What’s The Quality Score of Your Technical Documentation?
If you care about the financial health of your company, why do you also need to care about the quality score of your company’s technical documentation?
You have quality initiatives in every area of your business, but do you have a quality initiative for your technical documentation?
Low quality technical documentation is very expensive. The average score for the technical documentation provided by U.S. companies is between 10 and 30 – out of 100. This is bad for business on a number of fronts.
Poor technical documentation can put your business at risk. Technical documentation is a business-critical and valuable corporate asset that needs to be managed and maintained. Technical documentation with a higher score reduces risks, reduces costs, increases revenue, as well as greater customer satisfaction and experience. A lower score means more confusion, greater costs, lower customer satisfaction and liability risks.
Most companies struggle to communicate effectively. With geographically-dispersed workforces, English is frequently a second language. Confusion with complex instructions can result in longer mean-time-to-resolution.
Ensuring your technical content is in Simplified Technical English (STE) will ensure you are using the international standard for writing technical documentation for science, technology and human relations. It can also help you reduce an 80,000-word document to 5,000 words saving translation time, and money while improving consistency and clarity of communications.
Low quality scores negatively impact the bottom line of your company in several ways:
- Low customer satisfaction
- Confused service technicians and customer service reps
- High translation and localization costs
- Critical safety and legal issues which can lead to costly settlements
Your technical documentation can and will be audited by potential buyers, and current customers will let your prospective client know how easy you are to do business with. The quality of your technical documentation has a lot to do with your customers’ perception of the quality of your product and your service.
Click here to get a free quality score and then give us a call to help you improve the quality of your technical documents.