Professional Technical Writers

To your customers, a product without documentation is a product that isn’t complete. You think no one reads the documentation? The truth is, your customers count on it when they need help. If they can’t find the answer there, they will be annoyed first, and then call product support, which may become very costly for you.

Companies think that reducing their documentation deliverables will save them time and money. That is just not true. It will more often cost you more money in the long term with added costs in service calls and potential future sales losses. Many companies feel that documentation is an add-on to their product but not an essential component of the product itself. Unfortunately, customers don’t see it that way.

With the internet today, customer reviews are the first thing a potential new customer will check out. With inadequate, inaccurate or no documentation at all, customers will get the hint quickly and look to someone else for their product needs. If you deliver a product without documentation, it is likely you will make your customer very unhappy. After all, they’ve just paid you plenty of money for your product. Without accurate documentation you may have just made their new purchase useless. People today are not shy about posting their feelings on the web.

Documentation is often the last piece of the puzzle completed before your new product is shipped out the door and into the hands of your customers. Because it’s the last deliverable on a long list of release requirements, it often gets downsized or neglected completely.

Out of date documentation may actually be worse than no documentation at all. Customers trust that when they are reading the documentation, it is as correct as possible. The only way you can deliver out of date documentation is to say that it is not up to date. These days, that is simply not acceptable. They will not know what parts are out of date and what may be correct. If pieces of the document are wrong, how can they trust anything in the documentation at all? Errors in documentation are seen by users as mistakes in the product itself. It is expected that all parts of a new product will work as documented and if it doesn’t then the product must be broken. If you’ve cut corners in documentation, where will they go for help? How can they trust your company at all? It snowballs very quickly into a complete lack of trust.