Turning a writing request into an enterprise‑level content solution
Overview
Canada Post operates at a scale few organizations can match. As a Crown Corporation, it serves every community in the country, delivering mail, government services, and private‑sector partnerships. The breadth of information users seek from Canada Post’s Virtual Assistant (VA) is enormous — and the VA team was struggling to keep up.
I was brought in as a UX Content Writer to support specific conversational flows related to community mailbox issues. What quickly became clear was that the VA’s challenges weren’t rooted in AI limitations, but in the content ecosystem feeding it. Over several months, I shifted from a writing resource to a strategic partner, reframing the VA’s problems as an enterprise content strategy opportunity.
The Situation
The VA team faced a paradox:
- Users asked the VA about an almost infinite range of topics.
- The VA’s ability to answer depended entirely on the content it could access.
- Canada Post’s information lived across hundreds of documents, PDFs, and internal files — many outdated, unindexed, or inaccessible to the AI.
- The team had finite resources and needed to focus on the highest‑value work.
The result was a pattern: the VA wasn’t failing because it couldn’t reason — it was failing because it couldn’t find the information.
The Problem
Nearly every issue assigned to me followed the same structure:
“We know the answer exists, but the AI can’t find it or can’t communicate it correctly.”
Sometimes the team provided the answer and asked me to rewrite it for the VA. Other times, I had to hunt the answer down myself.
In almost every case, the root cause was the same:
- The information lived in a document the AI couldn’t parse.
- Or it lived in a file the AI couldn’t find.
- Or it lived in a PDF from 2006 buried six clicks deep on an obscure subdomain.
The VA didn’t need better writing. It needed better content infrastructure.
The Insight
The VA team had requested a writer. Fortunately, they got Content Designer.
The real problem wasn’t conversational design — it was content availability, structure, and findability. The VA was only as good as the content ecosystem around it.
This opened the door to a much larger opportunity.
The Solution: From Data Entry to Content Strategy
1. Reframing the Work
Instead of manually rewriting content from inaccessible documents into VA‑friendly formats, I proposed a different approach:
- Move critical information out of documents
- And onto indexable, structured web pages
- So the VA, Google, and customer support could all access the same source of truth
This shifted the work from “VA content writing” to corporate content strategy.
2. Solving the Resourcing Problem
The VA team didn’t have the budget to overhaul Canada Post’s content ecosystem alone. But other departments were suffering from the same issues:
- Marketing needed SEO improvements
- Customer support needed clearer self‑serve content
- Product teams needed consistent, accessible information
- Users needed answers they could actually find
By framing the work as a cross‑organizational content initiative, we could:
- Share costs
- Share ownership
- Share benefits
This turned a resourcing bottleneck into a collaborative opportunity.
3. Demonstrating Immediate Value
It took ten minutes to validate the strategy:
- Users were asking Google and customer support the same questions they were asking the VA.
- The answers existed — but were hidden inside a downloadable PDF from 2006.
- When I mapped that PDF content onto a proper web page, two things happened:
- Marketing gained an SEO win.
- The VA gained access to the information instantly.
One action delivered value to multiple verticals simultaneously.
This became the model: Solve VA problems by solving enterprise content problems.
Outcomes
- The VA team gained a scalable, sustainable way to improve accuracy.
- Marketing gained SEO improvements without additional spend.
- Customer support saw reduced call volume for common questions.
- Product teams gained clearer, more accessible content.
- Canada Post gained a unified content strategy approach that could be applied across the organization.
Most importantly, the VA team gained a strategic partner — not just a writer.
Reflections
Communicating Content Design
Most stakeholders don’t understand content design — and telling them rarely works. I’ve learned to show, not tell.
With the VA team, I demonstrated the value of content design by:
- Delivering what they asked for
- Delivering what they actually needed
- And doing it in a way that benefited the entire organization
This built trust and expanded the scope of what content could influence.
Delivering Value Across the System
The best solutions don’t just help one team. They help:
- Users
- Stakeholders
- Product teams
- And the business
This project reinforced that content design is most powerful when it solves systemic problems, not just surface‑level ones.