Kindle Direct Publishing App
Amazon Kindle
There are 1.5 million authors around the world who use Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to self-publish their books. When I joined the content team, customer service was receiving a high amount of contacts, totaling millions of dollars a year. To reduce contacts and save money, leadership tasked me with finding a solution.
My Role
Content strategist & designer
Team Size
7 (content, UX, product, PR, legal)
Tech Stack
Camtasia, YouTube Analytics, Qualtrics
Results
Reduced calls by 20%
Research & Analysis
To figure out what was causing the high number of customer service contacts, I needed to do a deep dive. I gathered data from contact logs and our survey platform, Qualtrics, to better understand our authors' pain points. When looking at the data, I noticed that about 70% of pain points were regarding only 5 topics. After checking our KDP help center and the KDP app's UI content, I discovered two things: 1. Authors couldn't find the info they needed in the right place, or at the right time. 2. Most authors needed a visual reference to answer their questions.
My solution? I'd create tutorial videos for the top 5 customer service topics and publish them to YouTube, the KDP help center, the KDP community forum, and add links to them in the KDP app itself.
Design & Development
Creating the videos was the hardest part. I didn't have access to the tech stack I regularly work with (Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects). Instead, I had to use Camtasia to edit the videos and Amazon Polly (text to speech software) for the voice-over. To speed up production, I created an asset library and video template that could be used for all videos.
In addition to the technical challenges, I faced another problem: the written content on the KDP help center and KDP app was outdated and inconsistent. So, I held a meeting with the UX and product teams to clarify the author experience and streamline my content across channels.
Once I had created the videos and re-written the help center content, I worked with the UX and product teams to add links to my content in the KDP app. In addition, I pinned the videos to the top relevant community forum posts.
Results
Within only 3 months, contact logs showed that customer service calls were reduced by 20%, saving KDP hundreds of thousands of dollars. In addition, survey data showed that customer sentiment improved by 35%, in some instances, specifically referencing the videos.
20%
Decrease in customer service contacts
35%
Increase in customer sentiment