Imagine This –
Your customer is in a problematic situation. He wants to make an urgent call but unfortunately, the mobile phone hangs. Confused on what to do, he opens his laptop and searches online for the product manual of his mobile phone to fix it quickly. By following the guidelines mentioned in the manual, he is able to troubleshoot the mobile phone in no time.
The issue gets fixed in less than 10 minutes, which is much better than the lengthy conversation he would have had with your customer support staff.
This shows how crucial an online product manual is and how it can be your customer’s best friend in the worst times.
Online Product Manual – the Competitive Differentiator
Today, every business is striving to outpace others and emerge as the most-favored brand in the market. While the competition is intense, what special steps are you taking to gain an edge over your competitors and be on top of your game?
Producing quality products is a given when you are running a business. But to meet the changing demands of your customers, you have to keep innovating to elevate your firm’s visibility and achieve a top-of-the-mind brand recall for your business.
Creating web-based product manuals to empower your customers with self-help is the best thing you can do to stay ahead of the curve. It can be a competitive differentiator for your company if it contains the right information. You need to present your content in the right fashion with an aim of delivering an exceptional experience to customers.
Building an impeccable technical manual can certainly be a win-win situation for you as well as your customers. It will help your clients solve queries instantly, without taking the trouble to reach out to your customer support staff.
Your client-facing teams, on the other hand, will receive fewer tickets, saving them a significant amount of time, which can be utilized for providing better service to customers who have serious issues. And this, in turn, will help you create a positive customer experience.
As per a progress report by WalkerInfo, by the year 2020, customer experience will take precedence over the product price and the product itself for consumers across the globe.
As we enter 2024, the clock has started ticking for you to prep up and start working on creating better online product manuals to make sure that none of your customer concerns go unresolved.
Read More: How to Create a User Manual Online for Free
Shatter the Common Perceptions About Web-Based Product Manuals
Since product manual of any kind is perceived as boring and content-heavy, it’s time you dispel these notions by creating a manual that’s exactly the opposite.
Read More: Best User Manual Creator Tools
Here are a few tips that will help you build a professional online product manual for your customers:
#1 Keep it Simple and Straight
Don’t beat around the bush when you can explain a product utility in a precise way. You don’t have to make your user guide, a story-sharing platform. It’s created for the sole purpose of educating customers about your product. Keeping this in mind, include relevant information and make it as simple as you can.
#2 Structure Your Manual
Simply throwing all kinds of information into the manual is not going to work. Ensure that you structure the information well. Include a table of contents and categorize information by creating separate sections, to make navigating easy for your readers.
#3 Multimedia can be Magical
Including images, how-to videos and infographics in your content, can literally metamorphose your manual and turn it into something your customers will like to read. It also helps in explaining content effectively to your customers as they will get a hands-on demonstration of what they read.
#4 Provide Contextual Help
Your web-based product manual might be full of technical jargons and concepts that are alien to readers. You can use tooltips, lightboxes, and pop-ups to make your clients familiar with complicated terms and concepts, by providing simple explanations and additional content wherever necessary.
#5 Don’t Ignore Formatting
Formatting is as essential as including multimedia in your content. Bold or italicize the text where need be. You can also add tables to your document or include steps in the form of bullet points to explain the content in a better way. Also, try to maintain consistency in formatting to provide readers with a seamless search experience.
#6 Include Relevant Content
Look at the kind of customer queries you frequently receive, to get an idea of what bothers most to your customers. Once you know the pain points, try to include information that can address them in the right way. Your customers will be more than happy to find exactly what they need every time they use your online product manual.
One last thing that you shouldn’t forget is to get the right online manual creator for building product manuals or guides.
Choosing software that is in conjunction with your requirements is a difficult task, given the variety of options available in the market. Hence, it’s recommended that you carry out detailed research, read its reviews and use all your prudence before taking the final call.
Happy searching, Happy creating..!
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