Keep everyone up to speed

People need technical information about products and services to enable them to implement, support, maintain and use those products and services. But employees waste on average 20% of their time trying to find this information.

If the information they need is hard to find they will revert to what they remember from the initial induction or use  trial-and-error; both of which can lead to delays, mistakes, and increased costs.

When information is easy to access, people can work more efficiently reducing costs and errors, as well as more readily adopt new processes and practices leading to longer term improvements.

PDF and Word files don’t cut it any more

When people need information they search for it online – possibly using their mobile. These expectations extend to the work place. So it is no longer acceptable for a support agent to have to dig through layers of folders to find a file while the customer waits (im)patiently on the phone.

It doesn’t need to be this way.

A better way forward

Using the latest tools and techniques reduces the cost of producing content by up to 30%.

Overall time and costs can be further reduced when such production methods are combined with a consistent content strategy. Such a strategy ensures that information is captured once and delivered to the people who need it in a way that is easy for them to access – online, embedded in applications, or even on paper.

So your existing product information can be leveraged to reduce operational costs, provide a competitive advantage with partners, and improve customer satisfaction.

product information flow

Can your communications processes do with a refresh?

Technical product information is created as part of the product development process. From here it needs to flow to the people that support, maintain and use those products.

  • Customers
    Can customers easily search for the information they need to do get the most out of your products?
    Do your customer administrators have access to content to enable them to support their users?
    Are you monitoring the support content your customers are looking for and providing a way for customers to provide feedback?
  • Partners and resellers
    Can partners quickly search for information to help them sell or service their customers themselves?
    Are your partners provided with frequent content updates for product enhancements?
    Does the technical content you provide integrate with your partner’s operational processes?
  • Support teams
    Can agents quickly search for information to help them answer customer questions, or are they reliant on remembering the last product training?
    Do agents email PDFs or Word documents to your customers?
    Are agents expected to write support content rather than respond to customers?
  • Internal operations
    Are the people producing your content (trainers, marketing, and support) copying and pasting content between documents?
    Do new hires need to search through multiple folders to find disparate documents to get up to speed with your products?
    Can operations teams easily find the information they need to do their job efficiently?

If your current processes can’t keep up with the increasing pace of product development, the move to accessing information on multiple devices, or integrate with your partners and customers operations, then it is time to review them to ensure they are keeping pace with your product strategy.

Free consultation

Contact us for a free consultation to find out how doc-department can help you design and deliver a coherent strategy to streamline how your technical product information is produced and shared with your customers, partners and teams.

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