Product instructions are crucial for customer satisfaction and retention. High-quality instructions and tutorials significantly enhance the customer experience, which in turn can positively affect brand reputation, underscoring the need for high-quality, detailed step-by-step guides.
Some companies have little control over the quality of their product instructions. When setup manuals come directly from the factory, maintaining the quality of product instructions can be challenging. In our discussions with clients, several concerns have emerged: low quality illustrations, bad translations, no updates and lack of consistency in approach…
Private label companies sell products manufactured by third parties but add their own brand name to them. This approach can define the entire business or apply only to certain complementary products – for example, Dyson-branded batteries are likely sourced from a reputable battery manufacturer rather than made directly by Dyson.
Similarly, distributors suffer from low-quality third party instructions. Distributors act like curators, finding products that will best fit their clients needs, they have to manage instructions from several brands at the same time, losing control over their own brand promise.
In this blogpost we will discuss the best practices to manage the challenges of third-party product instructions, and learn about what is the best use of StepAlong in this situation.
The Problem with Third-Party Instructions
One of the primary problems with third-party instructions is the inconsistency of manuals and product instructions. These differences can be noticeable from one manufacturer to another, reflecting variations in quality, as well as differing approaches or philosophies on how to set up and use a product. Nonetheless, common issues that are frequently observed are lack of clarity, information, or details.
Secondly, bad instructions have an impact on customer experience, this is why third-party instructions can threaten your brand image. Time and money is invested in sourcing, marketing and selling a great product, but often the instructions are forgotten. When instructions are pulled out of the box, it becomes very noticeable that the products come from a third party, this lack of consistency and failure to meet the customers expectations can damage your brand reputation.
Last but not least, your company will lack capacity to react if you encounter any type of issue with your instructions. It’s not just that the manufacturer will have many clients to manage at once, but also the logistics of changing the instructions are complicated: getting feedback, reviewing, editing, printing, replacing in the boxes, etc.
Best Practises when improving third party product instructions
Prioritise
Start with prioritising which products should have their instructions improved. If you have a catalog of 10.000 different products, it is unlikely that you need to improve all of them. Ways of prioritising could be:
- High margin products where any small improvement on customer satisfaction will have the most impact.
- Complex products that generate more customer service tickets.
- Best sellers: even if the instructions may be okay, the brand impact of improving them and the marketing potential of the products means that the gain may far outweigh the effort.
Once you’ve made your decision on one or several products, decided whether it is best to create the instructions from scratch, or to convert and improve the current ones. If the instructions are absolutely unintelligible, grab a camera and consider creating new ones. If you think they might be okay but lack text or quality presentation, consider converting them to a better format.
Languages
In our interconnected world, the languages that retailers traditionally sold in have expanded, especially considering multichannel marketplaces and the diversification of retailers. Make sure that you can publish your instructions in as many languages as possible. Think about languages that customers speak, not the markets that you are officially in, check in with your Customer Service Dept. to see from which countries support tickets are coming from.
Distribution & Publishing
Finally you need to think about the best ways to publish and distribute your product instructions and tutorials, as many ways as possible is ideal, but that can depend on your resources and logistical concerns:
- Add instructions to your product page on your website to give consumers the confidence that they will be able to setup and use the product. In this way they can always come back to the product page to find the instructions.
- If you have access to the product box, insert a paper with the QR Code that resolves to the instructions of that product.
- If you can’t open the box because of time or resource issues, a sticker with the QR code could be the solution. In this case you may want the QR code to resolve to your Instruction Center so that you don’t have to manage QR codes for every product.
- Finally, you can always send the link to the product instructions together with your confirmation email and invoice.
How StepAlong can help
Now that we’ve established all of the best practices to improve Third-Party instructions, let’s see how StepAlong can help.
The StepAlong instructional platform is made to help companies improve the customer experience, reduce reliance on PDFs and better serve their international user bases with the following key features:
- AI-Powered translations: Save 90% of the work due to context aware AI translations and invite collaborators such as distributors to revise.
- Publish anywhere & everywhere: You can publish your instructions in the StepAlong format on your own website and online store and easily allow your distributors to add StepAlongs on their websites in their required language (as easy as embedding a YouTube video).
- Integrated QR Codes: Automatically generate high quality (for printing) QR codes under your own domain.
- Turnkey Instruction Center: A StepAlong hosted website with your own domain with SEO friendly URLs for each language, to have all your instructions in one place.
- Interactive, mobile-Friendly Instructions: End users can follow step-by-step instructions directly on their phones.
- PDF if you need it! You can generate functional & great looking PDFs from the StepAlong platform if there is still a need for them (see image).
- Streamline your workflow: With StepAlong, you can manage instruction creation, translation and publishing all from one place.
Ready to see the difference StepAlong can make? Book a demo today and discover how StepAlong can transform your instructional content and boost your market competitiveness.
