Chapter 9: Documentation

Customer Interactions

Documenting customer interactions and support calls requires gathering essential information to ensure we can work on the problem after the call ends. Some details include:

  1. Customer name,
  2. Contact details (email, phone number etc.)
  3. Product or Service
  4. Pronouns
  5. Preferred Method of communication
  6. Best time of day to call back
  7. Problem Report
  8. Problem Frequency (new, existing, known issue)

Writing effective technical documentation and user manuals requires capturing the situation that is specific to the given event but also includes making some assumptions about what might not be stated or seen. For these assumptions we should call them out and label them clearing in our notes. For example, when a caller calls in to ask questions about a product and the caller seems to have above average knowledge about the product, we should wait for the right time to ask if they would like to talk to the product team who can better assist them with their purchase. In our notes we add “assumption - customer seemed very knowledgeable about < product name here > transferred (or xfer) to product specialist team - Jordan B.”. This would capture our thoughts at the time and allow us to review our notes and a later date and remember exactly what happened and what we were thinking at that time the note was captured.

Lean Slide Decks

Light, Effective, Aesthetically Neat (LEAN) Slide Decks are how we want to present our information. We aim for an easily comprehensible format that can be understood by most readers. Let’s break down each aspect of LEAN:

Light

“Light” in the acronym refers to the number of slides and the amount of information on each slide. Ideally, we should limit our visuals to just one (1) image. When selecting images, ask yourself if the image alone effectively conveys your topic or subject. If it does, then that image can stand on its own, requiring little to no additional text on the slide. This approach keeps the presentation highly focused and delivers the most impactful information to achieve the necessary changes. Each slide should align with the meeting agenda to ensure we stay on track with our expected meeting outcomes.

Effective

The “effective” aspect of our presentation relates to the details we include or remove to capture only the relevant information. We can leave links to related topics, but we should avoid allowing unrelated or complex topics to sidetrack our meeting, especially if they are controversial.

Aesthetically Neat

“Aesthetically Neat” assesses how visually appealing the images or layout of the presentation are. This encompasses elements like fonts, colors, shapes, charts, or layout templates. The choices you make here may vary based on the type of information you’re presenting and the target audience. It’s essential to consider design choices when working on the aesthetics of your presentation. Take the time to remove any elements such as imagery, colors, words, or bullet points that don’t serve the main topic or support subtopics in the presentation. Review the slide count, and if you have more than 15 slides, scrutinize the entire deck for redundancy and topics that don’t align with the agenda.

These principles may require some practice and time investment, but they are valuable for creating better presentations that resonate with your audience.

Beyond Bullet Points

Formatting and organizing documentation for clarity can help us quickly determine what our notes are about. Some tips include capitalization of text that you want to stand out, bold, _italic _and underlined words. Formatting can be tricking if we are not using a rich text enabled tool. Rich Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) editors allows us to add images, clickable links and gifs, and other visually appealing design elements. Keep it simple, we are creating professional documents so we don’t want to have too many different colors, font-size and bold text. Use the color red only when it makes sense and a reader needs to see the warning pop of the page against a white background. Use bullets when the order does not matter and number when there are sequential steps to follow that depend on each other.

Reviewing and editing

Our documentation should be checked for accuracy and completeness as a courtesy to our team to ensure they are able to understand the next steps. It’s also an important step in the process of escalation to other teams. Once we complete our notes, we want to take a few minutes to review what we wrote and ask ourselves if our target audience will need any additional notes, explanation or clarification. This is where we start to add more call-outs with bold words, red text or order list (list numbered from 1 to …n). A top priority in reviewing is spell checking or notes for accuracy. We should ensure we spelled everything correctly and remove any abbreviations that may not be clear to the reader. A good rule of thumb is to spell the abbreviations out once earlier in the notes and then we can use them later by abbreviations only.