Letting customers know there’s someone behind the documentation curtain

bri hillmer | June 27, 2014

I recently wrote a blog about the tutorial satisfaction survey that is embedded at the bottom of each tutorial in our knowledge base. I shared how frustrating it is to get feedback from respondents who indicate that the tutorial did not help them but then don’t tell me why.

On various social media sites I received some skeptical comments in response to this blog. Some commenters were skeptical that this data was useful. Others wondered about how acting on this type of feedback would scale. The truth is it might not, but getting feedback about how to improve is not the only reason I embedded that survey. It’s actually one of a number of methods I use to let customers know that there is someone behind the curtain.

The Wizard of Documentation

Let’s face it, getting all of your customers to self help is hard. Actually getting them the answer they were looking for is harder still. I’d say, the odds of helping a customer who, at any given time, tries to self-help using documentation is 6 out of 10 or maybe 7 out of 10; and that is pretty optimistic. (I’m basing this on two years of data from my own survey which, so far, has never done better than 78% satisfaction for a given week. Most months, our documentation averages out to about 50% satisfaction. If you know of any industry statistics on documentation satisfaction, please do share! I couldn’t find any with a quick Google search.)

If, on an average day, you’re never really doing better than satisfying 50% of your customers who use your documentation, that means half of them are likely to decide not to return to your documentation next time they have a question. How do you keep this from happening? Become the Great and Powerful Wizard of Documentation!

As documentation coordinator at SurveyGizmo my role is customer facing; my purpose and desire to help is the same as that of the support heroes who answer the phone. The trouble is, because I help via documentation, I am behind a curtain. So, I’ve devised a number of ways to let customers know that I’m here and that I want to help!

As the Wizard of Documentation at SurveyGizmo, here are some of the things that I do to let customers know that there is someone behind the documentation curtain.

1. Embed a satisfaction survey in the documentation – Each tutorial includes an embedded survey that asks whether the documentation answered their question and, if it didn’t, what they were looking for.

2. Respond to all survey respondents who request a follow up – This might involve an expanded or applied explanation of what they read in the documentation, answering a one-off question that was not covered in documentation, or even responding with a new document that answers their question (see Just-in-Time Documentation below).

3. Just-in-Time Documentation – Create documentation when a customer requests it, aka “just in time.”

4. Article Call Outs – Flag new articles as “New” and updated articles as “Updated” so customers know I am hard at work (see below). I also include links to new articles on the home page under a section called “New Articles Based on Your Questions”, which I update weekly.

What Dorothy the Documentation Customer Learned

I think the most important lesson Dorothy learned is not that “there’s no place like home” but that she has the power to get what she wants and needs. By asking for and responding to customer feedback – and then improving on existing documentation and adding new articles based on this feedback – I am revealing that I, the Great and Powerful Wizard of Documentation, am here and Dorothy has the power to get the documentation she needs.

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