In an earlier post we spoke about how Instruction were the last mile of your customer experience. Your customers have voted with their money, and they have your product in front of them – now your instructions need to bring it all back home. But how do you know if your instructions are doing a good or bad job? In this post we will look at where you can look to get that information.
Customer Service Tickets
Most companies will have a system to track help requests, that come in from customers whether that’s email, messages or phone and as such will be the most important source when looking for feedback on your product instruction manual. If your clients are calling support with their new product, it’s generally because there is something missing, that means they can’t complete it or the instructions are not clear.
It’s important that you are able to identify the differences in the tickets that talk about the product instruction manual, so you can identify these specific conversations to look at them. Many tools allow you to tag tickets as they come. Additionally, many Customer support tools will offer a more sophisticated analysis of tickets and let you break down semantically what is being said.
Remember that every time a client contacts your customer support it costs you money – by focusing on and improving product setup instructions, you will not only be increasing customer satisfaction, but you will also be reducing internal costs by lowering the volume of customers who need to call support. Also worth bearing in mind is that few companies receive calls to their support desk to say how great the setup instructions were, or that nothing was missing. Treat a support call for a new product as a company/product/process failure.
Reviews
Most product companies who are selling to the end consumer will have some reviews of their products, whether that’s on their own website or on others such as Amazon.
If you have a website to sell directly to your customers, we recommend that you install some review functionality, which can be done with various suppliers such as Reviews.io, Feefo.com or Trustpilot.
If you have multiple outlets, consider a system such as Birdeye that gathers your reviews across multiple platforms.
Those selling on Amazon will have reviews on the product page and if your setup instructions are mentioned a lot (for the good or the bad) they will appear here in the ‘reviews that mention’ section:
Customer Satisfaction Surveys
It’s good to check-in with the customers about various things, whether that is if they are enjoying the product, if the buying experience is good and if the product setup instructions were good. Make sure that you include a question on the product setup or build in your customer satisfaction surveys and make sure that you analyze well the responses.
Is your product Setup someone else’s content?
Many people are involved in creating how-to and instructional content on the internet and much of that is related to products.
Whether you view them as filling the gap of knowledge that companies leave around their products or taking advantage of the hard work of others to make some easy ad-dollars, it is a reality in which we live. Make sure that you are tracking your company and product name + setup/instructions/manual in Google to at least be aware of what else is happening. On Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook the equivalent would be tracking a hashtag.
Having other people create content around your product setup isn’t necessarily bad news, it could be a measure of success on one level, but it also means that there is enough search volume around your product setup to justify somebody creating specific content.
Let us know if you have any questions or ideas to add to the article.
