Improve Documentation Usage with Customer Empathy
Presentation Abstract
Audience analysis is at the heart of what technical writers do. But what makes an audience analysis truly successful? Empathy. Customer empathy spans more than customer service; in fact, it’s most needed long before a user even calls for help. By employing empathetic techniques – for example, monitoring customer support cases to find pain points and improve documentation to address them – your users will learn to trust your documentation and seek it out before calling customer support.
This presentation will cover how to acquire user empathy and effectively create empathetic technical information. It will discuss several empathetic techniques you can use in your organization to start writing with a better understanding of your users’ pain. We’ll also discuss the case studies, collaboration, and user outreach Extreme Networks performed and the results of these activities.
What can attendees expect to learn?
Audience members will learn what is meant by customer empathy and the importance of customer empathy in content. They will also get:
• Proven techniques for developing information that takes into account customers’ needs and “pain points.”
• Tips for collaborating between different parts of the organization, like Marketing and Customer Service, to create a multi-faceted understanding of the audience.
• Case studies that show what is possible, and how it can be achieved.
Meet the Presenter
Christina Mayr is the Lead Technical Editor at Extreme Networks, managing content from creation to analytics. Christina has been working as a technical writer and editor for more than 10 years and is interested in knowledge management trhough customer support/documentation collaboration.. Christina also teaches the tools section of the Technical Communication certificate program at Duke University.
Larry Kunz is a Lead Technical Writer for Extreme Networks, creating customer documentation for network hardware and the software that runs it. He has more than 30 years’ experience in technical communication and marketing. Larry teaches a course in project management in the Technical Communication certificate program at Duke.