Product instructions are part of the customer experience

Part of the customer experience are the product instructions, whether you send out printed Getting Started guides, online help or some mix of these.

Product instructions are an important after-sale touchpoint in the Use part of the Experience Cycle – where your customers spend the bulk of their time with your products. But we often overlook this important touchpoint (no one reads the product instructions), or decide that Support can fix what goes wrong.

Worse, poor product instructions impact bottom-line business metrics that can derail your customer experience efforts in other areas. 

Are you using support to overcome bad product instructions? 

Customer support is the most expensive way to support your customers as they learn to use your products. Everyone is trying to reduce the costs of support centers while providing a positive customer experience.file0001931487912

While you can’t stop everyone from calling support, you can deflect calls by providing clear product instructions. If you can improve the deflection rate by even 10%, for most support centers, that’s a giant win. Additionally, you increase the customer experience by letting people help themselves with clear and helpful product instructions and not interrupt their day to call support.

After all, most people don’t like calling support. By the time the customer calls support, their experience with the product has become negative. We’re depending on the support staff to turn that experience around, solve the customer issues, and do it quickly. By providing clear and useful product instructions, we’ve preventing these customer upset from occurring and deflecting the support calls.

Contact us to see how we can help you find out if your product instructions are helping or hurting.