£
Cost Benefits of learning to write Professional Documentation
If you and your team take my Technical Author Training Course,
there are many benefits to you and your company.
£
Financial and Non-Financial Benefits
There are benefits in many ways:
£ Processes: Increased Efficiency / Productivity / Lower Costs
With improved instructions and procedures, your staff can
learn their tasks quicker, carry them out with fewer mistakes
and with better accuracy. This saves you money.
£ Processes: Decreased Risk
If your staff or customers really understand your instructions / procedures properly at the first reading,
then there are likely to be fewer mistakes, lower risk, and
fewer accidents. This saves you money.
£ Products or Services: Improved Quality
Properly-written documentation aims to help your business, not
just to explain the product.
I use best practices to write your manuals and help guides so
that your readers or employees will understand the
task more clearly. The aim is:
- fewer mistakes
- fewer complaints
- fewer questions
- fewer Support Calls - they just get on with the job, and get it right first
time.
This means that the quality of your products and services
can improve. This saves you money.
£ Customers: Improved Satisfaction
Manuals and Instructions written in a professional, easy
English manner, mean that your Customers can use your products or
service more efficiently, do their job better and quicker, so
they are satisfied with what they have bought from you. This can
lead to repeat business. This earns you money.
£ Finances: More orders
If your customers are happy, there is a better chance they
will order more from you.
They also tell other people, and these can become sales
referrals: word-of-mouth is very a effective Sales aid.
This earns you more money!
£
Reduce the cost of your Support Calls
-
Good documentation reduces
complaints because customers can find the answers
without phoning your help desk.
-
Proper search facilities
mean they can find information easily.
-
Correct use of language means
they can understand what it says.
-
This can reduce your support
overheads considerably.
£ Improve your Sales with better documentation
A Help file or Manual that impresses people is
a
Sales Aid. Good documentation shows that
you care about your customers. That's where we
can help, with our
one-day technical author training course.
£ Help your Users to train themselves
"It's great. I give new staff
one module to learn, and they are moving on to the
next by themselves!"
- Sheena W., Team Leader,
Eagle Star Pensions.
- Learn how to create and structure Help files
and Manuals, so that readers can teach themselves
how to use your product / service; or learn
correct procedures, etc.
- This adds value, because it saves considerably on
one-on-one training of new staff.
Learn how to write technical Plain English. Here are some of the benefits:
£ New manual saved 125 support
calls a month
"In one test, customers who used
the clearly written manual made
about 125 fewer calls a month than customers who
used the old manual."
- Cathy J. Spencer & Diana Kilbourn Yates, A Good
User's Guide Means Fewer Support Calls and Lower
Support Costs, 42 Technical Comm. 52 (1995).
£ Royal Mail saved £1/2 million in 9 months
by rewriting their forms
When you move to a new address,
you complete a redirection-of-mail form for Royal
Mail.
The old form was so confusing that there was an
87% error rate when customers filled it in. This
cost Royal Mail about £10,000 a week trying to
sort out the problems caused.
Authoring specialists redesigned the form, and
this substantially reduced the error rate,
saving Royal Mail £500,000 in
the next nine months. Worth it? Oh yes!
Read more about the author on my Technical
Writing Course web site. The link is on the
Home page.
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