Technical writers are no strangers to user experience struggles. Moreover, there’s a separate position in many companies for so-called UX writers. They focus on communication with clients through written content and creating the best user experience.
We also look closely into UX when searching for the perfect software for technical writers. This coin has actually two sides: UX should be great for both writers and readers.
User experience seems to be a major concern on the market now, but there’s another term everyone who is striving to create a prosperous business should consider - customer experience or CX.
CX is a broader notion, it is influenced by many factors, UX included. Although, even if user experience of your clients in regards to technical documentation is great, that doesn’t necessarily mean that customer experience overall is high and vice versa.
Let’s jump right into it and see for ourselves what CX is and how technical writing is involved.
What CX Is
According to Wikipedia, customer experience is the result of clients interacting with a company on any level. As long as such relationships exist, customer experience is always present and can be measured/changed.
It consists of three major parts:
- The customer journey
- The brand touchpoints
- The environments the customer experiences
We can see that UX is interwoven into each of these parts in terms of technical writing, as well. The customer journey often starts with an in-product tour that can be created using context help. Technical documentation is certainly a brand touchpoint in itself and your online documentation portal is an environment your clients can find themselves in.
Customer experience is a complex entity. It requires the whole company working like one mechanism with perfect cooperation and collaboration between departments. Today’s world is highly competitive, so, to surpass rivals, you need to make sure all brand touchpoints are bringing good results starting with ads and customer support and ending with technical documentation.
User Manuals and CX
Technical documentation is definitely a huge touchpoint with your clients. Users call upon the power of user manuals at the most desperate of times, one should be really careful with that. The process of finding answers needs to be as flawless and intuitive as possible. Otherwise, you can get your whole company into big trouble by ruining CX.
Documentation is how tech writers speak to customers. But, for the most part, the readers don’t differentiate between your brand and the people behind written content. For them, it feels like dealing with the brand itself more than anything else due to the impersonal nature of technical documentation. That’s why it is crucial to brand your technical docs - if you are doing your job right, branding will only strengthen the bond between your company and its clients.
But, that’s not the only area help authoring nurtures - it also becomes the ‘glue’ that helps your company deliver better customer experience. This is being done through valuable internal documents like guides, instructions on employee on-boarding, company policies, etc.
Conclusion
Technical writing plays a unique role in a company’s life. It helps in finding common language with customers, aids support teams, holds the company together by means of internal documents.
If we choose to focus only on external documents, we can see that user manuals really interact with clients, although this kind of interaction may seem kind of passive - it is nothing like sales and marketing.
At ClickHelp, we always think of technical documentation as of a bridge connecting companies to their customers and, that’s why we are putting so much effort into creating the perfect environment for your readers.
Good luck with your technical writing!
ClickHelp Team
Author, host and deliver documentation across platforms and devices