How to Know What Customer Support Articles you Need to Write

One of the most overwhelming tasks for a new documentation manager or customer success manager is knowing what content they need to create.

Your first step should be to review the Customer Education Lifecycle so that you get a clear idea of the different categories of information you need to create. In this article, we are going to focus on the Customer Support area.

The goal of customer support in the context of the Customer Education Lifecycle is to remove obstacles. As your customers use your product, they are going to get stuck at various stages. Customer support articles should get them unstuck.

Ask your support agents

The best way to get people unstuck is to first understand where they are getting stuck. Your best resource for this will be your support agents.

• Find out what questions people are asking
• Create a new article for each question with the question as the title
• Write an article that answers the question in the title

This is a very simple method but it is very effective at writing targeted content that will quickly get used by your customers.

Ask your trainers

If your customer trainers then ask if you can sit in a few sessions with them, write down the questions that customers ask as well as the parts that the trainer needs to repeat. Most likely, your customers aren't going to remember everything they are taught in a customer training session. By writing down the questions they have and providing customer support articles that answer those questions you are better able to support those customers after the training session.

What tips do you have?

Using these two approaches has really improved our authoring process as well as the process for many of our customers. Do you have other ways for discovering what content to write? If so, leave your suggestions in the comments.