AI generated photo of a bad instruction giving it hell to client services
I’ve spent many years building digital products across online communities, hospitality and B2B tech and there is something that never changes: Client Services (CS) owns the documentation. Whether they report to the CEO or Marketing, CS is the primary stakeholder because they are the ones who suffer when the documentation fails. Better manuals mean higher CSAT, fewer support tickets, and faster resolution times.
However after three years of working with manufacturing and consumer goods brands at StepAlong, I’ve noticed that almost any department can own the manual – Marketing, Quality, Operations, or Product – except the one department that actually hears from the customers.
Whenever I demo to a Client Services team, I ask them: “Which three products would you rewrite the manual for tomorrow if you could?”
And they never hesitate. They know exactly which products are causing ticket volume; they have clarity on which instructions are causing the most friction, yet they don’t have the internal leverage to fix them.
Making the Thing Vs. Helping the Customer Use the Thing
In most consumer companies, manual ownership is dictated by legacy production workflows rather than the user experience, and that creates a narrow view of what the instruction manuals should be.
The Quality Department view the manual as a legal shield. Their goal is to ensure every warning label and regulatory requirement is met. This is clearly vital at the start, but it results in a document that satisfies a lawyer, but doesn’t necessarily help a customer.
Marketing owns the budget and the design team. They care about the brand aesthetics and (maybe) the “unboxing experience”. However, brand values often stop at the logo and fonts, and if the manual can be functionally useless. Marketing doesn’t feel the pain, Client Services does.
The Product or Buying teams are focused on product feedback and manufacturing defects. They will often fix a hardware flaw in the next production run, but they often let a confusing instruction set go uncorrected for years. On review based sites like Amazon it can take between 10 -20 positive reviews to offset one negative, so even a small stream of one or two-star reviews complaining about setup can be a significant downward drag on the product’s overall rating.
Where Should Instruction Manual Ownership Live?
Client Services must be the guardian of the customer experience. The better the documentation, the better Client Services can support end users and their departmental objectives – high customer satisfaction, low support cases and quick case turnaround.
Companies spend lots of money and time investing in product, distribution, marketing and sales and then at the last moment snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by making the customer decipher sub-par manuals. The manual shouldn’t be a post-script created solely by a quality engineer or a PDF beautified by a marketing intern, it should be owned by the people in the business who are closest to the users.
Quality should provide the compliance guardrails, and Marketing should provide the style guide, but Client Services should own the content and the feedback. They are the only department motivated to ensure the user can actually use the product without picking up the phone.
If you want to stop the small but constant stream of low ratings and high support costs, give the people who talk to your customers the power to fix the instructions.
