Robert Desprez Communications

Exceeding Client Expectations

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When peo­ple talk about tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions jobs or trends, employ­ers do not bring up cus­tomer ser­vice skills as a top skill.

While most of our jobs may be focused on writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tions or know­ing a col­lec­tion of soft­ware tools or tech­nol­o­gy skills, we still reg­u­lar­ly meet with col­leagues both with­in and out­side of depart­ments. Cus­tomer ser­vice skills come into play when we inter­act with col­leagues, respond to emails, take respon­si­bil­i­ty for mis­takes, pro­duce qual­i­ty con­tent on time, col­lab­o­rate and share knowl­edge, and man­age expectations.

Recent­ly, I read two books about cus­tomer ser­vice: The Star­bucks Expe­ri­ence: 5 Prin­ci­ples for Turn­ing Ordi­nary Into Extra­or­di­nary and Be Our Guest: Per­fect­ing the Art of Cus­tomer Ser­vice, a book that focus­es on Disney’s approach when it comes to exceed­ing expec­ta­tions rather than sim­ply sat­is­fy­ing them.

Here are a few things that I think about when work­ing for clients:

  • Be diplo­mat­ic: As a con­sul­tant, I real­ized the impor­tance of diplo­ma­cy more than five years ago. At one client site, I wit­nessed a con­sul­tant say the wrong thing to the wrong employee—the next day the con­sul­tant was fired.
  • Make an effort to meet col­leagues and clients in per­son: Even if I am not required to vis­it a client’s office reg­u­lar­ly, I still make the effort to phys­i­cal­ly be there, espe­cial­ly at the start of a project. I know it is more con­ve­nient to set up an online meet­ing. But vis­it­ing a client reg­u­lar­ly sends a mes­sage that the client and their work are impor­tant. In my expe­ri­ence, meet­ing the per­son helps build trust and often makes the sub­se­quent review of tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion that much eas­i­er. Think of that first meet­ing as an investment.
  • Be approach­able and lik­able: I know this is obvi­ous but it’s worth repeat­ing. First impres­sions mat­ter and being friend­ly and easy to approach when you first start work­ing at a com­pa­ny makes your work that much eas­i­er in the days and weeks that follow.
  • Man­age expec­ta­tions: If you tell a client or col­league that you will do some­thing by a cer­tain date, make sure you do it. Even bet­ter, if you say you will deliv­er con­tent to the client by Fri­day, pro­vide the con­tent a day or two ear­ly. I am fre­quent­ly sur­prised how many peo­ple make a promise and do not fol­low through.
  • Lis­ten well. When I meet sub­ject mat­ter experts, I talk less and lis­ten to their needs. For long meet­ings, you may want to con­sid­er using note-tak­ing tools. Check out this pod­cast on note-tak­ing tools and technologies.
  • Respond to crit­i­cism or mis­takes quick­ly. We all make mis­takes. If you’ve made a mis­take, own up to it, fix the issue quick­ly, and learn from it.
  • Sur­prise and delight: In The Star­bucks Expe­ri­ence, author Joseph Michel­li writes, “Nowa­days, peo­ple have a cer­tain antic­i­pa­tion for some­thing spe­cial with just about every pur­chas­ing expe­ri­ence, or hope they will get sur­prised, even in the most mun­dane expe­ri­ences.” With this in mind, how can tech­ni­cal writ­ers sur­prise and delight clients and super­vi­sors? One way is to go “above and beyond” what is asked of you. For exam­ple, if your client asks you to re-write an online top­ic, you could improve the top­ic but also add an illus­tra­tion that clar­i­fies a con­cept as well as improve an aspect of the website’s navigation.
  • Stream­line process­es. When you inter­act with col­leagues, make it easy as pos­si­ble to inter­act with you. In my opin­ion, reviews of tech­ni­cal con­tent are often cum­ber­some and are typ­i­cal­ly han­dled by send­ing draft PDF files to Sub­ject Mat­ter Experts, who edit the PDF and email it back. After a few months, writ­ers have col­lect­ed dozens of these PDFs from Sub­ject Mat­ter Experts in an email pro­gram. In con­trast, at one client site I worked at, they used Con­flu­ence to post PDFs so that Sub­ject Mat­ter Experts could eas­i­ly review and com­ment on the draft con­tent. Even bet­ter, Sub­ject Mat­ter Experts could see what oth­er review­ers had writ­ten on a giv­en top­ic, fos­ter­ing a dia­log on con­tentious issues. Fur­ther­more, writ­ers could respond to the draft com­ments by mak­ing com­ments back, such as “Made the edit in the source file.” Check out an ear­li­er blog post I wrote about using Con­flu­ence to man­age tech­ni­cal con­tent reviews.
  • End a project or con­tract in a pos­i­tive way: Every con­tract comes to an end. When a con­tract is ramp­ing down, I make an effort to sur­prise clients in a pos­i­tive way. Recent­ly, I vol­un­teered myself to write some depart­men­tal pro­ce­dures that I knew were lack­ing and need­ed. I feel that end­ing a con­tact in a pos­i­tive way may increase the chances of being called back for future projects.

 What do you think? When it comes to cus­tomer ser­vice skills, how do you exceed cus­tomer expectations?

The Gig Economy: An Increasingly Popular and Better Way to Work

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As some­one who has worked as a tech­ni­cal writ­ing con­sul­tant for almost 10 years, I’m very inter­est­ed in the emerg­ing gig economy.

Here’s one def­i­n­i­tion of this new way of work­ing: “A gig econ­o­my is a free mar­ket sys­tem in which tem­po­rary posi­tions are com­mon and orga­ni­za­tions con­tract with inde­pen­dent work­ers for short-term engage­ments. The cur­rent real­i­ty is that peo­ple tend to change jobs sev­er­al times through­out their work­ing lives; the gig econ­o­my can be seen as an evo­lu­tion of that trend.”

Cana­di­an econ­o­mist Lin­da Nazareth recent­ly wrote a book called Work Is Not a Place: Our Lives and Our Orga­ni­za­tions in the Post-Jobs Econ­o­my. She paints a pic­ture of the chang­ing labour force in which work­ing as a free agent is becom­ing more and more common.

  • A study comes from Intu­it (the com­pa­ny that devel­ops account­ing soft­ware, such as Tur­b­o­Tax) esti­mat­ed that 34 per­cent of the U.S. work­force is engaged in some form of inde­pen­dent work. It fore­casts that 43 per­cent of the U.S. labour force will be per­form­ing some sort of con­tract work by 2020.
  • Anoth­er study com­plet­ed by man­age­ment con­sult­ing firm McK­in­sey & Com­pa­ny found that up to 162 mil­lion peo­ple in Europe and the U.S. were engaged in some form of inde­pen­dent work.
  • In Cana­da, Rand­stad Cana­da esti­mates that 20 to 30 per­cent of Canada’s work­force con­sists of inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors, on-demand work­ers, and remote workers.

But with con­tract work on the rise, it doesn’t mean that indi­vid­u­als always want to work that way. Nazareth says there are four types of contractors:

  • Free agents: those who active­ly choose inde­pen­dent work and derive their pri­ma­ry income from it.
  • Casu­al earn­ers: those who use inde­pen­dent work for sup­ple­men­tal income and do so by choice.
  • Reluc­tants: those who make their pri­ma­ry liv­ing from inde­pen­dent work but would pre­fer tra­di­tion­al jobs.
  • Finan­cial­ly strapped: those who do sup­ple­men­tal and inde­pen­dent work out of necessity.

[pullquote]…this idea that some­one can have a sta­ble job that lasts for years is an old par­a­digm and is often just wish­ful think­ing. [/pullquote]

As some­one who prefers to work as a free agent, I’ve come across a lot of con­sul­tants who say they would be more than hap­py to become an employ­ee again. Many say they want the health ben­e­fits and the promise of a sta­ble work envi­ron­ment. But in the pri­vate sec­tor, this idea that some­one can have a sta­ble job that lasts for years is an old par­a­digm and is often just wish­ful think­ing. I’ve worked at mul­ti­ple high-tech com­pa­nies over the years that swift­ly jet­ti­son employ­ees when cor­po­rate earn­ings fal­ter. So much for stability.

When you sign up for being a con­sul­tant, you know and expect that your con­tract will end at some point. Every six to 18 months, my con­tract typ­i­cal­ly ramps down and I start look­ing for the next oppor­tu­ni­ty. Yes, it can be stress­ful and dis­con­cert­ing if you don’t have a new gig lined up. But, in gen­er­al, I’ve been con­sis­tent­ly work­ing for almost a decade.

If you can man­age to line up one con­tract after the next, con­trac­tors enjoy high­er wages, sig­nif­i­cant­ly low­er tax­es than employ­ees in Cana­da, a mul­ti­tude of tax write-offs not avail­able to employ­ees, and more vari­ety in their work. In addi­tion, accord­ing to some stud­ies, con­trac­tors may be hap­pi­er than employ­ees. Here’s an excerpt from Nazareth’s book: “Study after study finds that free­lancers are hap­pi­er than those in tra­di­tion­al jobs, with McK­in­sey report­ing that as many as 97 per­cent of con­trac­tors are much hap­pi­er than their per­ma­nent coun­ter­parts. These find­ings are backed up by [researchers] Katz and Krueger: they found that, as of 2015, 84 per­cent of inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors pre­ferred to work for themselves…”

Not such a bad way to work.

List of Online Webinars and 2019 Conferences for Technical Writers

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There’s no short­age of train­ing web sites, webi­na­rs, and con­fer­ences to keep your skills sharp.

Adobe’s blog:
https://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/

MadCap’s free webinars:
https://www.madcapsoftware.com/resources/recorded-webinars.aspx

Scrip­to­ri­um Pub­lish­ing offers time­ly and insight­ful thoughts on tech­ni­cal writ­ing trends:
https://www.scriptorium.com/blog/

The Soci­ety for Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion (STC) also offers webi­na­rs and cours­es for a fee:
https://www.stc.org/education/

Here’s a list of upcom­ing con­fer­ences this year in North America.

Lava­con, Octo­ber 27–30, 2019, Port­land, OR
http://lavacon.org

Mad­World Con­fer­ence, April 14–17, 2019, San Diego, CA
https://www.madcapsoftware.com/conference/madworld-2019/

STC annu­al con­fer­ence, May 5–8, 2019, Den­ver, CO
http://summit.stc.org/

Write the Docs, May 19–21, 2019, Port­land, OR
https://www.writethedocs.org/conf/portland/2019/

Writ­er­sUA West Con­tent Pro Con­fer­ence, March 28–29, 2019, Den­ver, CO
http://west.writersua.com/

How do you keep your skills up to date? Any oth­er North Amer­i­can con­fer­ences that I should add?

A Rare Example of an Excellent Installation Guide For Home Use

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The sup­port doc­u­men­ta­tion that accom­pa­nies most con­sumer prod­ucts is pret­ty poor.

A few years ago, our fam­i­ly bought a Mur­phy bed that took me two full days on a week­end to build. When the box was deliv­ered to our house, it weighed more than 50 kilo­grams and con­tained dozens of com­po­nents, includ­ing numer­ous bags of screws, bolts, and nuts. The bed includ­ed a 25-page instal­la­tion guide that most­ly relied on images. Here’s a scanned sam­ple of one of the pages (yes, I keep most user doc­u­men­ta­tion for per­son­al purchases):


 

Notice that the guide min­i­mizes the use of text, a stan­dard that Ikea, the world’s largest fur­ni­ture retail­er, whole­heart­ed­ly embraces. The order of steps is pre­sent­ed as a type of leg­end; the user needs to first look for label 34 and find it in the illus­tra­tion, then com­plete the steps shown in label 35, and so on. Oth­er than this map­ping exer­cise, I found that many of the pages in the guide were clut­tered. One of my most sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges in assem­bling the bed was that the screws shown at the bot­tom of the page were not labelled in any of the bags that were packed in the box. There many instances where I found myself scru­ti­niz­ing a bag of screws—and there were at least 20 bags of them—to deter­mine if this was the right tool for a spe­cif­ic step.

Doc­u­men­ta­tion like this is more com­mon than not. When cus­tomers buy a $199 dress­er from a store like Ikea I believe they know the instruc­tions will be mediocre and that there is a chance that parts will be miss­ing. It’s a com­mon exam­ple of doc­u­men­ta­tion that is bare­ly “good enough.”

Know­ing that most con­sumer doc­u­men­ta­tion is poor at best, I was delight­ed to pur­chase a smart ther­mo­stat and dis­cov­er the doc­u­men­ta­tion was actu­al­ly good. Here’s an exam­ple of one of the pages of the instal­la­tion guide:

I love the use of ample white space, the clear and suc­cinct instruc­tions, and the excel­lent illus­tra­tions. In my expe­ri­ence, good illus­tra­tions are a rar­i­ty in documentation.

It is obvi­ous to me that the com­pa­ny’s design team (the com­pa­ny in this case is Nest) put in a lot of effort to make the prod­uct intu­itive and sim­ple. I was able to install the ther­mo­stat in about 30 min­utes with­out a glitch.

My only sug­ges­tion to the com­pa­ny’s sup­port team would be to include a user guide in the box. Cur­rent­ly, if you need step-by-step instruc­tions on oper­at­ing the ther­mo­stat, you need to vis­it Nest’s website.

If the online reviews are any indi­ca­tion, a lot of peo­ple love the Nest ther­mo­stat. Admit­ted­ly, it’s a pre­mi­um prod­uct so it’s design and doc­u­men­ta­tion is notice­ably bet­ter than many products.

Have you expe­ri­enced con­sumer doc­u­men­ta­tion that has impressed you?

Preparing Your Content for Bots? I Am Not.

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Pre­dic­tions that tech­ni­cal writ­ers will be writ­ing for bots any time soon are overblown. From one upcom­ing tech­ni­cal writ­ing con­fer­ence, here is a sam­pling of some of the upcom­ing presentations:

  • “Con­nect­ing a Chat­bot to Your Tech­ni­cal Content.”
  • “Your Chat­bot Can Lit­er­al­ly Talk Back.”
  • “Prepar­ing for Change in a World of Non-Stop Change: Beyond Chat­bots and Voice.”

Ear­li­er this year, I watched two webi­na­rs on how tech­ni­cal writ­ers can write con­tent for bots. One of the pre­sen­ters acknowl­edged that he felt that writ­ing for bots is in its “infan­cy.” To me, the take­away is this trend isn’t going to take off any­time soon, at least in the tech­ni­cal writ­ing community.

Tech­nolo­gies like bots are tout­ed by indi­vid­u­als who orga­nize tech­ni­cal writ­ing con­fer­ences and con­sul­tants who are more than hap­py to ped­dle clients the “next big thing.” There’s also a lot of fear about arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and how the robots will usurp all of our jobs. From my per­spec­tive, in my home­town of Van­cou­ver, BC, I find that the adop­tion of new tech­nolo­gies with­in the tech­ni­cal writ­ing com­mu­ni­ty is often slow.

Here is an exam­ple I can share to illus­trate the point. For years, we heard about using the ben­e­fits of struc­tured author­ing using data mod­els for author­ing and pub­lish­ing like Dar­win Infor­ma­tion Typ­ing Archi­tec­ture (DITA). Ten years ago, I was writ­ing in XML using DITA. It seemed like it was going to be the next thing. I was a believ­er. But my unwa­ver­ing faith in all things DITA waned when I real­ized it was a mar­gin­al play­er in a city with a flour­ish­ing high-tech com­mu­ni­ty that employs more than 100,000 peo­ple. More often than not, tech­ni­cal writ­ing depart­ments are writ­ing unstruc­tured con­tent using tools like FrameMak­er, Mad­Cap Flare, wikis, and Microsoft Word.

I am sure that com­pa­nies like Adobe and Mad­Cap will soon intro­duce sup­port for bots. But even when sup­port is intro­duced, I am not expect­ing the change will rev­o­lu­tion­ize life for tech­ni­cal writ­ers in the short term.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not ignor­ing bots. But I don’t feel like I need to jump on the band­wag­on either. There is fre­quent­ly a chasm between what is being pro­mot­ed at con­fer­ences and in webi­na­rs and the real­i­ty of over­worked tech­ni­cal writ­ing depart­ments who may not have time to quick­ly adopt new technologies.

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About Me

Robert Desprez I have worked as a Vancouver technical writer for more than 20 years, working at Kodak, Boeing, Teck Resources, and FortisBC. In addition, I have worked as a writing instructor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Contact Me

Robert Desprez Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc.
North Van­cou­ver, British Columbia
Canada
Phone: 604–836-4290