Anyone who works with technology and, therefore, technical documentation knows how difficult it is to understand, create, and keep up to date. Companies rely on documentation to understand how complex technology works and how it can be used and implemented within an application or finished product. More often than not, technical documentation takes an enormous amount of time to create and maintain; there are usually errors; and drafts sit in various places and forms.
In fact, engineers typically dedicate at least 50 percent of their day to tedious documentation tasks, which is critical time away from developing new products and innovations that could drive company growth and expansion. This problem only gets worse as time goes on, and the engineers who originally developed the code or wrote the documentation no longer work for the company.
We recently saw this scenario play out in a global semiconductor company when an important customer called about a long-tail legacy product built more than 20 years ago. Unfortunately, no one from the original development team still worked at the company, and there was no documentation explaining how the product had been built or evolved over the years. In the end, the company had to pull several of their best engineers to review the original codebase and answer the customer’s questions. The process proved to be both expensive and time-consuming—and it was a recurring challenge the company had grappled with for decades.
Documentation is also critical for companies providing components to automotive manufacturers. As software becomes increasingly essential in software-defined vehicles (SDVs), providing documentation that is both easily consumable internally and by customers is crucial for providing a smooth onboarding experience. SDVs are complex due to the amount of software and hardware required to integrate. In many instances, engineers are pulled from active development to support customers in integrating their software into the customer’s environment.
Co-founder and CEO of Driver.
Interactive platform built on AI simplifies documentation and speeds time to market
Semiconductor companies produce thousand-page manuals, guides, and source code for customers—all of which are created manually. The quality is often inconsistent across different products or versions, and rapid product updates make it difficult to keep up with constant changes. This archaic process deeply impacts efficiency, productivity, and product time-to-market.
For companies whose customers rely on technical documentation to develop and sell their own products successfully, these issues heavily impact customer experience and retention. Their revenue is dependent on how fast their end customers, like OEMs, can integrate their products into their solutions. The quality of the technical documentation their customers receive often defines the entire relationship and is the determining factor in new and recurring business decisions.
By leveraging multiple LLMs, interactive documentation enables customizable solutions that adapt to specific needs with continuous improvement with new and enhanced models. It can modernize the entire technical documentation process by dramatically reducing the time teams need to understand, document, and deliver technology. This, in turn, enables significantly faster engineer onboarding, which frees up valuable resources to help customers focus on developing the next new innovation or product upgrade and drive faster time-to-market. Clear, comprehensive documentation that updates in real-time can also transform customer experience by providing five key benefits:
- Lowers support costs: By delivering intuitive, well-documented features and processes from the outset, support tickets—and costs—drop significantly. When documentation is updated in real-time, the gap between outdated documentation and the current product is all but eliminated. This reduces customer frustration and confusion, two important metrics in deepening trust and building long-time loyal customers. High-quality documentation also enables customers to more efficiently problem-solve without needing to pick up the phone and ask for help, reducing costs for the business.
- Customizes the documentation: Using an interactive documentation platform enables engineers to quickly create walkthrough guides for how a particular part works. Loading information into the platform can generate descriptive content that documents not only the specific code and how it functions but also explains how the application works for the OEM integrating into products.
- Accelerates product adoption: Customers who can quickly and easily onboard to new products are more likely to engage with the product’s full suite of features. This leads to faster time-to-value and increased engagement, which can lead to significant ripple effects across the business, including a 23 percent increase in revenue over the average customer.
- Increases brand reputation: When customers have an experience that meets or exceeds their expectations, trust grows. On the flip side, when the experience falls short—as is often the case with poor technical documentation—trust erodes. Modernizing technical documentation to exceed customers’ expectations is a fast and often overlooked way to win market share.
- Drives innovation: When engineers can spend less time on tedious documentation tasks, they can focus more on high-value initiatives such as building better products, speeding time to market, and innovating more quickly.
Reduce onboarding time from 1-3 weeks to just days
As technology gets more complex, prioritizing high-quality documentation is central to driving product introductions, updates, innovations, and customer experience. Companies revolutionizing the way they approach technical documentation, like Driver, hear the same frustrations from customers: understanding legacy code is nearly impossible; onboarding to projects takes too long; and customer support is time-consuming, expensive, and low quality because documentation isn’t up to date. Organizations using our interactive platform have seen significant benefits, including:
Reducing the time it takes to onboard from one to three weeks to just days. Slashing the time it takes to create onboarding guides from one to three days to just 45 minutes, a time savings of up to 95 percent. Delivering 50 percent faster creation of customer-facing technical support documents, freeing up half of engineers’ workday.
While documentation has traditionally been viewed as a time sink, companies increasingly see it as a competitive advantage. As we all look for innovative ways to improve customer experience, increase retention, and differentiate our offerings from the market, modernizing the approach to technical documentation should be at the top of the list.
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