Oh no! A customer has a problem with your SaaS product and what’s the first thing they do?
They fire off an email to your support team, telling you the uploading feature won’t work or they can’t access their billing.
Your support team jumps to their assistance, and another ticket is solved. That’s if you don’t have help documentation to ease their frustrations.
Help documentation can significantly improve the customer experience, help customers along their journey, reduce churn and improve product adoption.
Directing customers towards your help documentation is the best way to reduce support tickets and increase overall satisfaction with your SaaS product.
What is help documentation?
Definition: help documentation is any content that provides support to customers during their journey with your product.
Help documentation usually explains how to use your SaaS product in simple terms and answers many common customer questions.
It can take many forms, including user guides, FAQs, knowledge bases, video tutorials.
Help documentation enables self-service by allowing customers to fix their own simple issues without having to contact support. It’s usually hosted in a separate section of the company website and may be called a help center.
Components: help documentation is usually split up into articles and categories for easy browsing.
It’s composed of searchable topics, step-by-step instructions, visuals like screenshots or videos, troubleshooting tips, reference documentation and so on.
Many authors collaborate on your help documentation, making it a team effort for your company.
Scope: many help documentations start with frequently asked questions to troubleshoot the common inquiries, but the scope goes beyond so much more than that.
The breadth of help documentation can encompass basic instructions to advanced troubleshooting, and product feature explanations.
Users can deep dive into in-depth reference docs to take them to power users. Help documentation covers every aspect of using your SaaS product from true beginners to advanced technical users.
The power of effective help documentation
1. Empowering users: Clear and concise documentation allows users to find solutions independently, empowering them to troubleshoot and resolve issues quickly. They can simply search your help center or browse the categories when they have a question about your product. They may even discover new features they never knew about.
2. SEO boost: help documentation increases your online presence, making your product more visible in the search engine results. Search engines will index your help documentation and return articles whenever someone searches for a query relating to your product.
3. Reducing support load: a well-organized knowledge base reduces the number of support tickets and calls, allowing customer service teams to focus on more complex issues. Instead of typing out answers to the same questions relating to your SaaS, customer support teams can direct customers to the help documentation or link directly to helpful articles.
4. Improving customer satisfaction: quick access to information improves the user experience and fosters customer loyalty. Customers are happier when they can find easy, instant answers to their questions and appreciate your business thinking about their needs. Having problems solved quickly increases customer satisfaction.
5. 24/7 availability: help documentation provides users with round-the-clock access to solutions, regardless of time zones or business hours. Even if a customer has a question in the middle of the night, the help documentation is always available. There’s no need to wait around for customer support teams to clock on.
6. Increased product adoption: customers can use your help documentation during the onboarding process when they are learning about your product for the first time and they likely have lots of questions. Help documentation benefits your customer success team by holding your customers’ hand during onboarding. Customers can learn about new features and get the most out of your SaaS product.
Key elements of effective help documentation
Clarity: Your help documentation should have clarity, making it easy to understand for your users. Use simple, easy-to-understand language and avoid jargon, breaking down technical concepts into bite size chunks. Write like you would any kind of support email, as though you’re talking to a human. Check the reading age of your documentation to ensure it is readable.
Organization: Well-structured documentation should be searchable, categorized, and indexed to ensure users can find what they need efficiently. Content should be tagged with relevant search terms so it shows up in search. Utilize information architecture in your documentation to make the design intuitive for readers browsing your content.
Visuals and Multimedia: there are different types of learners and some prefer to learn in a more visual manner. Don’t forget the value of images, infographics, and video tutorials in enhancing understanding, especially for complex tasks. Screenshots can guide your users step-by-step through tutorials and videos can make a complex concept easier.
Up-to-date Information: it’s important to regularly update the documentation to reflect new features, bug fixes, and changes in the product or service. Someone needs to regularly check the help documentation for outdated articles. Think of screenshots that have changed or features that have moved. You may also need to add new pages and fit them into your existing architecture.
Best practices for creating help documentation
Understand your audience: not all users are the same. Tailor documentation to the technical skill level and needs of your users (novice vs. expert). Consider what a newbie will need to learn versus the level of insight required for a power user and categorize your help documentation accordingly.
Use user feedback: Collect insights from users about their struggles and incorporate solutions into the documentation. Give users a way to share their experiences with how helpful they found the documentation and use that feedback to make improvements. Establish an ongoing dialogue with your users.
Keep it simple and focused: help documentation isn’t your chance to write a great novel. Keep instructions brief, to the point, and organized to avoid overwhelming users. Solve one single problem at a time in each article and always bear in mind what users are looking to achieve. Summarize the solution at the beginning of each article.
Promote the documentation: help documentation is great but not if no one uses it. Link to documentation from support tickets and email out updates about new documentation that you think might be helpful to your users. Allow search engines to index the documentation so users searching in Google can find help.
Real-world examples of effective help documentation
Whatfix is a digital adoption platform with excellent help documentation. It’s clearly branded to reflect Whatfix and guides users towards different content depending on their need. Whatfix clearly differentiates between aspects of their product that users might need help with. Categories are broken down to be more specific to give users an idea of what might be contained within each section.
Intercom’s help documentation looks more artsy, linking users to frequently used categories that help them with different aspects of their product. The help documentation is simple and easy to navigate, pointing users towards the help documentation that will aid them most in their journey with Intercom.
The future of help documentation
AI and automation: documentation is needed to power AI chatbots. The more documentation you have, the more intelligent your chatbot becomes. A chatbot answers user questions using natural language, and asking a chatbot a question can be easier than searching a help center, leading to more productive discussions with the chatbot.
Interactive documentation: in the future there is the possibility of interactive, personalized help guides where users will be able to change the content depending on their particular journey. Content is not static and general, but customized to help that particular user, providing the right help at just the right time.
Integration with other tools: help documentation should integrate with other platforms like CRMs and ticketing systems for a seamless agent experience. Connecting these apps together will make it easier to view customers holistically and save time for agents using various support platforms.
Final remarks
Help documentation is indispensable for SaaS businesses developing a support strategy for their product. Documentation helps in so many ways, from product adoption to reducing support tickets, and enhances the overall customer experience. Customers expect help documentation to guide them on their journey with your product.
There’s no time like the present. SaaS businesses must invest in creating effective help documentation and continuously improve it based on user feedback, making your help center a living resource. Up-to-date help documentation is essential for a continuously developing product.
Help documentation is not just a resource for deflecting support tickets—it’s a powerful tool for improving user engagement, satisfaction, and business success. SaaS companies with help documentation can enjoy an edge over businesses that expect customers to contact them every time they have a question.
