Great Technical Documentation Leads to Great Customer Experience

What kind of customer experience (CX) are you providing your customers? And how do you know, have you asked them?

The technical documentation and support you provide customers after the sale and installation of your product is critical to CX and your customer’s perception of your professionalism and competence.

Customers want to be able to solve problems on their own. Does your technical documentation enable them to do so? Are you using Simplified Technical English (STE) so regardless of where your customer is located in the world, they are getting a consistent message about maintenance, repair, and operation issues or an answer to a frequently asked question (FAQ)? Consistency builds trust. Inconsistency breeds confusion and distrust.

Given that your customer has already invested in your product and service, I would make the argument that your technical documentation and service manuals should be more professionally produced than your sales collateral. Obviously, they have different purposes, but your technical documentation is more critical to providing an outstanding CX and earning a customer for life than your sales collateral is.

Technical documentation is changing as fast as the rest of technology and can often be an indicator of your company’s commitment to making a digital transformation. Here are a few things that should be on your radar with regards to modernizing your technical documentation program to improve CX:

• Real-time analytics feeding business intelligence that can lead to work orders for preventive or predictive maintenance. You did sell this with your product, didn’t you? If not, you have a tremendous long-term revenue opportunity as well as an opportunity to earn a customer for life.
• Feedback loops from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and service technicians, are being used to verify the prescribed work has been completed to the satisfaction of checklists, complex inspection cards, and with object verification.
• Easy access to documentation libraries, which are updated in real-time based on real use case data and are digitally optimized to be accessible from any laptop, mobile device, or other methods (i.e., smart glasses) your client and technicians would prefer.
• Field service applications (FSA) are integrating with enterprise asset management (EAM) systems for work orders, checklists, safety and security standards, parts, and other serial-number based information as we move from reactive to predictive maintenance reducing mean-time-to-repair.
• Proactive analytics. Predicting with great accuracy what is going to happen based on prior events using big data analytics and machine learning. These analytics are used to provide warnings, populate dashboards, inform business intelligence (BI), provide visualization of models, and other services.

See how we helped out these great customers here: http://www.etteplan.com/references.