TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:Re: Correlations between docs and bottom line From:Ami WRIGHT <ami -at- ziplink -dot- net> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Sat, 26 Oct 2002 18:13:56 -0400
On Thu, 24 Oct 2002 17:23:38 -0400, "Benedicto, Brandon T" wrote:
>Do any of you have ideas on discovering how a department's production of
>documents relates to an organization's bottom line?
Hi Brandon,
I have anecdotal information only. I previously worked for a small
software company that made programming tools for the Oracle environment.
It was a small company. I was the only tech writer, and tech support was
handled directly by the developers. I suggested that I handle tech support
instead, because I thought that I could improve the documentation if I had
more contact with the users. The developers thought that was a great idea,
because they didn't really want to do support calls anyway.
The first call that I took was someone calling about an error message that
he had gotten while installing the product. When I asked the developer
about it, he said "People call about that all the time. They can just
ignore that message."
I added two sentences to the documentation, and nobody ever called about
that again. It took me 20 minutes to eliminate their single most common
tech support question.
It is definitely the party line in our profession that good documentation
lowers a company?s support costs and increases customer satisfaction. I've
heard other people relate other stories like this one, but I've never seen
any studies that actually demonstrate the connection. If anyone knows
about one, I'd love to hear about it.
-Ami
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Ami Wright
"technical" tech writer
American with international experience
www.ziplink.net/users/ami
-----------------------------------------------------------------
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
All-new RoboHelp X3 is now shipping! Get single sourcing, print-quality
documentation, conditional text and much more, in the most monumental
release ever. Save $100! Order online at http://www.ehelp.com/techwr-l
Buy ComponentOne Doc-To-Help 6.0, the most powerful SINGLE SOURCE HELP
AUTHORING TOOL for MS Word. SAVE $100 on the full version and $50 on the
upgrade. Offer ends 10/31/2002 (code: DTH102250). http://www.componentone.com/d2hlist1002
---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as:
archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot- Visit http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.
