Never don't invest in the content base

I've argued for funding help content for years and mostly lost. The salary is easy to see. The customer who never needed to contact us is harder to put in a budget.

I still back the argument. If the service runs on your answers, pay someone to keep them right.

An experienced rep can spot an old instruction and ignore it. An agent might serve it straight back to the customer. Now a neglected article is giving advice on the company's behalf.

That doesn't mean we need more articles. We need the right ones.

Say two pages describe the same process. One includes an exception and the other doesn't. Someone has to work out which is correct — writing a third page won't do it.

A newer date isn't proof either. The person who owns the process needs to settle the answer. If nobody can, you've found a decision problem.

This is why I get annoyed when content is treated as tidying up after the real work. Deciding what we're prepared to tell customers is part of the real work.

The job includes stating who an answer applies to. It includes the awkward exceptions. And it includes deleting the old answer when we replace it, even if that makes the publishing numbers look less impressive.

A page count tells me how much we've written. It doesn't tell me whether any of it is useful.

I'd rather see a recurring customer question answered correctly than another batch of articles published. Follow the question through the service and see where it goes wrong. Give that finding to someone who can fix it.

There are several reasons an answer can fail. If retrieval misses a perfectly good page, fix retrieval. If the customer needs a permission changed, another explanation won't grant it.

That's the limit on my argument for content funding. Spend the next dollar where the failure is. A bigger content team won't compensate for a missing action.

Nor does every answer need to cover every possible case. An article so thorough that nobody can find the relevant bit has failed at its job.

The useful test is small. Pick a question people keep asking. Find the answer they're being given and get its owner to check it.

Is it right? Then make sure someone is responsible for keeping it that way.