The definition of value means generating a greater return on investment than the cost of the initial investment. Over the years, many products and service-oriented companies hired technical writers to produce documentation to accompany their software products or any services they offer. The company’s intent in producing documentation is to help its customers to configure their products and troubleshoot in case of any issues.
The general myth amongst the traditional product and service-oriented companies is that documentation offers less value. Some traditional companies consider documentation an add-on and associated it with a cost center. Hiring professional technical writers is considered a cost to the company rather than an investment in those old-style companies.
Thus, this makes an excellent case to formulate a framework whereby the business value proposition of documentation is amplified, and technical writers have metrics to showcase their business contributions.
Why do we need to measure the value of documentation?
The documentation contains product features, service procedures, troubleshooting guides, user manuals, standard operating procedures, help docs, and FAQs. Documentation plays a vital role in customer trust in products and services. If incorrect information is present in the documentation, it increases customer frustration leading to customer churn. It becomes obvious that it is easy to provide documentation as part of product offering as customers get the exact information they need at the right time.
Measuring the value of documentation is indispensable to quantify the documentation team’s efforts in business outcomes and metrics. The long-term benefits of documentation can be substantiated using data and metrics. Measuring the documentation value helps shift the company’s mindset about documentation as an essential component of the software product/services rather than a fancy add-on.
What are the metrics to quantify?
To quantify the value-add of a documentation team, we need to use evidence to quantify the business impacts. It is easy to produce evidence through data collected through various business interactions/transactions involving the documentation team. The metrics to quantify the business value proposition of the documentation team can be categorized under three groups
- Business outcome metrics – Metrics used to calculate the business impact
- Customer satisfaction – Metrics used to compute customer satisfaction
- Financial metrics – Measures applied to assess financial gains of documentation
- Documentation value metrics
Business outcome metrics
In a software product company, the business outcomes metrics for measuring the value of documentation consist of
1. Reduction in customer support tickets
As your software product grows, the customer support team function is indispensable for customer satisfaction and customer retention. The documentation is essential for the customer support team to deliver their day-to-day operations to help customers. If inaccurate information is present in documentation, it may lead to customer frustration. The unsatisfied customer would raise a support ticket that would make your customer support take more effort to close those customer support tickets. This increases your business operating cost as the volume of support tickets increases.
If the documentation helps the customers to self-serve, then the documentation deflects a lot of customer support tickets being raised. Thus, one of the key business outcome metrics to track over time is the reduction in customer support tickets.
First, take all the historic customer support ticket data before the introduction of documentation, then track the reduction in the customer support ticket correlating with documentation article views and so on. This metric should show a decreasing trend over time and be normalized to ensure its effectiveness.
2. Decrease in time to respond to customer feedback
If the customer leaves feedback on your documentation, it becomes easier for your internal team to respond to the feedback quickly because of quick access to necessary details in the documentation. Your business is keenly perceived as customer-centric if you respond to customer feedback quickly. This metric can be computed by measuring the timestamp difference between the time in which customer feedback was received and responded to.
3. Increase in productivity of customer support agents
Having good documentation increases the productivity of your customer support agents as it takes less time to find information to resolve customer issues. The metric to track is the median response time to resolve support tickets/calls per week.
4. Customers require less training cost
The product documentation helps your customers train their internal teams on your product, thus reducing the training cost for your customers. Liaising with your customer to get this metric would amplify the efforts of the documentation team.
5. Customer satisfaction
The documentation is produced to satisfy the needs of your customers. Customer satisfaction metrics dominate the executive-level discussion and having documentation as a measure to enhance customer satisfaction would be well-perceived. This also enables executives to change their mindset and invest in the documentation team
- Customer satisfaction via surveys
- NPS score
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