Focus On SDL
Customer Engagement Strategies
A Paradigm Shift for Technical Documentation

New demands from content consumers are triggering significant changes in how corporations are thinking about and managing their technical information. This paradigm shift—and it is indeed a paradigm shift—has been triggered by the increasing ubiquity of the Internet, the growing importance of the mobile channel and the adoption of smartphones and iPads that enable quick and easy access to the Internet without the traditional computer. These underlying changes in technology are bringing on massive changes in people’s behavior and expectations. Today, more than 50% of the people on the Internet have grown up with that technology. Use of the Internet is growing in all segments of the population and in fact is growing at faster paces in older generations than it is in younger ones. The adoption of smartphones and smart devices is accelerating as well. All of these trends are changing the expectations that individuals have about how to access and consume technical information regarding the products they buy. The focus of this paper is the nature of these changes and the new demands placed on the global corporation.

Traditional Technical Information
To understand why these recent trends are driving fundamental changes in the management of technical information, it is useful to look at the traditional, and still relevant, methodologies used to document technical information in global organizations. A corporation typically produces  six distinct types of technical information that mirror the customer’s journey or engagement with a corporation:

1. Marketing-oriented information aimed at the prospective buyer;|
2. Internally-oriented information used for designing the product and intended for “internal” use by the organization;
3. Product information that is often in “technical documentation” and provided to customers to explain how to install and use the product;
4. Training information used to teach people how to use the product;
5. Internally-oriented installation information for complex products, providing professional services teams with “know how” and practical guidance; and
6. Support information for customers explaining how to solve problems or reduce confusion in the use of the product.

To complicate matters further, this information is often produced by different organizations for different audiences.

Traditionally, the sources of this technical information have been silos within a corporation. There are different groups, with different tools, each producing technical information. Though some of this information may be relevant to other groups, the information is often inaccessible because of its origin or the tools with which it was developed. In large corporations with multiple business units, there might be multiple engineering, support or technical writing organizations all working in parallel and without much sharing between them.

Even before the Internet, this “siloed” approach to the development of technical information had its limitations. Information developed in one part of the organization was not reusable by another part of the organization. This inability to easily reuse information stemmed from the type of tools that were used to write and produce technical information. Each organization typically used its own specialized tools to develop and publish information. Product managers and engineers often wrote their information in Microsoft Word. Technical writers typically used a tool called FrameMaker. From there, they would write their documents, convert them into PDF and “help” files and sometimes HTML. Marketing writers often used InDesign. These diverse tools made it very difficult to share information. It was easier to recreate information than share it. Even within a single group, such as a technical writing department, the use of FrameMaker made it difficult to write information that was relevant to all product lines just once.

These traditional problems have been known for quite some time in global corporations. But they were never significant enough to make anyone care about changing them. However, because of the new channels for customers and prospects to engage with global companies, these traditional problems are now compelling enough to drive change.

The New Challenges of Customer Experience
The Internet and the new devices that make the Internet even more ubiquitous have transformed people’s expectations about how they find and consume technical information... specifically what information they expect to find, how they expect to find and consume it and how hard they are willing to work to locate it. These changes are affecting both the expectation of prospects who are buying, as well as customers who are already using the product(s).

The Internet makes it easier to search and find information both when buying a product and learning how to use it or fix it. A large percentage of people rely on the Internet when researching a product they eventually buy, and many actually make the purchase online. During this process customers expect access to documentation that they traditionally would get only after the purchase. In fact, some corporations are finding that 80% of their buyers are downloading product documentation before they make a purchase.

There are also changing expectations after the sale of a product. Many people search for technical information from Google first rather than going to the home page of the corporation from which they purchased the product. If the corporation is lucky, Google will lead the individual to the corporation’s homepage. But even if the customer lands on the corporation’s website, the individual may have trouble finding the information he wants or needs. A search may produce too many results, and those results may produce conflicting information, because information is often developed in different silos within an organization (e.g. support information may conflict with technical documentation). Inconsistent information was not so problematic before the Internet, since it was not as easy to find technical, support and sales information in one search. These silos of information are now more self-evident, exposing the inconsistencies of information as well as information that has outlived its purpose.

One example of technical documentation that has outlived its purpose is the use of PDF for electronic delivery. PDFs are single entities and do not give your customers and prospects the ability to find just the right topic of information via a search. They are also preassembled and cannot be configured on the fly to “remix” the information to suit the customer’s profile or particular interests.

The Internet has prompted a further change: Customers have come to expect more targeted information. They want information about a specific product with a configuration that is relevant to them. For example, someone who bought a printer might want to see how to install a software driver for a particular printer. A business user might want to know how to install a software product on Linux rather than Windows. Today’s consumer expects to do a Google search or search a company’s website, scanning four or five results before landing on the appropriate information. If they don’t, they give up or pick up the phone to call support. As the Internet’s bandwidth has grown, and video has become a possible medium of delivery, a generation has emerged that expects to see the solution rather than read about how something is done. The delivery of information that is targeted and visual is placing new challenges on corporations that deliver technical information.

The mobile and smart device channel is amplifying these trends by making Internet search easier and more common. These new devices also complicate the issue significantly by making the form of delivery variable in size and platform. For all of these reasons, corporations can no longer ignore the management of technical information as a “back-end” process. The management of technical information has now become a customer experience issue, which has always been of strategic significance to corporations.

Strategic Approach to Technical Information
Since technical information is now much more important to the customer experience, it behooves any global corporation to develop a strategy for how it will create, manage and share technical knowledge with its community of prospects, customers and partners. Customer experience, also known as customer engagement, is of strategic importance to the corporation for reasons that have been amply documented by analyst organizations. It is considerably harder to sell to a new customer than an existing one, and the investment to gain new customers is significant. An unhappy or dissatisfied customer can, through word of mouth, undermine future sales to other people in the corporation. Furthermore, competitors who are responding more quickly to these trends have an advantage in the sales cycle and in promoting customer satisfaction.

In addition to the revenue implications of customer experience, there is a significant cost angle as well. When prospects can’t find the information they want, they may give up and buy elsewhere. If customers can’t find the information they want, they will pick up the phone and call the support center. Support calls can cost an organization on average from $1 to $150 per call. Customers themselves are trending to self-service because the Internet presents such easy and immediate access to information. If corporations can more easily direct customers to the information they need, they avoid frustration, reduce costs and potentially increase revenue.