We've all experienced the thrill of acquiring a new product only to have it diminished when it's not as easy to use as expected. You rip open the box ready to start playing with your new gizmo and 20 minutes later you're stuck on the phone with tech support because the instruction book was incomprehensible.
Obviously this experience negatively impacts the likelihood of you purchasing from this vendor again or recommending the product to a friend or colleague.
The quality of product information for customers is often an afterthought, yet the importance of any post-sales customer-facing information shouldn't be trivialized. While businesses invest heavily in customer service training and customer relationship management systems to improve customer satisfaction, they often overlook the experience that customers have with product documentation. User manuals, online help, Web self-service, and training provide the first touch points after the sale and the opportunity to make a good impression on a new customer. Informative instructions or trouble-shooting tips are crucial to ensuring the customers' full understanding of, and satisfaction with, the product. Because even if a customer is having a problem with the product, the manual or Web site are the first places people look to get started, where they expect to find answers to their questions quickly. If the customer gets discouraged and doesn't fully adopt the product, he's unlikely to recommend it to others.
Conversely, improving user aptitude increases the chances that they'll find greater functionality in your product - a key component for becoming the next product advocate. Strong documentation can be a key element to enhance customer loyalty. Moreover, well-crafted user guides and online documentation also reduce costs by driving down the number of help desk calls from new customers.
Yet, all too often documentation specialists and other information developers are bogged down by out-of-date systems and processes that hinder their ability to deliver the goods.
What Is a Good Customer Experience Worth?
Most companies recognize that customer experience plays a key role in their market position. 85% of companies surveyed in Forrester's Q4 2006 Customer Experience Peer Research Panel Survey said customer experience had a critical or a very important role in the firm's competitiveness. However, many of these same organizations felt their overall approach to customer experience management is lacking - with 57% reporting that their companies had an undisciplined approach to customer experience management.
Unfortunately, creating excellent product documentation is easier said than done, particularly for companies selling multiple products and/or distributing products globally. The sheer volume of documentation to be created for each product iteration and language can be staggering. Keeping up with changes is a monumental task. Moreover, documentation development can usually only begin once the product is near completion putting authors and documentation teams under immense pressure to deliver content quickly and not delay time-to-market. Too often content quality suffers.
Read the complete article by Jerry Silver in SOA World.
