Anyone who works with technology, and therefore with technical documentation, knows how difficult it is to understand, create and keep it up to date. Companies rely on documentation to understand how complex technology works and how it can be used and implemented within an application or finished product. Most of the time, creating and maintaining technical documentation requires an enormous amount of time; there are usually errors; and the drafts settle in various places and shapes.
In fact, engineers typically spend at least 50 percent of their day on tedious documentation tasks, which is critical time for developing new products and innovations that could drive company growth and expansion. This problem only gets worse as time passes 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 at a global semiconductor company when a major customer called about a legacy long-tail product built more than 20 years ago. Unfortunately, no one from the original development team was still working 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 hire several of its best engineers to review the original code base and answer customer questions. The process proved to be expensive and time-consuming, and was a recurring challenge that the company had faced for decades.
Documentation is also essential for companies that supply components to automakers. As software becomes increasingly essential in software-defined vehicles (SDVs), providing documentation that is easily consumable internally and by customers is crucial to delivering a seamless onboarding experience. SDVs are complex due to the amount of software and hardware required to integrate. In many cases, engineers step outside of active development to help customers integrate their software into the customer’s environment.
Co-founder and CEO of Driver.
Interactive AI-powered platform 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 between different products or versions, and rapid product updates make it difficult to keep up with constant changes. This archaic process has a profound impact on product efficiency, productivity, and 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. Your revenue depends on how quickly your end customers, such as OEMs, can integrate your products into their solutions. The quality of the technical documentation that your clients receive often defines the entire relationship and is the determining factor in new and recurring business decisions.
By leveraging multiple LLMs, interactive documentation enables customizable solutions that fit 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 onboarding of engineers, freeing up valuable resources to help customers focus on developing the next new innovation or product update and driving faster time to market. Clear, complete documentation that is updated in real time can also transform the customer experience by delivering five key benefits:
- Reduce support costs: By offering intuitive, well-documented features and processes from the beginning, support tickets (and costs) are significantly reduced. When documentation is updated in real time, the gap between outdated documentation and the current product is virtually eliminated. This reduces customer frustration and confusion, two important metrics for deepening trust and building long-term loyal customers. High-quality documentation also allows customers to resolve issues more efficiently without needing to pick up the phone and ask for help, reducing costs for the company.
- Customize the documentation: Using an interactive documentation platform allows engineers to quickly create step-by-step guides on how a particular part works. Uploading information to the platform can generate descriptive content that documents not only the specific code and how it works, but also explains how the application works for the OEM that is integrated into the products.
- Accelerate product adoption: Customers who can quickly and easily onboard new products are more likely to engage with the product’s full feature set. This leads to faster time-to-value and higher engagement, which can create significant ripple effects across the business, including a 23 percent increase in revenue over the average customer.
- Increase brand reputation: When customers have an experience that meets or exceeds their expectations, trust grows. On the other hand, when experience is not sufficient (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.
- Drive innovation: When engineers can spend less time on tedious documentation tasks, they can focus more on high-value initiatives, such as creating 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 critical to driving product introductions, updates, innovations, and customer experience. Companies that are revolutionizing the way they approach technical documentation, like Driver, hear the same frustrations from customers: understanding legacy code is nearly impossible; Onboarding to projects takes too long; and customer support is time-consuming, expensive, and low-quality because documentation is not up-to-date. Organizations that use our interactive platform have achieved significant benefits, including:
Reduce the time it takes to onboard from one to three weeks to just days. Reduce 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. Deliver 50 percent faster creation of customer-facing technical support documents, freeing up half of engineers’ workday.
While documentation has traditionally been considered a waste of time, companies increasingly see it as a competitive advantage. As we all look for innovative ways to improve customer experience, increase retention and differentiate our offerings in the market, modernizing the approach to technical documentation should be at the top of the list.
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