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.

So I just finished “Black Box Thinking,” the 2015 book from Matthew Syed, in which he explores the power of failure as part of a growth mindset. It’s masterfully written.

Using countless examples from the aviation industry, healthcare, and other industries, Syed makes a convincing argument that “trial and error” experiences are the best proving ground for improvement. He makes a case that all organizations – and individuals – must learn fast, then adapt, if they want to improve a product, a process, a skill, etc.

One of my favorite cases is the Unilever laundry detergent “nozzle” problem. In the 1960s, Unilever was making a successful laundry detergent, but in the production process, constantly clogged nozzles were causing numerous quality and downtime headaches. After a team of math wizards couldn’t fix the issue, Unilever executives turned to company biologists. They came up with several variations of the nozzle. But only one of the variations had mild success. So the biologists created variations of just THAT nozzle. And then they created more variations. Finally, they came up with a nozzle that no longer clogged, but not before 449 nozzle prototypes were designed.

Syed notes that biologists think in “evolutionary” terms: conduct tests in a real-world setting – learn fast, then adapt – and gain incremental improvements.

So how can technical communicators embed this “trial and error” approach into our daily projects?

Well, I have been fortunate enough to build several online help systems that are never static. We can see where users are still stumbling. Maybe it’s a single term that has not been defined. Maybe we missed a question that most users have about saving their data.

Sometimes it’s a big change. Sometimes it’s a minor tweak. So how do we gain this insight? We study user comments when they reach out to our Customer Service team. We capture their search terms in the Help Center. We use heat maps to gauge trouble spots.

Interpreting this data – and acting on it – does take some time. That’s why some teams don’t invest in this feedback. Or maybe an organization puts too much stock in “getting it right the first time?” I’m not exactly sure why incremental gains can’t be made. But in our case, the gradual improvements we make to improve the user experience has led to happier customers, and stronger relationships.

If you have a similar “continuous improvement” experience, please share them with us. E-mail me at president@stcpmc.org or join us at next month’s STC-PMC holiday event – December 7th, at Flanagan’s Boathouse, in Conshohocken! You can register here.

See you all there!

Rob