Anyone who works with technology and therefore with 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 into an application or finished product. Most often, creating and maintaining technical documentation takes a huge amount of time; there are usually errors; and drafts are found in various places and in various forms.
In fact, engineers typically spend at least 50% of their day on tedious documentation tasks, which represents crucial time for developing new products and innovations that can drive business growth and expansion. This problem only gets worse over time 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 at a global semiconductor company when a major customer called about an existing long-tail product built over 20 years ago. Unfortunately, no members of the original development team were still working at the company, and there was no documentation explaining how the product had been built or evolved over the years. Ultimately, the company had to bring in several of its best engineers to review the original code base and answer customer questions. The process proved both costly and time-consuming, and was a recurring challenge the company had faced for decades.
Documentation is also essential for companies supplying components to automobile manufacturers. As software becomes more and more essential in software-defined vehicles (SDV), providing documentation that is easily usable internally and by customers is crucial to providing a seamless onboarding experience. SDVs are complex due to the amount of software and hardware required for their integration. In many cases, engineers are pulled out of active development to help customers integrate their software into their environment.
Co-founder and CEO of Driver.
Interactive AI-powered platform simplifies documentation and accelerates time to market
Semiconductor companies produce thousands of pages of manuals, guides, and source codes for their customers, all created manually. 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 has a profound impact on product efficiency, productivity and time-to-market.
For companies whose customers rely on technical documentation to successfully develop and sell their own products, these issues have a significant impact on customer experience and retention. Their revenue depends on how quickly their end customers, like OEMs, can integrate their products into their solutions. The quality of technical documentation received by their customers 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 improved models. It can modernize the entire technical documentation process by significantly reducing the time it takes for teams to understand, document and deliver technology. This, in turn, allows for much faster engineer onboarding, freeing up valuable resources to help customers focus on developing the next new innovation or product upgrade and accelerating time to market. . Clear and comprehensive documentation, updated in real time, can also transform the customer experience by delivering five key benefits:
- Reduces support costs: By providing intuitive, well-documented features and processes from the start, support tickets (and costs) decrease significantly. When documentation is updated in real time, the gap between outdated documentation and the current product is virtually eliminated. This reduces customer frustration and confusion, two important indicators for building trust and building long-term customer loyalty. High-quality documentation also allows customers to resolve their issues more efficiently without having to pick up the phone and ask for help, reducing costs for the business.
- Customize the documentation: Using an interactive documentation platform allows engineers to quickly create step-by-step guides explaining how a particular part works. Uploading information to the platform can generate descriptive content that not only documents the specific code and how it works, but also explains how the application works for the OEM integrating it into products.
- Accelerates product adoption: Customers who can integrate new products quickly and easily are more likely to interact 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% increase in revenue compared to the average customer.
- Increases brand reputation: When customers have an experience that meets or exceeds their expectations, trust grows. On the other hand, when the experiment fails – as is often the case with poor technical documentation – trust erodes. Modernizing technical documentation to exceed customer expectations is a quick and often overlooked way to gain market share.
- Stimulates innovation: When engineers can spend less time on tedious documentation tasks, they can focus more on high-value initiatives, such as creating better products, accelerating time to market, and innovating faster.
Reduce onboarding time from 1-3 weeks to just days
As technology becomes increasingly complex, prioritizing high-quality documentation is essential to drive product launches, updates, innovations and customer experience. Companies that are revolutionizing their approach to technical documentation, like Driver, hear the same frustrations from their customers: understanding existing code is almost impossible; integration into projects takes too long; and customer support is time consuming, expensive and of poor quality because the documentation is not up to date. Organizations using our interactive platform have seen significant benefits, including:
Reduce the time needed for onboarding from one to three weeks to just a few days. Reduce the time needed to create onboarding guides from one to three days to just 45 minutes, a time saving of up to 95%. Enables 50% faster creation of customer-facing technical support documents, freeing up half of engineers’ workday.
While documentation is traditionally considered a waste of time, businesses increasingly view it as a competitive advantage. As we all look for innovative ways to improve the customer experience, increase loyalty 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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