documentation feedback

[Sarah Bouchier]

Not tangential at all!

 

Thankyou; I know that our support guys have a single database for
queries; I should plainly go have a trawl :-)

 

S.

----------------------------------------- 
Sarah Bouchier 
Technical Author 

exony 

________________________________

From: R Arthur [mailto:carthur000 at sympatico.ca] 
Sent: 03 January 2007 23:18
To: Sarah Bouchier
Cc: techwr-l at lists.techwr-l.com
Subject: documentation feedback

 

Sarah Bouchier wrote:

 

<What do you find is the best way of getting feedback from customers on
your documentation?>

 

This is a bit tangential, but may be useful for determining if your
documentation is answering the questions the customers are asking. I had
a job once where the customer support and marketing folks kept all their
email correspondence in a single database. I asked the customer support
guys which new customers they had helped in the past year, and went
through the email trails for those customers. Well, that was a treasure
trove of what questions the customers were asking when they started. I
was writing a getting started guide, so this was exactly what I was
looking for. 

 

If you ask the customer support directly, they tend to remember the most
difficult or most interesting questions to answer. By reading the
emails, you see the raw data.

 

(Somewhat more interesting was when I had the content reviewed by the
team lead for customer support. Surprise! One of the key emails that I
had used as a source had included incorrect information. Cross check if
you can.)

 

Cathy Arthur