Brainstorming ideas?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Steven Goldstein wonders: <<My company manufactures products that are 
sold internationally and installed through a dealer network. These 
dealers have technicians on staff that are responsible for installing 
and maintaining my company's products. Therefore, my customers are the 
dealers and technicians, not the end-users who own my company's 
products.>>

One thing you didn't mention is whether the techs are responsible for 
training their customers. If not, that's a large part of your problem 
right there: "teach a user to fish", and all that. Point out to your 
dealer network that such training is a value-added service (whether 
free, as a gesture to earn customer goodwill, or paid, for a nominal 
fee that covers the dealer's costs), and is provided by many other 
product vendors in other industries. The more expensive the product, 
the easier it is to justify a day of training as part of the cost.

Educating the users should quickly reduce the support burden, 
particularly if your company compiles a list of frequently asked 
questions from your customers and uses those questions to inform the 
design of the training package. Incidentally, your company can also 
sell this training package to the 1500 dealers you mentioned for more 
than enough to cover the development costs and thereby turn the problem 
into a profit center. Of course, in an ideal world, you'd use the 
customer problems to design a better product and minimize tech. support 
costs that way...

<<Quite simply, the need is to reduce calls coming into Tech Support, 
and to reduce the duration of the calls that do come into Tech 
Support.>>

To reduce the need, you can do two things: In the long term, you can 
redesign the products to be sufficiently usable that support calls 
decrease greatly in frequency. In the short term, you can reduce the 
duration of the calls by developing some form of knowledgebase that 
provides fast, effective access to the answers to the most common 
questions, and slower but no less effective access to the less-common 
answers.

<<I will be teaching my technical writing peers how to document an 
analytical troubleshooting approach that will get the technicians to 
the root cause of the problem more quickly, with less confusion. This 
will result in fewer calls to Tech Support. Also, Tech Support will use 
these new troubleshooting procedures to handle calls that do come in, 
which will help them reduce the duration of the call.>>

Good start. Depending on the nature of your product, you may also want 
to make these guides available to the users of the product via your 
documentatoin. At a minimum, give these people access to 
troubleshooting information that helps them solve the problems they can 
easily solve by themselves, but that also clearly indicates when they 
shouldn't try and should instead call a technician.

<<My customers (the technicians) don't have Internet access when 
they're on the road, so he wants me to do something like provide all of 
our product literature (mostly PDF format, and there's a lot of it) on 
CD-ROM, with an easily navigable user interface so that the technicians 
can find the documentation they're looking for easily.>>

A better solution is to set up a synchronization system such that when 
the techs return to the office, they can quickly and easily download 
the latest solution set to their PDA or laptop. This way, there are no 
CDs involved (no production and distribution costs), and the support 
material is as up to date as the technician wants it to be. This 
approach has become a standard for many companies with large numbers of 
sales staff (insurance, pharmaceuticals, etc.).

How to synchronize? That's beyond my expertise, but software is 
certainly available for "managed PCs" (check out the archives at 
www.pcmag.com) that lets the network manager automatically install 
software on all PCs on the network. You can probably license such 
software inexpensively from the developer (most major PC manufacturers) 
if you can't develop your own solution.

<<I could create an online help project, which would provide the 
navigation system that allows the technicians to easily find the 
product documentation they need (I currently author help using RoboHelp 
X5). But this documentation is constantly being updated, and new 
documentation is constantly being added to the collection.>>

A "help" project strikes me as a suboptimal approach. Most help files 
are designed for integration with software, and although they work just 
fine as standalone applications, they're arguably less efficient than a 
simpler Web-based design using straight HTML. The main advantage of an 
HTML approach is that you can create new topics and update old topics 
without having to recompile the whole help project, and can easily 
publish the support material on your Web site as a knowledgebase. When 
installed on a tech's laptop, the tech need only download a few new or 
changed pages rather than an entire help file. But if the tech is on 
the road, they can also download the latest update directly from your 
Web site rather than having to return to the office.

<<[automatic updates] If this is possible, then I might only have to 
send 1,500 CD-ROMs to the technicians once (to install the first 
release of the documentation, plus to install the auto-update 
software).>>

That's a big time and cost saving on your end, and thus, well worth 
recommending.

--Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)


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