Today we introduce a new guest blogger, Vinish Garg, an STC member in the India Chapter. He’ll be writing on a variety of topics tech comm- and content-related from the point of view of an Indian with a global perspective. The topics may include tech comm trends and challenges, information architecture, product prototyping, project management for independent contractors, and so on. Welcome, Vinish!
Documentation Teams and Support Centres: Collaboration for A Common Goal
Not many technical documentation teams in the past used to collaborate with support centre teams in the organization. However, of late these two teams have good reasons to work together towards the common goal—to address users’ concerns and questions and provide them an optimal user experience.
My first job was as a support centre executive (SCE) and that experience actually helped me understand the finer points of documentation responsibilities and challenges. I talked about in detail about that in another blog post on Enjoy Technical Writing, Technical Writing and HelpDesk: The New Order. A few area of common ground are:
- Customers have pain points—SCE and TW both work to address these
- Persistence and consistency—Every single call is equally important because for a customer this one call makes all the difference. The same holds true for documentation teams.
- Quality control and performance benchmarks—Service level for calls and review for documentation
- Branding—SCE and TW both represent the brand and not the individual self
- Up-sell—When it makes sense
These similarities also mean that these two teams can find it easier to collaborate and work together for the common goal. Here are a few reasons how this collaboration can help an organization.
SCEs have direct interaction with product users
Since the SCEs have direct communication with the users, they get a real feel of the areas where users have maximum questions, doubts, or concerns. They get to talk to product users for their comments on product features, UX and usability, or why they are struggling to use the product effectively. This information, when shared with documentation as custom reports, can help writers update the documents more accurately.
SCEs can share details of what new features customers want or expect, and whether a new release update did not reach users on a particular medium such as via email or on the product’s active Facebook page. The writers can plan plugs for such gaps and content marketing strategists can work on the editorial calendar accordingly.
Support centre teams know hot spots
If the support centre reports suggest that a majority of concerns and user questions ask “How I can set notification parameters before I approve an invoice,” it means that either this feature or its documentation (or both) need urgent attention. Writers can update the documentation to address the large stream of user queries, and the strategy team can update users about the fixes being planned to address those issues.
Support centre can help find gaps and plan deliverables
The support centre can also help the documentation team know if there are some gaps or inaccuracies in the documents. Also, if a large section of users report, “The documentation does not really help me understand how to restore the default layout of dashboard,” it may mean that either a diagram or picture or even a video tour could be planned to help users.
Assume that a significant share of existing customers refers only to the procedures and they are already familiar with the product and the context of different features, tasks, and actions. If these support centre reports (when mapped with documents’ analytics and metrics reports) show that most of the contextual information is not referenced over a period of time, the writers can plan out for quick guides as another deliverable. Likewise, more deliverables such as cheat sheets or FAQs may be planned depending on users’ preference and pattern of how they access documentation.
SCEs as SMEs
Since SCEs always stay updated with the latest product updates, they can be excellent SMEs that technical writers can contact for their questions.
Collaboration can reduce support calls, helpdesk workload reduces
The above examples may reflect that the support centre is often trying to help documentation teams. Well, if the documentation is being updated based on support centre feedback and in right direction, it will also means reduced calls on helpdesk. So, the SCEs are helping themselves too.
Why support centres should be trained to refer to the documentation
Case 1: Not all organizations train their support centre on how to refer to the documentation. What if a user reports, “I am trying to find how to set up DNS settings for my new agent website and I am at Home > Setup New Website > Setup DNS > Advanced Settings. Can you please help?” What if the SCE struggles first to locate this information in the documentation and then to answer user’s question? What if the SCE’s response does not reconcile with what the documentation explains?
Case 2: I am not sure of how organizations plan the support centre collaboration for user generated content (community or open forums) in the documentation. For example, I see a Skype community here and I am yet to work on a strategy where we can plan this community-driven content management with support centre. I tried to search for a case study or some best practices for how it works but did not succeed. I would appreciate if you (the readers of this post) can give me some references.
The organization should have the right kind of processes to ensure that the documentation teams and support teams collaborate. The horse as well as the cart needs to be in synch for a smooth ride toward the common goal.
Vinish Garg is director technical documentation at vhite. He is an experienced technical communicator and business analyst. He provides services in information architecture and is a beginner content strategist. He blogs at http://www.enjoytechnicalwriting.com.
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