Data Analytics Skills for Technical Writers

Roberta Smith — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 07:29:47 +0000

Writing is a basic skill that technical writers have strong expertise in. Technical writers produce an invaluable artifact called product documentation. These skills help technical writers effectively deliver their roles and responsibilities.

Technical writers are indispensable to customer operations. Without technical writers producing and updating product documentation, chaos will reign!

Types of Data Analytics Skills for Technical Writers

Given the emergence of digital transformation projects and Artificial Intelligence (AI), technical writers need to upskill in data analytics and AI skills. Here are some of the data analytics skills

Data Management skills

Technical writers should learn the basics of data management and frameworks like DAMA DMBoK to understand data fundamentals, lineage, security, and organization. Understanding data collection methods is crucial for building reliable metrics and insights.

Technical writers collate data from business systems such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, CRM, product analytics tools, and so on. This helps with data linking leading to richer information. This also helps technical writers communicate clearly to internal stakeholders what data needs to be captured and its purpose.

Basic Data Analysis skills

This means that technical writers should learn about basic exploratory data analysis techniques such as correlation, head map, distribution, and so on. In addition to this, technical writers should know how to calculate mean, median, and so on. These data skills elevate technical writers to the next level as they can measure and monitor the right metrics to improve the business impact of their efforts. Focus on learning these skills would help technical writers communicate metrics clearly to their decision-makers such as C-level executives

Basic statistics including average, median, mode, and so on
Hypotheses testing
Correlation analysis
Head map generation
Distribution and histograms
Charts

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Role of Customer Interaction in Technical Documentation

Roberta Smith — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 09:10:56 +0000

In many organizations, technical writers work closely either with the customer support team or product management team to produce troubleshooting guides and product documentation. This is because the sales team and customer success team are the point of contact for new prospects and existing customers respectively. However, if you want your product documentation to be world-class, technical writers should be part of any customer interaction. This blog explores the role of technical writers in enhancing documentation via customer interaction throughout their entire customer journey. Let’s dive in!

Technical Writers in a Sales Discovery Call

Sales Development Representatives (SDR) are involved in the sales discovery call to understand the prospect’s business problem statement and why they are looking for a business problem. The sales discovery call also helps SDR to understand what product features apply to the prospect. This call is a holy grail for technical writers. Being part of this (at least listening to recordings), technical writers can understand how the prospect discovered their organization’s products and services. This provides a technical writer insight into what can be optimized in the product documentation in terms of SEO for each documentation article. This enhances the visibility of their brand and positions the documentation site as another marketing channel to scout for new prospects. Listening to a plethora of sales discovery calls helps technical writers understand customer persona and use cases to tailor the right content for them once they become customers.

Technical Writers in Sales Demo Call

Sales demo call is usually given by SDR or sales consultants. If technical writers can tag along with SDR for sales demo calls, it hugely benefits product documentation as technical writers learn to write using customer vocabulary. The sales demo call provides great insights into

What terms/vocabulary does the prospect use to describe a feature or product functionality?
What is the ideal customer persona type that technical writers need to cater for
What are the common use cases that must be addressed in the documentation
What are the common business problems faced by customer persona
What matters to new prospects in terms of solution design
What are the success metrics of the new prospect once the solution is implemented These insights help technical writers to create the right narration. This also greatly enhances the “Getting Started” section of the documentation. Producing documentation on how customers will use a product shines over producing documentation based on product features.

Technical Writers in Customer Success Call

Once the prospect becomes a customer, then onboarding is done by the customer success team. Onboarding involves solution design, configuration of product features, and so on. Technical writers play a vital role in customer onboarding as most documentation. Customers provide more feedback on the documentation site on whether they can self-serve to configure product features by themselves. Since onboarding takes human effort, producing more comprehensible documentation can help customers get started quickly with your product, thus delivering value quickly!

Technical writers can also understand ongoing challenges faced by customers during routine customer success calls. Feedback can be sought and can be implemented swiftly. This helps technical writers create good learning artifacts such as tutorials, videos, and so on to help customers navigate complex parts of your product/services more effectively.

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DEV Community: Roberta Smith