Documentation as a Point of Experience
Companies are always trying to build loyal customers and I’ve talked about how to connect with users and the benefits of an engaged user in this blog before. So when I ran across Kevin Stirtz’s recent post, For More Loyal Customers, Manage Your Points of Experience, I thought I’d share it along with a bit of perspective as to how you and your company can improve one specific customer Point of Experience.
Kevin’s blog is a treat to read and full of great tips and information. I’m a big believer that great customer service can hide many corporate and product flaws, and Kevin’s advice and suggestions are always insightful and helpful to read. Kevin defines a Point of Experience (POE) as every action taken by a company’s employees that result in a experience for a customer, and the sum total of those POEs is representative of the company’s reputation, image, and brand. POEs are also created as customers interact with a company’s website or its advertising campaign. A positive POE can result in a user who walks away with a positive image of the company. A negative POE can reduce or eliminate the value of previous positive POEs and turn a user’s perception of a company negative. Read Kevin’s blog and you’ll get a feel for where this is coming from.
So, is a company’s documentation a POE? Absolutely. In fact, I’d suggest that documentation is actually one of the largest culprits of **negative** Points of Experience’s out there. Take a look at this selection of tweets from this twitter search:
Not only does bad documentation create unhappy users, but if those users go to the point of sharing their negative documentation experience then the social web can cause a negative POE infection of sorts. The community can crown kings and also behead them, so as you write and publish documentation for your products you need to be asking yourself if you’re doing everything possible to turn your user’s interactions with documentation into **positive** Points of Experience.
This small sample of tweets is from people who’ve had positive documentation experiences. Take a look at the full search and ask yourself which one you’d like your product or company to be mentioned in. Kevin’s post concludes with this thought:
>To keep our customers coming back, we need to create positive POE’s every time. To do this the company needs to have the value that says “I care” and actions that say “I serve”. If your company’s core values include caring and serving then the actions of people in your company will reflect this. And you’ll create points of experience that customers like.
Write and publish your documentation in a way that shows your users that you care about their experience, give them a positive documentation Point of Experience, and they will reward you with loyalty. Understand that your users ultimately want answers and give them a way to build a community without jumping through hoops. Use your documentation as a seed to grow happy users and I think you’ll find that the return on your documentation investment will increase dramatically.
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