As product documenters, it is our remit to solve customer queries without making them reach out to the support team. But figuring out what our customers want is a difficult task. Most product documentation teams never get the opportunity to speak to customers. We depend on others to tell us what customers want. However, this feedback is colored by the individual experience of the person conveying the feedback. Often the requirements articulated are at odds with each other because of perspective. For example, I have had one person tell me that the article needs to be more concise and to the point, and on the same day another tells me that there needs to be more detail.
A few years ago, I was tasked with identifying what area of the product was receiving most support tickets. We typically got about 3000 tickets per week at that time. Going through all the conversations and bucketing them was a tedious, time-consuming task. Using ProdSight we were able to easily categorize conversations by keywords. While that gave us some great insights into where the questions were coming from, there was an unexpected benefit – I was able to see the kind of questions our customers were asking. Reading the conversations went a long way in shaping my approach to product documentation.
For instance, we found that almost 6% of the conversations were about resetting user passwords. This forced us to look at our documentation around the topic and also at the flow within the product. It helped us see things from the user’s perspective and a few tweaks in the process within the product brought the tickets down to around 1% of conversations. A huge win.
To cut a long story short, we don’t need to get a customer face-to-face to understand for whom it is we are writing. The information is all there in the support conversations. We just need to dive into them. I feel it is imperative and beyond discussion that reading support conversations should be a daily task for every writer in the documentation team. Like in all spheres of life, when light is shone in a dark place we see the world differently.
To summarize, we must see things from the readers’ or users’ perspective. While it would be great to get to meet and interact with our readers, going through support conversations is a great substitute. It not only helps us write more useful documentation, but it also helps us identify the biggest pain points in the usage of the product, and where possible fix the product.
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