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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