Making smart documentation work for your support team

This article was originally published as part of a series of articles on our LinkedIn page:

Week 2.

When brands create documentation (such as product manuals, quick guides, and FAQs), they will usually consider two aspects: costs (which they’d rather avoid) and end users as the primary target group. But there’s more. Product literature can also serve as a valuable tool for your support specialists.

In today’s fast-paced, customer-driven market, efficient support is more critical than ever. Customers expect clear, accessible answers, while support teams need practical tools to resolve inquiries quickly. In a world of short attention spans, where a moment of frustration can quickly ruin the relationship between the user, the product, and the brand, manuals can be a lifesaver. Aspects to consider:

1. Granularity

One of the coolest features of well-formed hypertext that we rarely hear about is granularity. “So what’s that, you nerd?”, I hear you say.

Every proper webpage has an internal structure, and the “nodes” within this structure can have IDs that can be detected and utilized by scripts, search engines, and humans. Think about it as directions not only to your hometown (the server where ACME Corporation hosts their manuals and product knowledge base) and your house (the manual for the new ACME Air Fryer 2001), but to that nice bowl of potato wedges with cheese in the TV room (“[id=x123] Heading 3: Configuring Deep-fry Mode”).

If your support team is aware of these IDs, they can use them to respond to support requests. Instead of telling frustrated users “That’s in the manual” (which is likely to increase their frustration), send them a link to the relevant section on the relevant page! 🎯 If you have the right tools, exposing these “granular” link targets and building collections for daily use isn’t rocket science and will help your support specialists help others.

2. On-the-fly translation

Are your product manuals and the product knowledge base only available in English? Legal issues and requirements aside, your Korean or French customers will appreciate support in their own language, even if it’s not perfect. With high-quality machine translation engines such as DeepL, solid on-the-fly translation of technical web content (or PDFs, for that matter) is only a click away (well, it’s actually two key taps, the default being Command/Ctrl + [C] [C]). Adding a “Please note that this is a machine translation” hint to these “raw MT” translations is considered good bedside manners.

3. Bring Support Specialists Into the Manual Creation Loop

No one likes a manual that rambles on about rarely used features while omitting highly relevant information. Your support team has likely fielded every conceivable question about your popular products. So when your tech writer creates documentation for a new, similar product, it may be a good idea to let them contribute. Support specialists are aware of the “unknown unknowns”: unusual product use scenarios, incompatibilities, and edge cases. Make sure they are heard, and sleep soundly knowing that the FAQ on page 40 really has the frequently asked questions.

4. Have the LLM ask questions instead of answering them

It’s natural for us to ask questions and work with the answers – why do the opposite (unless you’re on Jeopardy)? But that might be the first thing your support team might want to do when they get their hands on the manual for a new product: Upload it to ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini and ask your friendly neighborhood AI to generate a list of the questions that are answered in this document. This will give them a great starting point / training ground for the day when real questions from real people start rolling in.

Next week, we’ll talk about manuals as marketing assets. In the meantime, let me know:

Do your support specialists refer to or even contribute to your product manuals? Do they hate them, love them, secretly rearrange them as haikus?

Next week: Manuals as Marketing Assets

↻ 2025-09-24