Role of Customer Interaction in Technical Documentation

In many organizations, technical writers work closely either with the customer support team or product management team to produce troubleshooting guides and product documentation respectively. They never get the opportunity to interact with existing customers or new prospects in many organizations. This is because the sales team and customer success team are the point of contact for new prospects and existing customers respectively. However, if you want your product documentation to be world-class, technical writers should be part of any customer interaction. This blog explores the role of technical writers in enhancing documentation via customer interaction throughout their entire customer journey. Let’s dive in!

Technical Writers in a Sales Discovery Call

Mostly Sales Development Representatives (SDR) are involved in the sales discovery call to understand the prospect’s business problem statement and why they are looking for a business problem. The sales discovery call also helps SDR to understand what product features apply to the prospect. It helps to design an optimal solution to convert them into a paying customer. This call is a holy grail for technical writers. Being part of this (at least listening to recordings), technical writers can understand how the prospect discovered their organization’s products and services. This could be through some search “keywords”, videos, image searches, blogs, and so on. This provides a technical writer insight into what can be optimized in the product documentation in terms of SEO for each documentation article. This enhances the visibility of their brand and positions the documentation site as another marketing channel to scout for new prospects. Another important aspect is to understand the business problem statement. Listening to a plethora of sales discovery calls helps technical writers understand customer persona and use cases to tailor the right content for them once they become customers.

Technical Writers in Sales Demo Call

Sales demo call is usually given by SDR or sales consultants who have strong expertise in the organization’s products and services. If technical writers can tag along with SDR for sales demo calls, it hugely benefits product documentation as technical writers learn to write using customer vocabulary. The sales demo call provides great insights into

• What terms/vocabulary does the prospect use to describe a feature or product functionality?
• What is the ideal customer persona type that technical writers need to cater for
• What are the common use cases that must be addressed in the documentation
• What are the common business problems faced by customer persona
• What matters to new prospects in terms of solution design
• What are the success metrics of the new prospect once the solution is implemented

These insights help technical writers to create the right narration. This also greatly enhances the “Getting Started” section of the documentation such that prospects understand the business value of the product. The terms used by prospects help technical writers publish documentation in a simple language that is more customer-centric rather than using jargon that is more product-centric. Producing documentation on how customers will use a product shines over producing documentation based on product features. This emphasizes the customer-obsessive culture of the organization and technical writers can play an integral part in this organizational value.

Technical Writers in Customer Success Call

Once the prospect becomes a customer, then onboarding is done by the customer success team. Onboarding involves solution design, configuration of product features, and so on. Technical writers play a vital role in customer onboarding as most documentation is used by the customer success team to assist with setting up their accounts. Customers provide more feedback on the documentation site on whether they can self-serve to configure product features by themselves. Since onboarding takes human effort, producing more comprehensible documentation can help customers get started quickly with your product, thus delivering value quickly! 

Technical writers can also understand ongoing challenges with product documentation faced by customers during routine customer success calls. Feedback can be sought and can be implemented swiftly. Being part of this customer success process helps technical writers create good learning artifacts such as tutorials, videos, and so on to help customers navigate complex parts of your product/services more effectively.

Technical Writers in Customer Support Call

Technical writers should be allowed to participate in customer support calls thus helping them produce user manuals and troubleshooting guides more holistically. Sometimes nuances in the product functionality get missed but it shows up as a ticket during customer interactions. This can be captured by enriching product documentation. More repetitive queries from customers change month on month, thus capturing this knowledge greatly reduce customer support tickets over time.

If any new knowledge is created by the customer support team, this can be incorporated into documentation by technical writers through regular cadence. Thus, product documentation grows substantially over time covering all aspects of product features and functionality. This helps in educating customers more comprehensively.

Also Read: Technical Writing Guidelines to Create AI-Friendly Content

Benefits

Technical writers should make art of the entire customer journey starting from sales discovery call to churn. This provides a holistic view of the customer and their changing needs over time in terms of the use of documentation. Great organization creates good operating models and collaboration processes to keep technical writers as part of the customer journey. Many organizations also recognize the value of customer interaction in building trust and accuracy in the documentation through continuous feedback from different channels. Technical writers can also expand their portfolio by contributing to blogs, tutorials, learning materials, and so on. Technical writers can also play a strong role in playing a support role to drive business outcomes.

Closing Remarks

Technical writers are valuable in creating comprehensive documentation. Once they are allowed to play a key part in each part of the customer lifecycle, it enhances the content delivery of the organization more intuitively. This leads to an increase in customer satisfaction and customer retention thus contributing to the business’s bottom line. Organizations must empower technical writers to get plugged into the customer journey and continue to focus on the continual improvement of existing documentation.

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