For another part of an informal series about best practices in technical publications, I want to discuss customer interaction with writers and getting customer feedback about your technical documentation. How can technical writers ensure they are making the right customer connections to best help a company succeed? A few of the best practices listed in the “Tech writers as sales reps?” that the panel referred to for our Austin STC Meeting in October 2005 that are related to customer interaction are:
#7: Encourage technical writers to meet customers.
#8: Use customer advisory boards to get feedback on documentation.
Q: Customer interaction – let’s discuss the constraints on really making this happen. How have you made it happen?
A: These managers had done a lot of things to get customer feedback, from customer surveys to online feedback forms embedded in the online help. Bill Hunter guest-blogged about online feedback forms previously .
All the manager panelists liked the concept of a customer advisory board, citing that as a great best practice. Also scheduling your writers to have lunch with customers when they’re on site for training is a great idea.
One manager said from her experience that she finally understood why it wasn’t always a good idea to have writers talking directly to customers, due to the issues that a writer may not be able to resolve to the customer’s satisfaction because the politics are out of their realm of expertise or influence. Also, our curious nature might lead us to ask questions about our own tools that might not have the best answer, leading to awkward, shoe-shuffling moments. So, in this manager’s perspective, she felt that writers should not meet directly with customers unless they are trained on how to work with customers and guide discussions so that you answer questions correctly or help with things that are fixable (and realize not all perceptions can be fixed). If you’ve worked in IT for any amount of time, you know about these perceptions and what can and can’t be fixed.
Getting customer feedback can be a best practice to put into place, but you may not always get an immediate positive result. You have to ensure that your doc team can succeed by setting expectations for the requests to avoid unrealistic requests based on time or resources available. Still, any time spent with customers helps us take a walk in their shoes and should offer both participants valuable insight into the other’s position.
This post continues the series about best practices in technical communication where I blogged about:
Questioning technical publications best practices
Best practices in tech comm for fit in the organization
How to implement a document or records management system that meets ISO standards