Customer feedback is the forefront creating and optimizing appealing product documentation that your customers understand, and use to aid them with the use of your SaaS or physical products.
A lot of times companies are scared to knowing what their customers truly think about their documentation and this leads to a roadblock in finding out what their customers truly think about their product docs.
Why is this important? Why do we need to learn about what our customers feel about our product documentation?
If you own and operate your own company I'm sure you go out of your way to delight your consumers, to meet their demands, and to keep them loyal to your business. But how can you be certain that your efforts will yield the intended outcomes? You will never be able to provide your customers with the ideal product documentation experience if you do not try to find out what they think about your service. Their feedback on their experiences perusing and browsing your online documentation with your brand products is valuable information that you can utilize to better tailor your product documentation to meet their demands.
You may use client feedback to your advantage in a variety of ways. In this article, I'll try to illustrate why gathering client feedback about your documentation, whether prompted or unprompted, is critical for managing customer happiness and loyalty, customer retention, product and service improvement, and many other aspects of your organization. Continue reading to learn about the advantages of product documentation feedback.
What does product documentation feedback entail?
Customer feedback is information supplied by customers regarding their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a product documemntation, user manual and any online documentation provided to the customer by the company. Their feedback can help you improve the client experience and tailor your activities to their demands. This information may be gathered through various types of surveys (prompted feedback), but you can also locate and collect unprompted feedback from your clients by employing Internet monitoring technologies, such as Vocally – a feature within Docsie that allows you to observe how your customers react with your online published documentation. Both sources are necessary for obtaining a complete picture of how your clients view your brand.
Top-performing organizations recognize the importance of consumer input in their operations. They pay attention to their clients' voices on a regular basis. They not only look for thoughts that clients post on social media and reviews that they offer on feedback-gathering websites (such as TripAdvisor), but they also ask for input directly through various types of questionnaires. If you want to keep ahead of the competition, you must always pay attention to consumer feedback, whether favorable or bad, prompted or unprompted.
Why is it important?
Many SaaS and engineering products have a variety of user guides, user manuals and other version of product documentation which they provide to their customers. This documentation can be translated in to various languages, and have many versions. So why is it important to know what your customers are thinking when they are looking at your companies product documentation? Simple. Product documentation are designed to explain how your product works, and if this explanation is not comprehensible to your clients it could lead to churn, and clients who are annoyed with reading your documentation. Feelback helps to narrow the gap between their misunderstanding and optimizing the documentation so that they can comprehend the material in a more comprehensive manner. This essentially makes your customers happier because now they understand how to use the product documentation as it was indented and it instills a trust in using your brand, which shapes your companies reputation in a positive way.
Secondly, knowing feedback can deliver the product manager, product owner, technical writer and even tech team with information that they can use to help improve the product documentation outlay, as well as content to increase and optimize for higher comprehension. This is always the goal when publishing product documentation.
The following are the top seven reasons why client feedback is critical in the business world.
1. Customer input aids in the development of better products documentation.
You presumably have an idea of client demands when you first bring a new product, brand, or service to the market. Market research conducted before to introduction may help you determine whether or not potential clients would be willing to purchase it, as well as provide you with suggestions on how to enhance it. After launching your products you now need to make suitable user guides, online product documentation by sharing your knowledge portal with your clients online. You hire a technical writer to write information about your product. A translator to translate it and get your tech team to display it online. However, you will only hear about all of the benefits, faults, and their actual experience after your consumers have used your products in correlation with your product documentation and provided you and your team with the necessary feedback.
This customer feedback provides insight into what aspects of your product documentations are performing effectively and what changes might be made to improve the experience. Your professional knowledge may be the finest in the industry in which your firm works, but consumer insights will always be more useful to finely polished product documentation that your customers will understand. Because you are really close to your products its good to get their feedback assists you in ensuring that the final product documentation meets their expectations, solves their issues, clears up any misunderstandings the products has and meets their requirements.
2. Client feedback aids in the evaluation of customer satisfaction level.
Customer loyalty and happiness are important factors in determining a company's financial performance. It's connected to a slew of advantages, including improved market share, cheaper expenses, and more income. A number of studies have found a strong link between customer satisfaction and corporate performance. As a result, there's no doubt that you want to ensure that your customers are satisfied with your product documentation and understand how to use your products effectively. Getting their feedback is, of course, the greatest method to see if you've met their expectations. You can simply assess the degree of satisfaction and, as a result, anticipate your company's financial situation in the future by using rating-based inquiries.
NPS is one of the most accurate techniques for measuring, managing, and improving customer satisfaction that has been used by many organizations. The statistic is based on a single question that asks if a client is likely to suggest a brand to a friend. The loyalty questions provide response possibilities ranging from 0 to 5, with 0 signifying highly negative and 5 reflecting extremely positive. Because this technique is both easy and ubiquitous, it may be used in customer satisfaction management by any company. Vocally uses this rating as well, and additionally allows our clients to recorded videos of how their customers use their documentation. This information is highly essential and also gives companies the cutting edge in analyzing their customers feedback and delivering on future optimizations of the product documentation.
3. Collecting client feedback demonstrates that you care about what they have to say.
By soliciting comments from your customers, you demonstrate that you value their input. You include them in the development of your company, products and product documentation/user guides so that they feel more connected to it. You may strengthen your relationship with them by listening to their voice. This is the most effective approach to recruit important brand ambassadors who will help you spread good word of mouth. And I'm sure you're aware that relying on their recommendations is probably the most successful and cost-efficient approach to gain new consumers and increase your trustworthiness in the eyes of present and future customers.
People enjoy it when you inquire about their satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with the way your company formulated your product documentation. It demonstrates that you appreciate their viewpoint and are here to help them, not the other way around. They believe that your main purpose as product documentation is to solve their misunderstandings, and helps educate them on how to use your products effectively which is a proper approach to customer retention.
4. Customer input aids in the creation of the greatest possible customer experience.
Today marketing is strongly influenced by people's interactions with products, services, and brands. People do not purchase brand name items just because they are excellent. They seek for quality customer service, user experience and over all good understanding of the products specifications and use case which matches their needs. They purchase the confidence to push their boundaries farther. Clients will remain loyal to your brand if you focus on offering the finest customer experience at every touchpoint. And, of course, the most effective approach to provide customers with a wonderful experience is to ask them what they appreciate about your products documentation which demonstrates the uses of your products and what they think may be improved. This is even more so for SaaS products which have many facets and technical aspects. The more educated your customers are the more they will understand the uses or your products and the more they will want to stick around and maintain loyalty.
5. Customer feedback aids in the retention of customers.
Customers that are happy with your service will continue to do business with you. Unsatisfied customers who don’t understand your product documentation, and consistently get confused with how to use your product will ultimately seek out a better option to your company. Customer feedback may help you figure out where your customers are getting confused with your product documentation and what made them happy with the knowledge portal of your products and identify areas where you can improve. You can always maintain your finger on the pulse if you ask for comments on a frequent basis. When a disgruntled consumer expresses their dissatisfaction, you can respond quickly and find a solution to their problem. This is an ideal time to reclaim a customer and perhaps improve their degree of loyalty. In many situations, a dissatisfied client who had an issue with your products, services and or user guides which explain them but was promptly resolved displays greater loyalty to your brand than a consumer who has never been dissatisfied with your products or services.
6. Customer feedback is a trustworthy source of data for other consumers.
In the world of marketing, gathering analytics and feedback it is highly essential to collect useful data and information to opt for optimizations and continue increase retention and bringdown churning rates. Consumers no longer believe advertising or expert advise in the age of social media. These days, the opinions of other consumers who have utilized a product or service are a more credible source of information. When you are looking for a place to stay in a city you are visiting or a beautiful new restaurant to dine with friends, you check reviews first. When you want to buy new shoes, you ask for advice on Facebook or read a review on a reputable site. Reviews apply to any business, especially SaaS products. Many businesses now include a review system as part of their services and products. This ensures that not only their brands can be shaped by the reviewers but also that they can work hard to gain trust of new customers and attempt to claim them for the long hall. Customer feedback is just as essential to your business as it is to other customers, so make sure you and your clients can easily access comments and evaluations.
7. Customer feedback provides you with information that assists you in making company decisions.
In a highly competitive market, business choices based on wild guesses have no place. Successful business owners collect and manage a certain type of information that aids in the development of future initiatives. Only in this way will they be able to tailor their products and services to precisely meet the demands of their customers.
Customer feedback is one of the most dependable sources of concrete data that can be utilised to make business choices. Customer insights can assist you gain a better understanding of your clientele and their demands. Take their advice into account, and you'll be able to figure out where you should put your money to obtain the most return on investment. You could find that, in your situation, more product development isn't essential, and that instead, you should focus on advertising your brand to gain more visibility. Customer feedback is a wonderful source of such information, but you must learn how to listen to it and turn it into meaningful business insights.
Vocally (a Docsie powered feature) allows you to put your clients and customers at the core of your business and regard their input as the most significant source of information in your organization so that you can keep on top of things. Your customers are the ones that use your products and services; therefore they are the best people to tell you how you can make them even happier. Never disregard the sound of their voice. If you fail to satisfy their expectations, your customers will go for another firm that can do it better. Customer feedback should be used at all levels of your organization and in all divisions. Insights will aid in the development of your goods, as well as the improvement of customer service and the management of client happiness. Customer feedback ensures that your customers will stick with you, remain loyal to your brand, and, as a result, promote great word-of-mouth about you. Having committed brand ambassadors is priceless when it comes to growing your business!
Keep in mind that consumer comments may be found anywhere. Learn how to gather it with the help of Vocally. Use the feedback you acquire from your customers as a door opener, so that you can discuss your product documentation, your products and services and gather more information now how you can benefit your customers and make them loyal forever to your product and services. Your customers will enjoy the fact that you value their input. It's crucial for building deep bonds with your audience. Customer feedback is invaluable to your company, so never stop listening!
Lets transcend the fear of hearing feedback from our clients and customers because with their feedback we can improve our product documentation, products, and services as well as customer service. Lets take a dive into how Vocally – a Docsie powered feature- can help us understand how our customers are using our documentation and what they like or disliked about it.
Getting started with Docsie feedback:
Here is a video on in-depth instructions on how to setup and use vocally with your Docsie knowledge portals:
Once you have publish your Docsie portal, if you click on to Docsie’s cloud-based knowledge portal you may notice this at the bottom:
When our customers viewing our documentation click this button and send us feed back, their feedback is automatically collected and viewable on our web analytics within Docsie. but that is not all! we can also see a short video of how our customers interacted with our documentation!
Let me show you how!
After our client or customer sent that nice little feedback:
We can see it on Docsie. First thing we need to do is jump onto Docsie’s platform and on the left we can see “workspace, notification feed” and below those tabs we can see “Web Analytics” with a globe.
If we press it and open the Web analytics’ button it will show us Docises feedback platform:
This platform shows us everything we need to know about the feedback we have collected, our client who sent it, the date they sent it. And what portal they are referring to.
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We can play back the video when we please with this play and pause button.
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This allows us to change the speed of the video being played. This is especially handy for large documentation portals which are previewed by our customers so that we can quicker pinpoint where they had issues.
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This tells us what portal they have submitted this feedback from.
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This is their comment
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This shows how much they liked or disliked the documentation
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If you have compiled allow to feed back Docsie allows you show only certain portions you require to analyses based on dates.
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The configuration button helps us make changes to CSS and other aspects of Vocally’s feedback tool
Lets take a look now at what features Vocally has to offer by clicking on the ‘Configuration” button:
This is our configuration dashboard. There are a few different changes that can be made here.
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You can connect your feedback to email, Slack, Mattermost, Zandesk, and Zapier.
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You can auto record your videos, or turn off this capability
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This is the strip of code so that you can later on use number 4 to stylize your feedback so that it matches your company’s brands look and feel. Adding a strip of code is only required when you are publishing Docsie via a strip of code for your website. However, if you are publishing your Docsie documentation via our Cloud-based Portals, you will automatically have Vocally injected seamlessly within all your published knowledge portals.
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This is for stylizing the Vocally.
Now that we have taken a deep dive on the importance of why feedback is nessisary for improvements and optimizations, building trust with your customers and how Docsie provides a solution to all these matters. Please feel free to try Vocally out for yourself. Sign up to Docsie, write and publish your first documentation, and then see how you like it!
For more information about Vocally -a Docsie powered feedback feature- please check out: https://help.docsie.io/?doc=/gather-feedback/