by Jen O Neill
In this month’s Watercooler Webinar held by the Europe SIG, we discussed the various ways we can collect feedback from the global users of the products we document. Many of us write for audiences located across countries and languages. How do we find out if our documentation meets their needs when due to geography, language or cost factors, it often isn’t practical for us to meet them directly?
In our chat, we discussed the different ways to collect information from users. It was interesting to hear real examples of how people have done it.
Contacting technical support
An obvious source of customer information is speaking with technical support and product management. They can be a mine of information about customers and the problems they’re reporting. Some companies, such as HP, keep knowledge databases of calls received by technical support and the solutions provided. Such databases can then be searched for problems encountered by users. Even smaller companies will have a log of issues brought up by customers.
One tool that we all seemed to have used at one stage in our quest for user feedback was forms. A well designed form is crucial and care is needed to prepare the questions so that you collect useful and correct information. A book recommendation was “Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability” by Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney.
Two useful points brought up were that it’s a good idea to offer a prize or small gift to those who take part in surveys as a way of saying thanks. Often this can simply be to send the results of the survey to respondents. Another point was if you are collecting feedback via email, you should use an email alias address instead that of a person.
One source of documentation feedback that writers may not consider is that from translators. We had a translator in the discussion who described that translators often pick up inconsistencies and errors in texts and terminology and will seek to ask writers for clarification.
Interestingly, none of us worked for companies that used social media such as Facebook or Twitter to collect information from customers.
Customer surveys
An example of a customer survey that we discussed was one my company did a few years ago. The European technical writers had to do projects as part of their Six Sigma Green Belt certification to improve documentation quality. We used a multilingual Web survey to collect feedback from customers about our documentation.
We drew up a 10-question online questionnaire covering satisfaction, usefulness of the manuals and problems encountered across three product groups. Questions had five-point scales for answering with one open-ended question. We did the questionnaire in seven languages including English as most of our customers don’t work in English. As we each managed the localisation of our own projects, we knew the technical support people in the sales offices across Europe. They were the in-country reviewers for translations. So we asked them to help us translate the questionnaire and any associated texts.
The seven language versions of the survey were located on the European HQ web site. We got the agreement from the country sales managers in seven countries to have information on their national web sites about the survey that linked to the HQ site with the multilingual questionnaires. Two of the country managers did a mailing to all their customers to encourage them to take part in the survey. The survey ran for a month and we got nearly 200 participants, most from the countries that did the mailings to customers (next time we will push hard to get all country offices to do mailings to customers about the survey). Respondents didn’t receive a prize or gift for taking part nor get a copy of the results. However, the sales offices did get to see the results.
We found that doing a multilingual survey took more effort than if it had just been one language; there were more steps to organise due to the need to get translations of the questionnaire, web page text and answers, as well as seeking the OK from the sales office managers. But we didn’t have any problems getting the support of our colleagues located in the sales offices located around Europe. They were also interested. However, analysing and writing up the data took time as it had to be done on top of the daily workload. We hadn’t allocated enough scheduled time to this task so it took longer than originally planned.
Meeting customers at trade/training meetings
Another participant, Karen Mardahl, described how she collected feedback from customers by attending a global meeting run by her company for their partners and distributors. This was the first time that such a meeting had been held in several years and attendees came from many countries. It was also the first time Karen got to meet readers of the documentation face to face. The company did a questionnaire to collect information from the attendees on many topics, and Karen got them to include one question dealing with documentation.
Based on the information collected during the meeting, the company now does a weekly newsletter to connect with their partners. A single topic is discussed in each newsletter, and feedback and questions on any product and service are very welcome. The newsletter is encouraging them to get in touch with the company with their issues.
The next Watercooler Webinar
It’s always interesting to meet with fellow professionals and compare notes, to catch up with what’s been happening at work and see how it applies to what we’re doing. This month’s Watercooler Webinar let us discuss the practicalities of collecting user feedback. The webinar is free to SIG members and you can phone in from almost anywhere in the world using the list of phone numbers provided. Come and join us in January for our next webinar! Watch our discussion list for details.
Tags: customers, feedback, forms, multilingual, questionnaire, surveys