How Is Effective Technical Documentation Essential for Your Business?
Bigger corporations or even small businesses offering highly technical products or services can find it challenging to ensure that procedures and policies go off smoothly and without a hitch. For that reason, technical documentation holds a special place in the processes of these organizations.
But what exactly is technical writing? Technical writing is a form of copywriting that focuses on informational and instructional details that help translate more complex ideas into easy-to-understand content. Many companies decide to hire technical writers to develop and maintain technical documentation, but if you have the time and interest in writing on your own, you can use technical writing tools to create great, professional-looking content.
Comprehensive technical documentation can help streamline your operations and processes and keep everyone in the organization informed. In this article, we’re outlining nine ways that technical documentation can positively impact your business.
Clear Communication
Successful businesses are built upon effective communication with customers, employees, and investors. So, it is not an exaggeration to say that lack of clear communication can have a detrimental effect on your team’s efficiency.
Technical documentation can help prevent this by providing crystal clear compliance verification, functional specifications, user and product manuals, etc. Even if you don’t have confusing equipment or complex processes, providing clear guides and instructions can make a big difference in your company’s overall productivity.
Efficient Issue Resolution
Issues are sure to arise from time to time in any technical environment. Detailed technical documentation offers many benefits to help resolve such problems quickly and efficiently. For instance, step-by-step procedures based on similar issues in the past will enable new members of the team to resolve issues relying on the knowledge obtained from prior experience. In contrast, troubleshooting and FAQ documents will provide answers to commonly asked questions and methods to overcome known issues.
With readily available technical documentation, end users can perform troubleshooting on their own. In the case of more complex issues, having access to comprehensive procedures and specifications means that technical personnel will no longer depend on the knowledge of a single expert.
User Education
If you’re selling a technical product that is rather complicated, the importance of technical documentation can’t be understated. This is because today, more than 70% of customers prefer to use self-service customer support options. That means that excellent technical documentation can be the difference between a great customer experience and a poor one.
Some of the commonly used technical content materials used to educate users include manuals, quick start guides, case studies, FAQs, release notes, and presentations.
Marketing Tool
Marketers need technical documentation to help them connect with prospective and existing clients. According to Hubspot, about 60% of businesses include content marketing in their overall marketing strategy.
Good content marketers are aware that different types of content are needed at various stages of the customer journey, providing the correct information at the right time to help the customer make an educated choice.
Establish Trust
Technical documentation or, to be more precise, product documentation allows you to establish trust with customers. Research conducted by Forrester found that today’s consumers make buying decisions after first informing themselves via social media and websites.
The content you create will influence customers’ impressions of your business and products throughout the entire customer journey. Customers want helpful, accurate, and relevant information that solves problems. A survey by IBM confirms this, stating that nearly 90% of the company’s website visitors consider high-quality technical content to be a significant factor when making a purchase decision.
Knowledge Transfer
Have you ever needed crucial technical information to solve a certain issue, only to discover that the employee who held the knowledge has moved on to another company? As your organization grows, employee turnover will become a regular occurrence. But whenever this happens, there will be a risk of losing valuable experience and knowledge. Luckily, there’s a solution for this problem: technical documentation.
Creating technical documentation, such as work instructions and SOPs, is the best way to prevent the loss of skill and information. Preserving this knowledge will help you maintain high levels of efficiency and productivity.
Standardized Employee Training
Every new employee needs training. Technical documentation can help make the process quicker by helping new team members understand your organization and their work within it.
Proper technical documentation helps standardize the knowledge for new employees, thus reducing confusion. In addition, streamlining the training stage through the use of technical documentation will help you save time, reduce training costs, and increase productivity across the board.
Improve Your Search Engine Rankings and Visibility
No matter how excellent and detailed your technical documentation is, it will be of no use if nobody can find it. In order to make sure that your users can easily find the information they’re looking for, your technical documentation needs to be optimized for an online search.
By utilizing search engine optimization in your technical content, users will be able to easily find the topics they’re seeking without having to weed through thousands of pages. So, even if you aren’t concerned with how your technical content is ranked by search engines, you should still consider the different factors that impact SEO, such as keyword optimization.
Save Money in the Long Run
Investing in the creation of technical documentation might seem like an unnecessary expense at the moment, but it will pay off in the long run. Clear standard operating procedures (SOPs), instruction Manuals, administration guides, compliance, and other technical documents can save all staff members frustration, time, and money. This is especially true for upper-level executives whose time and skills might be wasted on clarifying and answering questions and problems.
In addition, having properly outlined documents to use as a guide can help decrease support costs and eliminate expensive mistakes in production.
Final Thoughts
In today’s complex global economy, having comprehensive technical documentation is essential. Clear technical documentation can prevent employee errors, help users achieve their goals using your products, and make business processes more reliable.
