastercard team wanted to address this issue, and did so under the leadership of Jill Sheffield, a 13-year veteran of Mastercard. She began her tenure as VP of Network Operations, and about two years ago, took on the role of VP Content Strategy and Development. She brought with her a unique perspective, in that she didn’t have a background in content production.
“I thought documentation was simply creating a document describing how to use Mastercard,” Jill explains in a webinar that outlined the company’s quest to improve customer satisfaction. “Boy, was I wrong.” Entering an entirely new world of complexity, she began looking for ways to increase customer satisfaction through their content experience.
Jill had the Mastercard Customer Experience team perform research on what an enhanced customer experience would look like. Their most important finding was that customers wanted product content that was “easily digestible, actionable and relevant.”
Mastercard was already sitting on tens of thousands of pages of content, so the solution wasn’t to just create more. Instead, they needed to help users easily access the right content for their needs. One of the main pain points in the content production process was that each piece of content was created individually by different teams who were not aligned with each other, causing duplicates in the system and, worse, confusion to the reader. They needed a solid and cohesive documentation portal to unify and streamline access to content.
“The customer experience is at the forefront of what we do. So I had to ensure we honored our commitment to our customers and delivered an elevated customer experience,” explains Jill. Despire her role as VP of Content Strategy and Development, she kept the end-game in mind: to provide a positive experience for customers.
Jill put together a core information architecture team whose mission was to ensure that customers visiting their new documentation portal could access the information they need in a timely manner. This portal would also act as the integration point between the authors, technology team, and taxonomists helping to create a seamless Mastercard experience.
The team searched for a way to deliver a scalable and personalized user experience by proactively delivering relevant technical documentation. Mastercard set themselves a lofty goal: to bring users one step closer to their information needs in five seconds or less.
“The goal became within reach with the integration between Zoomin and IXIASOFT,” says Jill. By implementing these two solutions, the team improved their content operations so authors could self-publish content. They also improved the users search experience through a synonym and acronym depository, as well as faceted search – key to any good search experience because it allows you to increasingly narrow your search to arrive at just what you need.
Through this implementation, the Mastercard team was also able to translate content automatically, gain actionable insights into how users find and interact with specific content, self-curate and personalize content, and introduce better findability using SEO tools. With clear, easy to manage and simple to publish content, both the employee and customer experience changed for the better.
Mastercard is now able to publish and deliver content at scale in one cohesive, organized documentation portal, in addition to delivering a personalized content experience based on each user’s needs. By streamlining the way they deliver product information to users, the Mastercard content team realized substantial gains in internal productivity too. Their end-solution provides authors the ability to single source their content, easily keeping content up to date across all forms of media.
“Implementing Zoomin and Ixiasoft allowed us to save time and focus on what would drive value for our customers,” explains Jill. “Now we have a streamlined process that saves numerous hours of production time. We have boosted productivity and elevated the customer experience.”
Want to see Mastercard's journey with your own eyes? Watch the full webinar here.
