Technical documentation has become a crucial asset for any organization. It allows both your staff and your customers to work autonomously and feel in control of their product.
It helps your staff do their job more efficiently, reducing the time needed and improving quality of service. It provides employees with a constant and up-to-date knowledge bank that they can easily refer to, thereby reducing the training time and costs and their dependency on each other.
Documentation is also essential in every step of the project’s life cycle. It helps document the process, ensure that everyone involved is on the same page, and create a clear resource that your team can refer to at any time. Without technical documentation, large projects would simply fall apart.
In addition to internal documentation, end user documentation helps customers have a positive experience while using a product. This can be achieved through concise, accessible training materials, user guides, troubleshooting manuals, and online help, thus increasing customer loyalty in the long run.
When customers can look for answers to their queries directly in the document, they are less inclined to reach out to your support staff for help for every trivial issue they face. This can reduce calls to technical support lines, and therefore greatly cut down your staffing costs.
In brief, product documentation is an indispensable aid to learning, which your staff or customers can refer to long after the training session is over. In the Age of Information, people need to access the answers to their questions with minimal effort. Without consistent, concise, and clear documentation, a potential customer is much less likely to have confidence in the product or want to put in the time and effort to learn how to use it.