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Documentation as Customer Success and Retention Tool with Isa De Abreu, Lead Technical Writer, Nexudus

Category: Podcast

In the latest episode on Knowledgebase Ninjas podcast, we have Isa De Abreu sharing how documentation can act as a customer success tool. She also reflects on some interesting metrics they put in use at Nexudus to keep the knowledge base up to date.

About Isa

      1. Isa’s LinkedIn
      2. She has a Master’s in Technical Communication from Université-Paris-cité
      3. In her opinion, having a background in academia, research, or teaching can be helpful for technical writing as there’s a lot of transferable skills that one can bring into the field.
      4. Before joining Nexudus, she worked as User Assistance Developer at SAP

Key Takeaways 

  • Isa has a different take on when asked what’s easier, content creation for customer acquisition or retention. She says, “for customer conversion, content needs to be super impactful, you have about 8-12 seconds to make an impression. However, in customer retention, since they have a certain grasp of the platform already, it’s a matter of getting them from point A to point B.”
  • “At Nexudus, we have a very rigorous and robust single sourcing-content reuse. Hence, whenever there is an update, we can do that as quickly as possible. It is crucial because the knowledge base is not only used by our customers but also by our support team. And it is a central knowledge hub that everyone using our software is bound to use at some point.”
  • “The main challenge I have faced w.r.t documentation is keeping the knowledge base up to date and that’s just something that you can find in every company making sure, especially for software, it’s a constant battle to make sure that everything is up to date and our users have the latest information.”
  • Isa says “Keeping our knowledge base up to date has helped customer retention a great deal. Having an issue or not being able to do something and being able to browse the knowledge base, find a solution, get going instead of waiting, you know, 24 hours for their tickets to be solved.
  • It’s also a reflection of knowledge bases in general or the reflection of how companies feel about their customers in a lot of ways. Being able to answer their needs is already a sign that you sort of care and you’re doing your research in terms of knowing who you’re serving.
  • Adding further to the knowledge base update, she explains, “At Nexudus we have an agile model within the company. So, whenever we need to update something where we have a ticket, we update it right away. If it’s a third-party integration and we don’t have a lot of input on the product or feature, we go with the review process. We usually have a 90-day period where we review the documentation for third-party platforms and see if it lines up.”
  • “To make sure the content is well received by the users, the main metric we use at Nexudus is ‘click to read’. It tells you exactly when customers are engaged. If you’re consistent with your content, the metric value should be somewhere between 60 and 65. It’s a good indicator to know people are clicking as well as engaging with the content.”
  • Another metric to note is the number of tickets that you get, the number of tickets that are sold with just a link to the knowledge base.

Rapid fire with Isa

Biggest influence  

“My tech writing professor in my master’s program was one of the people that helped me grow the most because he was so demanding. “

Highly recommended resource  

Passo uno/about/ by Barcelona-based tech writer, Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti

A piece of advice you would give your 20-year-old self. 

Ask away. Ask as many questions as possible until you’re 100% sure. And connect with loads of people, as much as you can, because everyone will help you paint a better picture of the users we’re serving, and your documentation will be better if you know who you’re talking to.

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Isa De Abreu Quotes

 

Gowri Ramkumar

Mar 28, 2023

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