It seems likely Artificial Intelligence (AI) and chatbots will play a key role in helping users, in the future. Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM and Microsoft, as well as smaller technology companies, are all developing platforms for simulating an intelligent conversation with human users. This raises a question: Will chatbots mean we’ll write a how-to task in… Read more »
Category: user assistance
The ROI of user documentation: you could break even if you avoided 3 support calls per week
We’ve been experimenting with another spreadsheet for calculating the Return on Investment (ROI) on User Assistance. We wanted to look at: how many support calls an organisation needs to have resolved by users reading the Help content instead of calling Support, before it starts to see a return on the cost of creating the Help. Using… Read more »
The new marketing funnel for software and other technology products
Prospective customers today know more about products than they have ever done. Many people tend to search for the solution to their problem on the Web and through Social Media before they buy a product or service, and many of them never even touch the product before buying it. This means the “marketing funnel” has changed into a loop…. Read more »
Getting users to read the Help rather than call support
We spotted an interesting statement by the “Father of Behaviour Design”, BJ Fogg: “For somebody to do something – whether it’s buying a car, checking an email, or doing 20 press-ups – three things must happen at once. The person must want to do it, they must be able to, and they must be prompted to… Read more »
How technical documentation helps the customer journey
Here is a diagram that shows the different types of User Assistance that can help users as they progress through the customer journey: Supporting the user through the customer journey has become more important, partly because the subscription, “try before you buy”, sales model means users can stop being a paying customer at a moment’s notice. Today, all… Read more »