Thanks for commenting. You make a good point about customers talking about their good or bad experience. Time was companies could afford to piss off some customers (perhaps in order to allow them to suck up to other, more "important" customers). Now that we all have many ways of being heard and broadcasting news of our good or bad experiences, companies really can't afford to behave like that any more. Sam Bayer's blog post "Hertz Gets Social Media!" is a good example of a company being smart about a customer voicing his opinion.

So documentation certainly has a value as a preventative medicine - and like all medicines you accept that it costs money and you have to have a certain amount of trust that things would be worse if you weren't taking it.

But if part of the answer of proving our worth is to arm ourselves with "powerful customer stories", the question is: how do we go about getting those? My experience has always been that, when it comes to documentation, people are very quick to complain when something's wrong, but they rarely go out of their way to shout about it when documentation has really helped them out. I'm not complaining - I behave in exactly the same way.

Is it worthwhile - or acceptable - going out and trying to solicit favourable comment? Or do you just need to make sure that when a customer does say something nice you make sure to ask if you can quote them on it?

We all do need to justify ourselves. If you've never had to put together a case for your value to your company, then someone else is doing it for you. Business is (almost always) about generating revenue, so your life is likely to be easier and your job more secure if you can justify yourself in terms of monetary value.

But that's not the whole picture... technical documentation also adds to the overall customer experience, and although there have been plenty of books written about how companies that take customer experience seriously are more successful (Louis Carbone's "Clued In" is a good one), I've never seen anyone put a specific number on the value of a specific customer experience initiative. For example, when luxury hotels choose to use high quality bed linen in their rooms, I doubt they put a specific sum on the ROI for this decision, even though the reason they do it is as part of a set of things designed (ultimately) to generate revenue.***
Instead, the value of these initiatives to a business is often conveyed via stories told about individual cases: an unhappy potential customer who couldn't get the software up and running because required information wasn't available - so they decided not to buy; customers who are so delighted that they tweet about it or write a blog post. Small stories like this can have a powerful impact on how technical documentation is viewed - switching it from being a dirty necessity to something that adds value ... all without needing to come up with any numbers at all.

The reality then is you probably need a combination of well-thought-through metrics AND a few powerful customer stories.

***However, companies *do* often measure overall customer satisfaction, via something like the NetPromoter survey which measures likelihood of a customer to recommend the company's service or product to a colleague, and this is often used as a way to put monetary value on keeping customers happy. If your company is doing this, then it could be a good to measure customer satisfaction with the technical documentation too, and make sure that gets plenty of visibility as something that contributes to overall satisfaction.

You ask: "Do I need to sell myself as a technical and marketing writer to get the work?"
I hope not.
I regularly edit copy for the marketing department and I've often had to write copy for business proposals (which is a similar sort of thing) and it's a very different skill to technical writing. In my experience technical writers don't often make good marketing copy writers and marketing folks don't often make good technical writers.

Good tips. Thanks.

Is VP Dev right? Do I need to sell myself as a technical and marketing writer to get the work?

Personally I've never worked anywhere that didn't have an appraisal system in which you were required to talk about the value you'd brought to the company over the past 12 months. Reading through my post again I think I was a bit mean to senior management and the people in Finance. They have a job to do and they're not doing their job properly if they aren't periodically looking at every section of the business and asking questions like: do we need that many people in that department, or: is the company spending its money wisely on those salaries?

If you read my post again you'll see that I never suggest senior management expect us to "justify every last topic or article" - but I do expect, and in fact hope, that senior management should want me to be able to justify the cost of employing me and my team. I'd be concerned if I was working somewhere where I was just left to get on with things and no one ever questioned me or wanted to know about the value of the docs team to the company.

I have a great team of writers working for me and I'm very lucky to have an approachable, common-sense-driven management team above me, but I wouldn't want my efforts on behalf of the company to be just taken on trust. I think there are good reasons why we should continue to work for our company and be paid the salaries we're paid and I'd like to think I can back that up with some hard facts.

Sorry, you lost me at this point. Technical writers shouldn't have to prove or justify anything to anyone. It's part of our job to write useful content, and it's up to us to measure its usefulness. If I was working somewhere where I had to justify every last topic or article to "numbers guys" I'd be very miserable and would be looking for another job. If you don't trust people to do their job, using their experience and expertise, then don't hire them.

For example…

If you're Sony and have 1000s of people on your customer support site, you can ask them to rate (prioritize) bugs etc that you want Sony to develop faster than others.

All of this feedback gets funned back to marketing, designers and developers.

You make the fix and release the patch to the customers (or whatever works for your industry)

The customers see that you're listening to them and continue to help you prioritize the development work.

This is a radical change from the approach most companies adopt. You're bringing the customers in close so they can accelerate the dev process.

One downside to this is that it (often) conflicts with internal politics, i.e. people pulling rank over what gets done when but that’s another day’s work…

We rolled back about 20-25% over a 3 month period after the content was reviewed & optimized.

Essentially, we convinced the snr mgr that quality v quantity would win… and the feedback backed it up.

But they two key takeways here are:

1. Shoveling content onto a site doesn’t work – it creates traffic jams and information pollution, and you lose the trust of the readers

2. Identify why people use the site and build it from there. if they all read X number of pages, then look at why they are doing so, i.e. is because the user needs more information on the product, policy, procedures etc. or they have an interest in a specific area and are looking for more (unfound) information.

Again, ultimately it's down to cost. Changes that are cost reductive are always easy to make. Changes that involve spending money - even with the promise of demonstrable value from the results - are much, much harder to implement.

Please keep writing about the value of web analytics to tech comms, and across companies as a whole: it's all grist to my mill!

I work with corporate software where end users call their own Support help desk with their questions and only the big issues, or server-side questions, get asked of our Support people. So I need to reach out to customers and try to get hold of their data from their help desk to find out where the areas of pain are for the end users.

I've campaigned for some time to host our online help on our servers, so that we can collect data showing which parts of the help system users need to look up most often. This would allow us to target those areas and finding out what words users enter into searches would give and indication of which parts of the user interface need attention. Hosted help would certainly make it easier for me to answer the questions: "Where do customers need more information? Where are they getting confused?"

<If you have a lot of pages that are never viewed, well, what's causing that, and how does it affect the company's bottom line?

We had 5000 pages on a portal many years back. Nightmare to maintain them. Less than 10% were read every month.

This was for several reasons:

1. Users don’t know how to search.
2. The search tool is not up to scratch.
3. The content is not tagged/indexed.
4. Users have only so much patience and then give up (about 3 pages)

We took the 90% offline for 1 month to see what the reaction would be. Zero!

People spent less time on the portal – but here’s the important point – because now they could find the content.
… but they used it more because it delivered.

With web analytics, page views, return visitors, new visitors, how long a reader stays on the page, and the exit rate, these are all metrics that can help you prove (or disprove) your worth as a technical writer. When you have a big-picture view of your help site compared to the support site, community site, corporate site, and marketing site, you can aggregate that info to answer the compelling questions. If you have a lot of pages that are never viewed, well, what's causing that, and how does it affect the company's bottom line?

Hard data such as web analytics also gets you away from the few opinions about the help that overwhelm the discussions with anecdotal rather than hard evidence for one direction for pubs or another.

What do you think? Not enough web content to make the reports stick? Or are we onto something here?

I've discussed this with some people since then and, for brevity’s sake, here are a few thoughts:

1.Create a baseline – e.g. how many tech support calls/email etc are related to poor documentation? If your company/client doesn’t have this figure, suggest that they explore this.

2.Look at Customer Support forums (see Dell/Sony as an example) and look at where communications are breaking down. Where do customers need more information? Where are they getting confused?

3.Ask the Finance Director, how much it costs to answer 1 tech support calls/email? They’ll tell you. See how you can reduce this number by providing documentation, videos etc that resolves the most common complaints. It’s usually 4 or 5 problems that keep recurring. Escalate these and address.

I think the opportunity for ‘technical writers’ is to look at the business problems within their own organization and then see where/how they can resolve these issues with the communication skills they have.

Scott Able, Chris Brogan, Debbie Weil all offer valuable insight (from different angles) on this.

Bye
Ivan