Most of the organizations start with developing a product. When they try to release their product in the market, they realize that customers are looking for documentation supporting their product. What happens next is that developers who built the product are asked to write about it. However, since the developers are technical people and not professional communicators or writers, the document that we get from them is also technical and probably full of developer terms. A technical document with jargons or internal terms, may or may not help the customers. That’s where the technical writers are introduced. There are organizations, however, who realize this requirement much sooner than the release stage and engage with the writer as soon as the development kicks off.
Let us look at some of the benefits of hiring a technical writer:
A technical writer has the ability to understand technical aspects and convert the technical information into simple to understand concepts, procedures, and reference content. All this with customer journey and usability of the doc as the base. A technical writer uses the product to write it to ensure they understand what they are writing to be able to simplify it.
Providing a detailed document on the product and its features, along with how to use them will get the customers started rather than having them call the support or asking for free training to learn the product. Remember technical writers do not just produce written content but tutorials, knowledge base articles, video content, etc. as well. All this helps onboard customers faster and reduce the support cases, reducing the support and training costs.
Engaging a technical writer from the beginning will reduce your documentation cost as you will have a dedicated professional working with your developers from the beginning to define the content strategy, plan the content, and get the content out the door along with your product. You would also have saved the developer bandwidth by not asking them to write the documents.
Yes, sounds strange but this is true. This is the baseline for selling a product. Even a 2$ razor comes with a basic documentation or microcopy. This is a plain fact that each product to be sold has to accompany documentation. In addition, a technical writer can explain the concept of a product, benefits of using the product, and problems the product will solve in a very simple language, create videos to convey the same information, and provide you with better sales oriented power points to help with sales.
A technical writer always writes based on how the customer will experience the product or use the document. Due to this customer focused thought process, a technical writer tries to simplify complex topics and continuously works towards improving the content quality as well as usability of the documents.
To summarize, technical writers help build a strong foundation of the product team by asking questions that your customer might ask later. So, it is a wise investment to invest in a technical writer for the detailed eye and a customer advocate built into your team.