Why Technical Communicators Should Think “Upstream”

So I just finished the Dan Heath book Upstream. Rarely is a piece of non-fiction such a page turner. The author pulls from industries such as technology, education, criminal justice and healthcare to demonstrate how folks have solved problems “before” they become problems.

In many cases, the key to the upstream mindset is data. Lots of data. Hidden in that data is often the cause of the problem an organization is trying to solve.

This is where we come in. Technical communications professionals have become data rich. The tools we employ can capture user behavior data via search queries, content preferences, and more. These vast data sets can help the organization anticipate user’s concerns and provide answers in online help, user guides and other assets – before the customers even ask the questions.

We need to remind departments, and even senior executives, is that this data can shape our help content to anticipate user and operator challenges. Our content has the potential to go way beyond the basic “how do I get started?” questions. When we consider the entire customer experience, we can build “precision” help content that can remove the friction from almost every customer experience:
– A Help Center that encourages more users to self-educate, putting less stress on our customer service team;
– A user guide that makes it easy for operators to deepen their relationship with our company’s products; ensuring product loyalty and continued use.

We need to remind our senior executives about the value of this “customer experience” data to help build deeper, more meaningful customer relationships.

That’s why the technical communication community has expanded to include functions such as customer experience managers, product designers, content architects, and others.

So let’s remind our senior executives that technical communicators can improve the success of a wide variety of projects: product launches, process improvement projects, website launches, new hire training, etc. We go beyond the activities of documenting proper product usage. We can serve as user advocates, and bring an upstream mindset that prevents costly issues down the road from ever happening.