I’ve been at my current company for a year and a half, and my role is a mix of technical communications and customer support (which is really technical communication with a specific person instead of a group of current customers and prospective customers).
As my company is growing and taking on more customers, I need to build a team. I’m figuring out what that team will look like, and what sort of skills and personalities I need to fill those roles.
I’m writing this in a theater that’s filling up with people. I’m here for my youngest daughter’s dance recital. She’s dancing in two groups, both at the very end of the first act. I’ve got a long time to wait.
I spent last week researching support and learning management systems, working on a documentation delivery schedule for the rest of the year, and responding to a few complex support cases.
Those support cases, along with some comments from other users, have made me rethink my opinion of FAQs. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that this feedback is pushing me in a direction that I’ve been trying to avoid, while I knew that I was fighting the inevitable.
I’ve spent a large chunk of time this week building a case for hiring a technical support person. This has been a difficult, time-consuming process, and I’ve been thinking about how I’ve done this sort of thing before, and why it’s difficult now.
I’m the documentation and support team for my company (startup!), which means that I get an interesting, and often valuable, view into the problems our customers are having. Most of them are technical (port numbers), some turn into feature requests, and some are questions about using the product. Those are often tricky, or subtle, and they’re particularly useful to me because they show me where the documentation could use some improvement.
And sometimes the user is having a problem because I screwed up. Let me tell you a story about one of those.
I’ve been a tech writer for 18 years, and I’ve worked for half a dozen companies as a full-time writer or doc manager (which has meant “full-time writer who also helps other writers clear roadblocks”). In all that time, I’ve never been a member of the Support team.
From my experience, and from talking to other tech writers, we’re almost never part of Support. But that’s exactly where we should be!
Possibly. At least I think so.
Continue reading “Why isn’t the documentation team part of customer support?”
