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Quantifying the Benefits and High
ROI of SDL Knowledge Center
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary ... 3
Introduction ... 5
Overview of SDL Knowledge Center ... 5
Research Background ... 5
Methodology and Demographics ... 5
SDL Interviewee Snapshot ... 6
Overall ROI and other Key Findings ... 6
Content Development ... 7
Content Reuse ... 9
Greater Collaboration ... 10
Publishing Efficiencies ... 10
Aggregate Cost Savings ... 10
Translation ... 10
Customer Support ... 11
Customer Satisfaction ... 11
Aggregate ROI ... 13
Conclusion ... 13
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Executive Summary
Customer Experience Management (CEM) Solutions, provided by several software companies including SDL Knowledge Center, enhance experiences throughout the customer lifecycle, including post-sales touchpoints around customer service and support.
Crimson Marketing (Crimson) interviewed and researched four global enterprises to calculate the return on investment (ROI) for a specific CEM solution, SDL Knowledge Center, a knowledge management and delivery solution for technical documentation and support content.
Among the interviewed companies which had average revenue of $12.5B, the overall ROI achieved by using SDL Knowledge Center over the course of five years was approximately 7 times the cost of the solution, or 687%. Using that data, Crimson extrapolated the following ROI for the following three company sizes:
• Mid-Size ($0.5B) = 305%
• Large Enterprise ($12.5B) = 687% • Very Large Enterprise ($17.5B) = 961%
The three largest contributors to these impressive ROI findings were the following:
• An average savings of 31% in content development costs over 5 years • Content reuse went from 3% to 32%, on average, over the course of 5 years • Translation/localization savings amounted to $11.5M, or 37% over 5 years In addition to calculating the ROI of SDL Knowledge Center, Crimson also looked at possible cost savings in customer support organizations mainly due to enhancement in customer self–service. While no company specifically tracked that data as it related to the use of SDL Knowledge Center, there was a strong feeling that savings were
achieved due to enhanced customer self-service. One company embedded help videos using SDL Knowledge Center to enhance support content which resulted in a 20% reduction of support calls over the initial three months.
305% 687% 961% 0% 200% 400% 600% 800% 1000% 1200% $0.50 $12.50 $17.50
ROI with SDL Knowledge Center
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Crimson also asked interviewees to quantify increases in customer satisfaction after adopting SDL Knowledge Center. All of the interviewees agreed that SDL Knowledge Center’s tools helped improve their customer satisfaction although none could share proprietary measurements such as net promoter scores. However, one interviewee stated that customer satisfaction in the aggregate went up by 15% after the implementation of SDL Knowledge Center.
The results of this study show that the companies using SDL Knowledge Center have generated considerable ROI driven by service & support-related efficiencies in content development and translation, and are deriving real benefits in customer self-service support and customer satisfaction.
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Introduction
With the groundswell of social and mobile technologies, consumers are empowered to not only make more educated purchasing decisions, but to also publicize their customer experience through reviews and comments that can affect brand image. This shift of power to the consumer incents companies to improve the customer experience throughout the customer lifecycle—thus the growth of Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions.
CEM is defined as “a continuum of cross- and multi-channel business activities executed on an enterprise level to manage business activities across the customer lifecycle.”1 A majority of the “business activities” managed by CEM are product communication in the form of product marketing collateral, technical documentation, service manuals, etc. These materials all need to be localized, causing enhanced complexities with each additional translated language. This paper will outline the return on investment (ROI) of a specific CEM solution called SDL Knowledge Center (created by SDL). The areas examined include the main content touch points in a company: 1) organizations that create and translate content, 2) customer support organizations and 3) the customers themselves.
Overview of SDL Knowledge Center
SDL Knowledge Center offers structured content management using a modular content structure to boost reuse of information and streamline content creation processes. This process enables subject matter experts to collaborate in the creation, review and editing of content that can be delivered on multiple devices with analytics that provide personalization and information on content engagement. SDL Knowledge Center uses the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), which is an XML data model for authoring and publishing,2 and makes use of SDL’s strength in multilingual content management and delivery.
Research Background
For this study, Crimson focused on defining, clarifying, and, where possible, quantifying the benefits of key SDL Knowledge Center capabilities, as experienced or expected by users. An in-depth interview guide and questionnaire was developed from secondary research based on publicly available SDL documentation and data, and past research efforts in this space.
Methodology and Demographics
With particular emphasis on customer service & support, Crimson researched four companies and their content subject-matter experts involved with the deployment and use of SDL Knowledge Center. (See Table 1 for specific roles). Companies involved were large to very large global enterprises.
1 Aberdeen—“CSM and Product Communication: Does your Content Speak Consumer,” Analyst Insight, June 2013
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Role/Position Company description Infrastructure
Process Manager/
Product Owner Global Technology Firm
Outsourced infrastructure model, where service
manager meets service level agreements
Senior Manager,
Information Development Global Financial Services Firm Cloud-based, infrastructure managed by SDL Director of Global
Information Global Technology Firm Cloud-based, infrastructure managed by SDL Vice President of
Support IT Global Technology Firm Cloud-based, infrastructure managed by SDL Table 1: Interviewee roles and company descriptions
Crimson averaged the data provided by all the companies together and normalized where necessary to account for disparities of revenues between interviewed companies. Crimson also extrapolated data from interviews to predict ROI for mid-market
companies ($0.5B revenue) and very large enterprises ($17.5B revenue).
SDL Interviewee Snapshot
The Process Manager for the technology firm manages developer and support content for well over 300 different products in nearly 100 different locales (e.g., a locale could be the French spoken in Canada, which varies slightly from the French spoken in France). The content is reused across multiple platforms, such as paper, website, and on mobile devices.
The Senior Manager at the financial service firm is responsible for and uses SDL
Knowledge Center for publishing customer user guides. She manages approximately 35 content authors, with over 150 content editors spread out across many different
disciplines.
The Director of Global Information for the technology firm employs SDL Knowledge Center in the technical documentation group that is the center for documentation across the enterprise, as well as the learning and training group. These groups are tasked with content creation and localization across multiple platforms, similar to the first interviewed technology firm.
The Vice President of Support IT for the technology firm used SDL Knowledge Center primarily to help with self-service support for their customers in order to improve their overall customer experience. In particular, their goal was to improve Net Promoter Scores among their customers and reduce phone support costs.
Overall ROI and other Key Findings
Among the interviewed companies which had average revenue of $12.5B, the overall return on investment achieved by using SDL Knowledge Center over the course of 5 years was approximately 7 times the cost of the solution, or 687%.
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Using that data, Crimson extrapolated the following ROI for the following three company sizes:
• Mid-Size ($0.5B) = 305%
• Large Enterprise ($12.5B) = 687% • Very Large Enterprise ($17.5B) = 961%
The three largest contributors to these impressive ROI findings were the following: • Savings of $111M, or 31% of content development costs over 5 years • Content reuse went from 3% to 32%, on average, over the course of 5 years • Translation/localization savings amounted to 37% over 5 years
The remaining sections of this paper will take a closer look at how these efficiencies were achieved, as well as look at other important value propositions for SDL Knowledge Center, some of which are in early stages of adoption. Hence, the full potential impact on ROI, namely efficiencies achieved in customer support organizations and
improvements in customer satisfaction, may yet to be achieved.
Content Development
Developing content at the enterprise level can be quite complex. Interviewees were asked to describe their content development processes, and all of the respondents followed a similar process as pictured below:
Content development involves not only authors and editors, but also outside subject matter experts/engineers (technical contributors) needed at points in the process to explain concepts or validate what has been written. The following chart provides a look at the average percentage of time required by each stakeholder in each step of the process.3
3 Percentages are averages based on primary research interviews
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Figure 1: Percent time breakdown in content development process by stakeholder type prior to SDL Knowledge Center implementation
Source: Crimson Marketing Research, Customer Interviews
As expected, the content authors and more technical contributors spend a majority of their time creating and updating, whereas editors and reviewers are mostly involved in the review process. Publishing doesn’t take a large percent of time, but is part of the activities of the content authors and editors.
The interviewees explained how the use of SDL Knowledge Center created efficiencies at each step of the process. The following chart lays out these efficiencies:
Figure 2: Content Development Process Efficiencies Enabled by SDL Knowledge Center (by Stakeholder Type)
Source: Crimson Marketing Research, Customer Interviews 34% 15% 60% 45% 10% 30% 11% 90% 75% 10% 10% 10% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Authors Editors Technical
Reviewers ContributorsTechnical
Publish Review Update Create 30% 13% 54% 40% 9% 26% 10% 84% 70% 9% 9% 9% 11% 7% 8% 11% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
Authors Editors Technical
Reviewers ContributorsTechnical
Efficiency
Publish Review Update Create
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Across the board, stakeholders at every step in the process are able to do their jobs more efficiently after adopting SDL Knowledge Center. Most notably, authors and technical contributors were creating and updated content 11% more efficiently, while editors and reviewers could save between 7-8% of their time in content review.
Content Reuse
One of the main drivers of efficiency is greater content reuse made possible by SDL Knowledge Center’s modular structure that allows content to be tagged for reuse across platforms. The
combined percentage of content reuse among interviewees increased from 3% to 32% over the course of 5 years. The Process Manager of the technology firm explained how content reuse
created savings in her organization. “We do over 70,000 publishing jobs a year for over 350 different products. There are many variants to each product where much of the support content doesn’t change. If we couldn’t build this content in a modular fashion using SDL Knowledge Center, we’d probably have to spend 3 to 4 times our current budget.”
She then illustrated the following graph that shows how costs rise to create support content with each product variant without the ability to easily reuse content.
Figure 3: Illustrative Savings Enabled by Greater Content Reuse Source: SDL Knowledge Center Customer
It is easy to see that as product variants increase, the costs of producing content for those variants can explode without the ability to easily reuse content where applicable. The Senior Manager of Information Development at the Financial Services Firm
supported this view with her own statistics: “As for content creation, what used to take us 2 to 3 days per page now takes us 1 day per page because of content reuse.
Updating content is even easier. Before using SDL Knowledge Center, it took us 1.5 days to update 10 different documents with similar information. Now it only takes 5 minutes.” $0.0 $2.0 $4.0 $6.0 $8.0 $10.0 $12.0 Base
Product Variant 1 Variant 2 Variant 3 Variant 4
No Reuse Reuse
($M)
“If we couldn’t build this content in a modular fashion using SDL Knowledge Center, we’d probably have to spend 3 to 4 times our current budget.”
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Greater Collaboration
A key driver for reviewing efficiency is the ability to aggregate comments by all stakeholders. The Senior Manager of information content at the financial services firm noted this in particular, who said, “Our authors can save a lot of time by not having to aggregate comments made by the many different content contributors, and
everyone else saves time by being able to see all the changes/comments that are made.”
Publishing Efficiencies
The modular structure of building content also creates benefits in publishing. The Director of Global Information at the technology firm explained it best in this quote: “Publishing could often be time consuming because one language would fit a certain way on a page, whereas another could take up a lot more space, forcing us to waste time reconfiguring the document. This step has now been removed because of using structured language and process automation within SDL Knowledge Center.” The Senior Manager of Information Development at the financial services firm echoed that sentiment, noting that publishing times have been reduced to a half a day from a whole day for approximately 50% of their content thanks to the combination of structured content, templates, and automated publishing.
Aggregate Cost Savings
These efficiencies added up to significant cost savings. Averaging the responses of all four interviewees, the aforementioned cumulative efficiencies reduced the time spent creating content by over 31% for a savings of $111M over 5 years for a typical large enterprise.
Translation
Although translation and localization are parts of content development, Crimson separates them out because of the dramatic cost savings noted by interviewees in this area. The average savings in translation among interviewees was 37% over five years. This large savings correlates both with increased content reuse and with the fact that SDL offers strong language translation and localization solutions that are bundled into SDL Knowledge Center and many of its customers
were originally attracted to SDL because of these services.
Cutting translation costs often result in companies being able to expand the number of languages covered. This sentiment is affirmed by the Process Manager of the
technology firm: “We expanded the number of languages offered from 30 to 90 over the course of 5 years, which was achievable because we reduce our translation costs by 80% over that same period.”
“Before using SDL Knowledge Center, it took us 1.5 days to update 10 different documents with similar information. Now it only takes 5 minutes.”
Senior Manager of Information Development, Financial Services Firm
“We expanded the number of languages offered from 30 to 90 over the course of 5 years, which was achievable because we reduce our translation costs by 80% over that same period.”
Process Manager of the Global Technology Firm
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Customer Support
In preparation for customer interviews, there was a general consensus that SDL Knowledge Center has an effect on reducing the costs of customer support calls by making self-service support much easier to provide and to scale. The solution not only makes content easier to find over multiple platforms, but it offers tools that provide smart, interactive content tailored to customer’s needs. Essentially if customers can find the support information they need easily, they won’t need to call a customer support representative.
Companies that deployed SDL Knowledge Center in their support organizations
confirmed this hypothesis. Interviewees believed that the use of SDL Knowledge Center was correlated to decreased customer service requests, but didn’t have the tools to collect, track, or measure exact results. The Director of Global Information at the technology firm explained the complexities of this measurement in the following quote: “Our Company has entire groups associated with reducing customer service calls, because it can be a very expensive cost to an enterprise. We don’t have the tools to measure how our use of SDL Knowledge Center affects the overall rate of calls, but we recently used SDL Knowledge Center to create video content that we hoped would make it easier for the customer to fix their own problems, and we noticed a 20% reduction of calls over three months.”
According to the Association of Support
Professional, enterprises typically spend 7% of revenue on technical support, and that around 15% of employees at these companies deal with technical support.4 Approximately seventy-five percent (75%) of that support staff provide direct phone or email support to customers. Using those numbers, Crimson estimated that an enterprise with $12.5B in revenues may spend around $900M annually on technical support. A reduction of calls by an annual low single digit percentage could reduce annual support costs up to $100M or more over 5 years.
So while many customers are inexperienced in measuring their ability to deflect customer support calls/tickets, the potential savings achieved through leveraging SDL Knowledge Center to enhance self-service support is potentially very large.
Customer Satisfaction
SDL Knowledge Center ultimately helps manage the customer experience. Although the ROI for this solution can be measured most in greater efficiencies in content
development for post-sale support, increasing customer satisfaction by providing useful documentation along the entire customer lifecycle is very important to the top line, as it supports customer retention and thus repeated sales. The following chart shows this paradigm shift enabled by CEM solutions such as SDL Knowledge Center.
4 Source: http://asponline.com/tscr.pdf
“We recently used SDL Knowledge Center to create video content that we hoped would make it easier for the customer to fix their own problems, and we noticed a 20% reduction of calls over three months.”
Director of Global Information, Technology Firm
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Source: BCG, research commissioned by SDL All of the interviewees agreed that SDL Knowledge Center’s tools helped improve customer satisfaction. According to the Process Manager at the technology firm, “Responsive websites and better FAQs improve customer satisfaction by knowing the language preferences of the customer, the customer’s preferred device,
and the specific content delivered on that device. These tools improved our customer satisfaction scores by 15% after implementation.” The Director of Global Information at the technology firm agreed, saying “We’ve been getting a lot of great feedback directly from customers, which has enabled us to quickly make changes to enhance the
customer experience.”
“These tools improved our customer satisfaction scores by 15% after implementation.”
Process Manager of the Technology Firm
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Aggregate ROI
In determining the return on investment over five years to a customer purchasing the SDL Knowledge Center solution, Crimson looked at the license cost as well as the support costs over five years. They also factored in the cost to migrate all appropriate data into SDL Knowledge Center, which wouldn’t be a recurring cost. These aggregate costs taken in association with the cost savings of content development and translation alone amounts to a potential ROI of up to 687% over the course of five years for a large enterprise—a very compelling argument for investing in SDL Knowledge Center. Additionally, Crimson calculated that Mid-market companies (with $500 million in
revenue) could realize an estimated overall benefit over 300% (or 3X) in five years, and that very large enterprises (with $17.5 billion in revenue) could achieve a 961% ROI, shown below:
• Mid-Size ($0.5B) = 305%
• Large Enterprise ($12.5B) = 687% • Very Large Enterprise ($17.5B) = 961%
Conclusion
The large ROI of SDL Knowledge Center derived through in-depth customer interviews shows that efficiencies in content development driven by content reuse, as well as efficiencies in translation, make the solution a strong vehicle for cost savings and/or enhanced production.
Additionally, there was a strong indication that the use of SDL Knowledge Center will reduce customer support call/email volumes by enhancing customer self-service, and that a company’s top line may improve with increase customer satisfaction due to SDL Knowledge Center’s facilitation of attentive, targeted, and well-timed documentation throughout the customer lifecycle.
305% 687% 961% 0% 200% 400% 600% 800% 1000% 1200% $0.50 $12.50 $17.50
ROI with Knowledge Center
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About Crimson Marketing
We Enhance Marketing Performance
Crimson is a technology marketing firm. Our clients include Adobe, Cisco, Dell, eBay, Hitachi, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, SDL, Seagate, Symantec, Verizon, and others. We are experts in the marketing of technology solutions.
For more information, contact: Todd Keleher
Crimson Marketing (650) 759-2230