Chapter 16: Working with Customer Support¶
This chapter argues that a strong connection with support teams can be mutually beneficial. It can:
- Increase customer satisfaction.
- Reduce support workload.
- Gives the writer a stronger voice as a customer advocate.
- Gain feedback from real-world use of your docs.
Discussion Summary¶
Several people in the dicsussion group started out on support. It seems to be a fairly common route in to tech writing. Some retain close links to support, picking up support tickets occasionally, or continuing to work from within the support team. Whether still working as part of support, or on another team, all commenters find support feedback valuable.
There can be a virtuous cycle, whereby improving docs leads to support asking for more docs. This requires trust and visibility between the writer and the support team. Without this visibility and cooperation, you can end up with the situation several group members experienced, where support maintain their own separate docs. This is a frustrating situation to find yourself in, and it is confusing for the customer to have several places to look for info.
Some suggestions to improve integration with support:
- Attend some of their meetings.
- Add a docs tag in your support platform (such as Zendesk or Salesforce), to allow support to tag issues that require docs changes. If this isn’t possible, find another simple and quick way to allow support to send feedback and requests.
- Be respectful of support’s time, and the challenges of their job.
