According to Embroker 2023 statistics, about 90% of the startups fail. About 10% of them do so in the first year. The major reasons are misreading market demand and launching user-unfriendly products, poor marketing, and product mistiming. Over 10% of startup failures are related to bad product practices and marketing.
So, you can start your business with beta software and achieve some growth over time. Still, you can’t do that without investing in maturing your product and proper documentation. As specialists, we know that taking care of software documentation can boost important KPIs that can lead your company towards success.
The later you address software documentation in your strategy, the harder it can be to keep your product updated and user-friendly. To help you understand the importance of taking care of it over time, we chose the four main KPIs that receive a positive impact when you invest in top-notch software documentation: Customer Satisfaction Metrics (CSAT and NPS), ROI, Customer Support Requests, and Churn Rate.
Analyzing data without proper context makes it easy to get lost in understanding customer satisfaction. Nothing in the company can interfere with your client’s perception of the quality of your product or service.
Software businesses usually count on two metrics to measure and understand customer satisfaction: CSAT and NPS. Both are similar, can be measured in a transactional or relational way, and have standardized measuring and calculating methods.
When CSAT is lower than 70% or NPS goes under 30, the comments on the customer’s answers need to be thoroughly analyzed. Mainly, anything can interrupt your customer experience and provide lousy feedback. When it comes to software, when the user has a breach of expectation during their journey, their experience gets jeopardized, lowering customer satisfaction.
This breach can go from a simple sales misalignment about how the software or the customer experience team works, and it can spread to software without proper documentation guiding the customer during integration, setup, and instructions to help their use.
Investing in having excellent software documentation will impact your product as a whole. If the documentation is hard to navigate and the user can’t understand the product, it can result in bad NPS and CSAT. Bad documentation feedback can be a stimulus to organize features and journeys across the software.
On the other hand, by providing documentation with excellent user experience, consistent instructions that help developers integrate or easily use the software, and great structure can help you boost CSAT and NPS. Creating satisfied product promoters and recommending your software is a commitment that your business should make entirely.
Every strategy investment made in a business expects a financial return on it. Documentation Return on Investment (ROI) is how you know you invested in the right technical writers, the proper documentation tools, and anything you need to deliver software documentation overall.
To understand if you’re putting your budget in the right place and assets, you must understand all the positive and negative outcomes and address them to your return formula.
You can notice the investment return regarding product documentation in four main ways. First, good documentation reduces customer support costs and time because it liberates the team to work on specific bugs and usage issues. The collected and registered knowledge on your helpdesk platform solves most of the common problems users face throughout your product.
Satisfied customers buy again and refer your product to new clients, so there is a satisfaction and branding part related to investing in documentation. Also, happy customers stay longer than unsatisfied, so the ROI increases the customer’s lifetime value (LTV) and, consequently, your revenue.
To build excellent product documentation, you need outstanding professionals working on it. While searching for technical writers, you must consider the experience and how much you want to invest. This investment can be into training junior professionals or hiring senior writers.
Existing products usually need high-speed returns to their investments in documentation, so relying on juniors who still need to ramp up their writing skills can be risky. In this case, senior writers can suit the velocity you need to have a return. If you doubt whether you should outsource or hire in-house, we already discussed the advantages and disadvantages of each type in this article.
Businesses that work with the Software as a Service model tend to have a customer success structure to apply retention and support strategies. This area aims to help customers achieve their desired outcome with the software, and it prevents detractors and creates promoters within the base. There are many benefits from investing in customer success, such as increased satisfaction, more considerable lifetime value, retention, and much more.
Customer support is a special team within the customer service area that deals with doubts regarding the product and its other possible bugs and issues.
When a company hasn’t put enough effort into product documentation, the customer support team may be ticket-oriented. Every question, from the simplest to the most complex, needs a customer support agent to answer. The lack of proper documentation increases the customer support burden, fatigues the agents, and makes it an expensive operation.
Technical writers don’t work exclusively with integration articles or specific content for developers. This writing professional can also build a knowledge base to help every user who gets in touch with the product. When you have a team of technical writers that can cover your operation needs, including building an open product knowledge base, tickets will decrease significantly, and your customer support team will focus their efforts and extra energy on solving more complex problems.
For SaaS companies, the churn rate is one of the primary metrics to consider your business health. The churn rate is the percentage of customer base you lose in a period.
A plan cancellation aggravates the revenue leak of your company. Churn rates must be measured, monitored, and fought daily with actions in customer success, product development, and more.
Good products are easier to sell and retain customers, but they perform less well than those with exquisite documentation. Proper software documentation facilitates early adoption, guarantees faster systems integrations, and teaches customers about daily use by offering a solid knowledge base. It impacts customer acquisition and retention, preventing churn throughout the customer’s journey.
Boosting your KPIs shouldn’t be hard. By investing in top-notch software documentation, you can have a significant impact on your revenue without compromising your budget and your schedule.
On Write Choice, we aim to revolutionize how tech companies educate customers about their products through excellent technical documentation and content.
We have a collaborative and highly skilled team that will work as your own, understanding your software profoundly and matching your brand’s voice, and it costs less than hiring senior professionals in-house. Let’s talk? Click here to schedule a call with one of our specialists.
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