The cost of disorganized content
Content decline and chaos happen bit by bit: A policy isn’t updated, a web page goes stale, content owners leave their role, links break, search stops being effective. Eventually, not being able to find information feels normal and, because you don’t know how to fix it or you don’t have time, your organization puts off addressing the problem.
You might have had one (or more) of these experiences:
A customer calls in asking questions about old files that are available via search, but should have been unpublished years ago.
A customer finds contradictory information and calls customer service confused and frustrated.
An employee discovers two versions of the same procedure living on the intranet and can’t verify which one is current.
Your AI chatbot implementation was populated with all your content, including the out of date or inaccurate stuff, and now it’s giving that information to employees or customers.
You’ve attempted to remove out of date content, but you don’t know who owns the content and no one is making decisions.
How do you track how much time someone spends looking for a file? Or the loss of potential customers because of dissatisfaction? An urgent situation, such as a policy violation, lack of compliance, or lost revenue forces you to address your content problems. How can you quantify the cost of poor content before it becomes an urgent situation?
Measuring the time cost
On the interwebs, the biggest cost of content chaos is lost employee time. Employees spend hours per week searching for information they can’t find. They search in a system, across systems, ask coworkers, or access out of date files.
I’ve written two other articles about how much time it takes to search for content.
Why your intranet search is broken: a research review and Why search doesn’t work on intranets.
Having worked on large intranet and website projects for over 20 years, I know in my bones that the search tool isn’t the real problem. Search can only surface the content it has. If it has out of date, redundant, or inaccurate content, that’s what it will provide based on the searched term. When customers and employees say, “Your search sucks,” they really mean they can’t find what they need and they distrust what they find.
Compliance risk
When content is unstructured and ungoverned, duplication is inevitable. Nurses search the intranet for a policy, only to find two versions that are slightly different. Call centre staff work with different price sheets. Customers see information on a website that contradicts what customer service told them. Residents have a hard time applying for benefits when they can’t figure out a process and the content doesn’t explain it.
In regulated and risk-averse industries such as healthcare, financial services, public sector and government, employees are expected to work from accurate, up-to-date information. But many organizations have a very poor understanding of the investment needed for good content management and information management. Plus, in the last few years, I’ve seen management squeeze content efforts down to the bare minimum, provide little training, and pressure staff to do even more with even less.
This means that organizations in risk-averse industries are creating risk through their ungoverned content. An outdated procedure on the intranet isn’t an inconvenience; it is a liability.
The underlying problem is a lack of process and supporting structures to ensure that content is kept up to date. Someone actively reviews the content for accuracy and currency, content is properly marked up with metadata, old content is archived. Without the right process and structure, adding more content adds to the chaos rather than preventing it.
Plus, it can be very difficult to engage busy stakeholders, do user research in a company that fears user feedback, and put time into content that isn’t valued by management.
Unless you set about to deliberately measure it, content chaos doesn’t show on a spreadsheet. I haven’t seen expense line items for:
Time searching for, and not finding, a file
Time asking coworkers where a file exists
Customers called because they couldn't find the answer online
Staff recreated a document that exists but they can’t find
Company pays for research we already did but couldn’t find
Where to start
Organizations that have solved the content chaos problem share a common approach, which is relatively straightforward to replicate.
Talk with users to understand how they use content and what they are looking for.
Talk to stakeholders to see what their content challenges are.
Talk to contact centre employees to see what challenges customers and users have.
Do a content audit to see what exists, discover it is redundant or out of date, and if it meets user needs.
Build a structure around how users think
Create processes for governing the content
The good news is that this is a solvable problem. Organizations fix it regularly. The ones that succeed start by understanding what they have, who needs it, and how it should be organized. That foundation is what makes everything else work.
If any of the scenarios in this post sounded familiar, you are not alone. Key Pointe works with organizations to untangle content problems like these: user research, content audits, information architecture, taxonomy, and content migration planning.
A short conversation is often enough to identify a practical path forward. Get in touch.