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Here's your chance to participate in STC's project on the value technical
communicators add to their work. Ginny Redish, who is not a participant on
TECHWR-L, has asked me to post the following message. If you decide to answer
directly to TECHWR-L, I will forward your messages to Ginny.
Liz Babcock
President, STC
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> This message is from Ginny Redish.
> As part of the STC-funded project on
> Measuring the value added by professional
> technical communicators, Judy Ramey and I
> are writing a booklet on how to use
> reducing support calls and costs as a
> measure of value added.
> One important issue is how to categorize
> support calls so as to isolate problems in
> documentation or problems that could be
> ameliorated by better documentation.
> We are interested in the categories and
> definitions of those categories that different
> companies use.
> If your company has a group that fields
> requests for help from users (Tech Support,
> Product Support, Customer Service, Help
> Desk, whatever they are called) and those
> people track or log the calls, please help us
> by answering these questions:
> 1. Do they categorize the calls?
> 2. Is documentation a category?
> 3. If so, how is it defined, that is, what
> types of problems go into the category?
> 4. How does the Support person decide to
> put a problem in that category? (Does
> the user have to mention that he or she
> tried to use the document?)
> 5. What other categories do the Support
> people use that you consider related to
> documentation? For example, one
> company also uses the category
> tutorial, which they define as anytime
> the user requests help on how to perform
> a procedure. Please include both the
> name and definition of the category.
> 6. Do the Support people ask users if they
> tried to use the documentation?
> Thank you very much for sharing information
> with us. If we may mention your company's
> name, please let us know. Otherwise, we will
> use the information as anonymous examples.
> You may send responses directly to Ginny at
> redish -at- quark -dot- umd -dot- edu
> or through the listserver.
