Managing 'Customer Experience' via Technical Writing

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Permalink Reply by Haim Toeg on March 14, 2010 at 10:54am

Jorge - it is difficult to understand what you are after. Every one of the content classes you list is part of the customer experience, either in existence or in absence, so the better they address your customers' needs the better their experience will be. IMO it is not as much about the dedicated technical writer but about understanding your audience and its needs and writing to that.

Permalink Reply by Jorge Delgadillo on March 15, 2010 at 4:15pm

Haim,

Thank you for your comments. I concur, "everyone of the content classes..., is part of the customer experience".

Beyond understanding their interests and writing to that...., I'm interested in learning, how many Customer Support Professionals have actually hired a dedicated Technical Writer and if they found the approach valuable?

I realize organizations vary in size and respectively have ways of doing business. Some organizations have Technical Writers hired specifically for a functional department(s) e.g. Marketing, Customer Support..etc. So, are most Tech Writers in your organization part of a Technical Publications team who serve every department or do you have a dedicated Tech Writer for Customer Support?

I suppose the response will differ if it's a small, medium or large company. Would you say your company is medium in size and so..., do you have a dedicated Tech Writer in Customer Support or part of a Tech Publications team or None?

I'm currently assessing a value proposition in dedicating a Technical Writer to a Customer Support organization (Small Company) and wondered how many colleagues may have look into this and what their approach was - based on their size (Small, Medium, Large).

Your feedback and experience is appreciated.

All the best,
-Jorge

Permalink Reply by Brett Ferguson on March 22, 2010 at 8:52am

Jorge, it is just my opinion, but I would try to avoid having technicians author any of your public-facing documentation (unless you have to document interfaces, etc.). There are certainly technologists who have great writing skills, but in my experience you would be better served by having a great writer on staff.

Your question is specifically about hiring a dedicated writer. If you have the resources to fund someone for that specific role, then maybe that makes sense for your organization. I would offer that you may realize greater benefit by hiring a strong business person who can also write well.

Good luck!

Jorge Delgadillo said:

Haim,

Thank you for your comments. I concur, "everyone of the content classes..., is part of the customer experience".

Beyond understanding their interests and writing to that...., I'm interested in learning, how many Customer Support Professionals have actually hired a dedicated Technical Writer and if they found the approach valuable?

I realize organizations vary in size and respectively have ways of doing business. Some organizations have Technical Writers hired specifically for a functional department(s) e.g. Marketing, Customer Support..etc. So, are most Tech Writers in your organization part of a Technical Publications team who serve every department or do you have a dedicated Tech Writer for Customer Support?

I suppose the response will differ if it's a small, medium or large company. Would you say your company is medium in size and so..., do you have a dedicated Tech Writer in Customer Support or part of a Tech Publications team or None?

I'm currently assessing a value proposition in dedicating a Technical Writer to a Customer Support organization (Small Company) and wondered how many colleagues may have look into this and what their approach was - based on their size (Small, Medium, Large).

Your feedback and experience is appreciated.

All the best,
-Jorge

Permalink Reply by Jorge Delgadillo on March 22, 2010 at 3:13pm

Hello Brett,

I appreciate your feedback and opinions on this topic..., it has been helpful to me. This also validates the need reached from other research conclusions.

Your right, funding this need as a specific role was a challenge. I'll consider myself lucky in getting a requisition open. We will be posting a job description in our web site soon.


Thanks again,

Permalink Reply by David Kay on March 25, 2010 at 9:23am

Jorge -

I'd like to offer an alternative perspective based on my work over the past 7 years or so helping companies create an excellent customer experience through knowledge and self-service. First, Haim is absolutely right: the key thing is understanding your customers wants and needs. The research we've done is that the things customers care most about are:
- Findability
- Usability / understandability
- Technical accuracy
- Timeliness (how quickly do you share what you know)

Putting a technical writer in the workflow actually can hurt all of these. Sure, you get more polished technical writing, but that ends up being lower on most customers' priority lists than usable, correct content they can find quickly.

Brett is right: most technologists aren't great "writers"...but I expect the people on your team are able to communicate clearly to customers by email -- in writing -- and clear communication is what we're shooting for, not artistic paragraphs with topic sentences, etc. So the trick is:

- Use a simple structured template for knowledge that separates the problem description (in the customer's words, as well as additional technical information as required) from environment, resolution (numbered series of steps), and cause, with a few other simple templates as needed

- Use complete thoughts, not complete sentences

- Capture most knowledge in the workflow, so people don't forget what the customer said and what they did

- Make sure people update and improve knowledge as they use it

- Have a simple content standard to show people what quality content means

- Spot check content relative to the standard to make sure they're doing the right thing

This isn't anything I've made up; it's the core of the "Solve Loop" within Knowledge-Centered Support, a best practice for knowledge management in service and support.

By all means, use technical writers for true documents. But most of what customers want from support isn't documents: it's knowledge. For knowledge, let Dragnet be your guide: "Just the facts, ma'am."

Best,
David

Permalink Reply by Haim Toeg on March 25, 2010 at 10:10am

I agree with what David wrote above, but would add one exception from my past experience. When the people writing the content are not native speakers of the knowledge base language you will want to have someone review the content before it goes public. It needs to conform to basic language standards from grammar and vocabulary. When I implemented this position we had better collaboration from the teams and users, internal and external, were to better utilize the information.

Permalink Reply by Jorge Delgadillo on March 25, 2010 at 2:28pm

David,

Fantastic input on the Knowledge and self-service piece, clear and well laid out.

I would agree with the Dragnet guide idea and creating the basic (problem, solution) template for an agent is the best approach to development for knowledge articles and to Haim's point - a final reviewer to simply ensure there is conformance to a basic writing standard.

Thank you,
Jorge

Permalink Reply by David Kay on March 25, 2010 at 2:46pm

Jorge and Haim -

This all sounds good. One possible refinement, again borrowing from KCS: share immediately (without review) internally, but review prior to external publication. If you track knowledge reuse for closing cases, which I recommend, you might only start this review-to-publish cycle for content that's been reused a couple of times. That way you know it has had a few pairs of eyes on it, and it's content that others find valuable. The trade off, though, is that it may take a little while for stuff to get published externally; it really depends how problems recur in your environment.

A final observation: for this review function, where a reviewer assures compliance with the content standard, if it takes up more than 5-10% of their time, a real tech writer will go crazy. This is fairly low-level work and can be staffed accordingly.

Cheers,
David

Permalink Reply by Jorge Delgadillo on March 25, 2010 at 5:49pm

Hello David,

Yes, I understand your view on sharing knowledge immediately. In our environment, the quicker we can get valuable knowledge out the better for our customers and our team. So, a Tech Writer would be ideally working on knowledge that requires more in-depth analysis. e.g. Tech Notes, Application Notes or White Papers we can make available to our customers. One good well written Tech Note or Application Note has been found to lower our call volume for certain topics.

Thanks,
Jorge