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The First Line of Support


By Eric Butow
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April 15, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 3)
You may have had this conversation with your software development team once or a hundred times before:

You: “We need documentation for our software so our users will know how to use it.”

Developers: “But the software is so easy to use, we don’t need any documentation!”

A rejoinder to this argument can be hard to come by, because the developers are right—if your development team members are the only people using the software.

The reality is much more complicated. As graphical user interfaces (or GUIs), such as Windows and Mac OS, became popular in the 1990s, it was assumed that since users would now be using a standard interface, people would be able to use any software at all. However, a new interface didn’t solve an old problem: Application software usually brings new ways of doing tasks along with it, and users need to be told how to perform those tasks. Without any guidance, users will use their own judgment, for better or worse, to get something to work the way they feel it should work—for example, users who broke CD-ROM drive trays when they used the trays as cup holders.

Customer support costs account for as much as 60 percent of a high-tech company’s total costs. Documentation is the first line of support for most customers, and customers usually use documentation to find the answer to a problem they’re having. The inevitable result of poor or nonexistent documentation is that more people try calling the customer support lines for help.

The company tries to mitigate the costs of hiring and training customer support staff by charging for those calls. Users, who don’t want to pay for those calls if they don’t have to, usually search on the Internet to get answers. Some users visit the company Web site for those answers, and many companies not only have lists of allegedly frequently asked questions but also online forums to ask and answer questions. However, the user may not have the answers she needs, so she has two choices: Pay and hope she gets the information she needs, or give up. In any case, the extra time the user puts into solving the problem reinforces negative feelings about your company. If you have aggressive competition, this isn’t good news for you or your team.



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