Service teams guide and support customers, maintaining satisfaction and your overall brand image. But without straightforward procedures, agents may provide the wrong advice or keep callers waiting while searching for answers.
Read on to discover how to create, organize and maintain effective customer support documentation. Also explore ready-made templates so you can get started immediately.
What’s Support Documentation?
Support documentation helps users troubleshoot issues, answers questions and improves the overall customer experience. It’s primarily internal and ensures service teams provide adequate assistance, although it can also refer to external, self-service resources.
Support docs are also crucial to technical training. They teach service employees key concepts and new software features for more effective customer care.
Benefits of Support Documentation
While skilled employees are the best assets to customer support, even the strongest employees need high-quality help documentation to provide excellent service. Structured guides set quality standards and promote consistent performance in every worker, improving customer satisfaction and your company’s reputation.
Support documentation also helps new hires learn procedures and ramp up quickly, especially when your top performers help write the instructions. Say your best agent details their troubleshooting process, including the script and language they use, and then passes that on to new workers. This lets new hires begin work with an understandable, proven process.
Types of Support Documentation
Each type of documentation for customer support serves a unique purpose, such as FAQ pages that quickly answer common questions and how-to guides that walk people through complex procedures.
Explore the main types and support document templates for each so you can start building your customer-facing team’s knowledge base today.
How-to Guides
How-to guides break down processes into easy-to-follow steps. They generally help simplify long or complicated procedures, but they can also structure and clarify shorter operations.
This type of help documentation consists of both internal and external guides. Internal how-to documents direct employees through customer support processes and help them provide better service, while external docs help customers solve their own issues.
When creating how-to guides, it’s best to use concise language and short sentences to improve readability. These documents should be a high-level overview. If you need to provide further detail, we recommend including additional links and references rather than getting descriptive.
These help documents are foundational to customer support, and getting started is easy with our free how-to guide template.
User Manuals
User manuals are external documents that offer a detailed product overview. They help customers understand primary features and get more value from your services.
These documents typically guide users through the initial setup, including assembly or their first day using the product. For example, a manual for a customer relationship management (CRM) system would describe how to add new contacts.
User manuals should be thorough and detailed — describing features, benefits and use cases — so they’re often much longer than how-to guides. This means they’re also a helpful reference for your support team if they need to brush up on your services.
Start creating these docs today with our customizable user manual template.
Troubleshooting Guides
Troubleshooting guides help people spot symptoms, discover the root cause and resolve issues. They’re primarily intended as self-service customer documentation but also a handy reference for support teams when assisting people.
These documents are a crucial part of a company’s knowledge base because they empower customers to solve issues themselves. This creates a smooth user experience and lessens the load on your support staff.
Building troubleshooting guides takes thorough research to discover and prioritize product issues and provide effective solutions. Dig into reviews, support tickets and community forums to populate your document with accurate details.
Troubleshooting documents are complex and detailed. Reduce the workload by starting with a solid troubleshooting guide template.
FAQ Page
Frequently asked questions (FAQ) pages list and answer common customer queries.
While FAQ pages contain popular questions, they don’t guide users through solving issues like troubleshooting. FAQs guides are informational and educate people on what your service does. For example, an applicant tracking system FAQ page would discuss which payroll software it integrates with.
Successful FAQ pages must be relevant and succinct. Review customer service data and ask support staff to identify common questions, then provide short answers using plain language and layman’s terms.
Start by customizing our simple FAQ page template for a quick addition to your knowledge base.
How To Create Support Documentation: 6 Steps
Use this step-by-step guide to craft and maintain helpful, foolproof customer documentation.
1. Choose the Right Documentation Type
Consider which type of documentation is appropriate for the customer issue you want to solve. For instance, while step-by-step guides technically instruct readers how to solve problems, they shouldn’t be used as troubleshooting guides, which require special headers for common issues and symptoms.
Each documentation type has a specific structure that serves different needs, so review our templates above and choose the best one for your situation.
2. Consider Your Intended User
You must structure and write your documentation based on who will be reading it. External guides need straightforward, non-technical language that’s easy for customers and clients to understand without extensive internal or industry knowledge.
However, employee guides should use internal terminology to enhance understanding. Say a help document instructs the worker to navigate to the “Solution Hub” — the employee will immediately know what this is because it’s a part of their company glossary and daily work.
3. Use Documentation Tools
Support documentation must be detailed and accurate, so writing these guides is effort-intensive without the right software. Process documentation tools and templates streamline content creation, saving you and your team dozens of hours per week.
With Scribe, you can create compelling support docs in seconds. Simply turn on our browser extension or desktop app and execute the task as usual. Our AI-powered tool will generate a descriptive guide with annotated screenshots.
You can compile all your guides into all-in-one help documents with Scribe Pages, a feature that lets you combine multiple Scribes, videos and images into one comprehensive guide.
4. Run Tests and Collect Feedback
Once you have the first drafts of your documentation, send them to a handful of employees and ask for honest opinions and feedback. This ensures that your guides are clear, understandable and follow a logical progression.
Scribe makes it easy to receive lightning-fast feedback. Your team can jump into your guides and give their input with a single click, reacting with emojis like applause and hearts. If someone has a question or request, they can leave a comment you can easily review from the central Feedback tab.
5. Centralize Documentation
Support staff need quick access to help documents — the faster they respond to customer inquiries, the better the service. Maintain an accessible, searchable internal knowledge base where employees can quickly find any guide they need.
Centralizing customer-facing information is also vital. Create a library on your website, organize your guides into intuitive categories and ensure the database is searchable.
6. Review and Update Regularly
Documents must change as your company evolves, so schedule a regular time to review and update content. Edits may be minor, like swapping in new brand terminology, or significant, like rewriting instructions to accommodate a new CRM for resolving customer issues.
It’s best to review new guides within the first three months after creation to confirm they work as intended. After that, maintain an annual update schedule where you evaluate materials and ask your team for feedback.
Enjoy Next-Level Customer Support With Scribe
Scribe is the ideal way to create a rich knowledge base of customer documentation. The AI Document Generator tracks keystrokes and mouse movements to instantly turn any process into an actionable guide.
Our tool is ideal for customer-facing teams, improving internal and external documentation. Onboard and support your clients by answering frequently asked questions and providing transparent step-by-step guides.
Sign up for Scribe and offer outstanding customer support with less effort.
