Incorporating Customer Feedback

Problem

The documentation didn’t have a very good reputation for being complete and helpful, but the documentation writers didn’t know what was wrong with it. According to the information they were getting from their SMEs, the content was correct.

Meanwhile, users repeatedly ran into the same errors in the documentation, but they didn’t know what to do about it. No one knew how to report issues, so rather than go digging for a way to send feedback, they would just work around the problem and complain on their customer survey.

Goals

Changing a reputation for poor quality takes more than just fixing errors. Users would have to see evidence of an aggressive initiative to understand and cater to their needs in a timely fashion.

Solution

We started by putting a simple feedback form on every page of the documentation, inviting the reader to rate the page as “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” as well as provide comments. Because the feedback form was on every page, it was very easy for users to find.

Even more importantly, though, the doc team instituted a policy that all feedback messages would be responded to promptly. Regardless of whether the comments were a compliment or a critique, an assigned documentation writer would respond, thanking the user for writing, apologizing for the problem if appropriate, and pointing the user to more information. If the feedback resulted in a change needing to be made to the document, the writer would make the change immediately and reference it in the response to the client.

Results

Initially, clients used the form to voice their frustrations, but the timber of the feedback messages changed over just a couple months as clients became accustomed to the fact that their feedback was accepted, acted on, and appreciated. As a result:

• The quality of the documentation improved as changes were made to reflect the needs of the client in consuming it, rather than the needs of the SMEs in producing it. The documentation writers enjoyed the satisfaction of knowing they were producing something that was genuinely useful.
• Clients were more successful with the documentation, improving their satisfaction with the product and decreasing their need to contact customer support. In fact, customer support representatives themselves even used the feedback forms to report issues because it was so useful in driving down call rates.
• Engagement with the documentation increased as more users found it to be a worthwhile resource. Customer satisfaction went up, not just for the documentation specifically, but also for the entire experience of working with the company.