Anyone who works with technology and thus technical documentation knows how difficult it is to understand, create and keep up to date. Companies rely on documentation to understand how complex technology works and how it can be used and implemented in an application or finished product. More often than not, technical documentation takes an enormous amount of time to create and maintain; there are usually errors; and drafts sit in different places and forms.
In fact, engineers typically dedicate at least 50 percent of their day to tedious documentation tasks, which is critical time away from developing new products and innovations that can drive business growth and expansion. This problem only gets worse as time goes on and the engineers who originally developed the code or wrote the documentation no longer work for the company.
We recently saw this scenario play out in a global semiconductor company when a key customer called about a long-tailed legacy product that was built more than 20 years ago. Unfortunately, no one from the original development team still worked at the company, and there was no documentation explaining how the product had been built or evolved over the years. In the end, the company had to pull several of their best engineers to review the original code base and answer the customer’s questions. The process proved to be both expensive and time-consuming – and it was a recurring challenge that the company had struggled with for decades.
Documentation is also essential for companies that supply components to car manufacturers. As software becomes increasingly important in software-defined vehicles (SDVs), providing documentation that is easy to consume both internally and by customers is critical to providing a smooth onboarding experience. SDVs are complex due to the amount of software and hardware required to integrate. In many cases, engineers are pulled from active development to support customers in integrating their software into the customer’s environment.
Co-founder and CEO of Driver.
Interactive platform built on AI simplifies documentation and accelerates time to market
Semiconductor companies produce thousands of pages of manuals, guides and source code for customers – all created manually. Quality is often inconsistent across different products or versions, and rapid product updates make it difficult to keep up with constant changes. This archaic process profoundly affects efficiency, productivity and product time-to-market.
For companies whose customers rely on technical documentation to successfully develop and sell their own products, these issues greatly impact customer experience and retention. Their revenue depends on how quickly their end customers, like OEMs, can integrate their products into their solutions. The quality of the technical documentation their customers receive often defines the entire relationship and is the deciding factor in new and recurring business decisions.
Leveraging multiple LLMs, interactive documentation enables customized solutions that adapt to specific needs with continuous improvement with new and improved models. It can modernize the entire technical documentation process by dramatically reducing the time teams need to understand, document and deliver technology. This, in turn, enables significantly faster engineering onboarding, freeing up valuable resources to help customers focus on developing the next new innovation or product upgrade and drive faster time-to-market. Clear, comprehensive documentation that real-time updates can also transform the customer experience by providing five key benefits:
- Reduces support costs: By providing intuitive, well-documented features and processes from the start, support tickets – and costs – drop significantly. When the documentation is updated in real time, the gap between outdated documentation and the current product is almost eliminated. This reduces customer frustration and confusion, two important metrics for deepening trust and building long-term loyal customers. High-quality documentation also enables customers to resolve issues more efficiently without having to pick up the phone and ask for help, reducing costs for the business.
- Adapting the documentation: Using an interactive documentation platform allows engineers to quickly create walkthroughs of how a particular part works. Loading information into the platform can generate descriptive content that not only documents the specific code and how it works, but also explains how the application works for the OEM integrating into products.
- Accelerating Product Adoption: Customers who can quickly and easily onboard new products are more likely to engage with the product’s full suite of features. This leads to faster time-to-value and increased engagement, which can lead to significant ripple effects across the business, including a 23 percent increase in revenue compared to the average customer.
- Increases brand reputation: When customers have an experience that meets or exceeds their expectations, trust grows. On the other hand, when the experience falls short – as is often the case with poor technical documentation – trust is eroded. Modernizing technical documentation to exceed customer expectations is a quick and often overlooked way to gain market share.
- Driving innovation: When engineers can spend less time on tedious documentation tasks, they can focus more on valuable initiatives such as building better products, accelerating time to market, and innovating faster.
Reduce onboarding time from 1-3 weeks to just days
As technology becomes more complex, prioritizing high-quality documentation is central to driving product introductions, updates, innovations, and customer experience. Companies revolutionizing the way they approach technical documentation, like Driver, hear the same frustrations from customers: It’s nearly impossible to understand legacy code; onboarding for projects takes too long; and customer support is time consuming, expensive and low quality because the documentation is not up to date. Organizations using our interactive platform have seen significant benefits, including:
Reduces the time it takes to get on board from one to three weeks to just days. Cutting the time it takes to create onboarding guides from one to three days to just 45 minutes, a time savings of up to 95 percent. Delivers 50 percent faster creation of customer-facing technical support documents, freeing up half of engineers’ workday.
While documentation has traditionally been viewed as a time drain, companies are increasingly seeing it as a competitive advantage. As we all look for innovative ways to improve the customer experience, increase retention and differentiate our offering from the market, modernizing the approach to technical documentation should be at the top of the list.
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