We’ve just completed the Calculateur de retour sur investissement StepAlong to help companies understand the savings they can achieve by using StepAlong to create, publish, and maintain their product instructions.
Most companies stick with outdated processes, so their instructions are inevitably sub-par, (we go into this in more detail in our post Challenges of Instruction Creation and How StepAlong Helps), but inefficiency is only the surface issue. The deeper cost comes when those instructions fail customers — creating support calls, returns, and bad reviews that quietly erode your margins. StepAlong solves both: modernizing the process while protecting your bottom line.
So beyond production processes and issues, where do instructions hurt your business and how do we measure it?
Impact 1: Bad instructions create more support tickets
When I speak Customer Service Directors, they can always name, without hesitating, the products with the worst instructions. Customers buy with excitement, but when they hit a roadblock, a support ticket at best kills the vibe and at worst builds resentment toward your brand.
Example calculation:
- Average support ticket cost: €5–€10
- Tickets per year: 50,000
- If just 10% are caused by unclear instructions, that’s 5,000 tickets × €7.50 = €37,500 annual cost to support poor instructions.
Impact 2: Bad instructions drive more returns
A product return is a small-scale economic disaster for your company. You lose the sale, have to assume the cost of return, and may never resell the product.
Returns happen for many factors outside your control – wrong size, color mismatch, buyer’s remorse. But when a customer sends a product back because the instructions were unclear, that’s entirely within your control.
Example calculation:
- Product retail price: €200
- Return rate: 8%
- If 2% of returns are instruction-related, that’s 100 products per 5,000 sold.
- Lost revenue: 100 × €200 = €20,000 — plus shipping and handling.
Impact 3: Bad instructions damage reviews
Whether you sell online, through distributors, or in-store, your customers still read reviews before they buy. Bad instructions are a silent killer because they generate a constant drip of poor reviews, which companies fail to address as aggressively as other complaints.
Example calculation:
- Product with €1M annual sales, with an Amazon rating of 4.5, dropping to 4.0
- QuietLight estimates that on Amazon, a drop from 4.5 stars to 4.0 can cut sales by 20–30%
- That’s an average of €250,000 in lost revenue because of the drop in star rating
- It’s not just bad instructions that cause negative reviews, so let’s say 40% of the drop is attributable to the negative reviews caused by bad instructions, that is €100,000 lost to bad instructions.
The Combined Cost – 15,5 cents Lost to Bad Instructions for each Euro of Revenue
Putting it all together for our example of a product selling 50,000 units annually at an average price of €200:
- Support tickets: €37,500 lost to instruction-related queries
- Returns: €20,000 lost from instruction-related returns
- Reviews: €100,000 in lost sales from ratings drop
Total impact: €157,500 per year for ONE product line or for every euro you earn in revenue, you could be losing 15,5 cents to bad instructions.
Multiply that across multiple products or categories, and the hidden cost of bad instructions can start to be significant.
The Rising Damp of Bad Instructions
I see bad instructions like rising damp in a house: an unseen issue that quietly spreads, undermining everything. Companies know it’s there. They patch it here and there. But rarely do they fix it at the source, because the impact of those bad instructions isn’t felt in one place, and isn’t the responsibility of one person.
In hundreds of meetings since starting StepAlong, I’ve only met two companies who are happy with their instructions. They know the damp is there.
Good Instructions areThe Foundation of Success
Good instructions aren’t just about compliance. Good instructions are a foundation: supporting your customers, reducing costs, and protecting your margins. Bad instructions, left unchecked, will steadily undercut your success.
Today’s environment of selling online, high compliance and low margins means that it’s more important than ever to keep the foundation of your business strong and stop the erosion that bad instructions can create.
StepAlong exists to stop that erosion — and to turn instructions from a liability into a competitive advantage.
