|
 |
What If Documentation Worked Like eCommerce?
A practical case for helping users get instant answers from documentation (and knowing when to hand the hard questions to a knowledgeable human)
|
| |||||||||||||||
I used to believe (deeply, earnestly, and with the kind of conviction usually reserved for people who alphabetize their spice racks) that if we just wrote better documentation, the questions from customers would stop.
Not all of them. I’m not unreasonable. Just… most of them.
Our Users Will Always Have Questions
It’s a nice idea. Clean. Optimistic. And…completely detached from reality.
Because our users don’t stop having questions. They don’t wake up one morning, stretch, and think, “You know what? Today I’ll rely entirely on the doc team’s careful prose and never bother another human again.”
No. They click around for a bit, get mildly annoyed, and then — frustrated — they go looking for an answer the fastest way possible. This usually involves asking someone. Anyone.
And that’s the moment where most of our documentation strategies (assuming we had them) quietly fall apart.
 |
What eCommerce Already Figured Out
Somewhere else on the internet, far from our lovingly maintained knowledge bases and documentation portals, eCommerce companies solved this problem without holding a single panel discussion about it.
They didn’t try to eliminate questions. They assumed questions were inevitable (like software updates that arrive at the worst possible time) and built systems to deal with them.
Most customer questions? Handled automatically. Instantly, if possible. Order status, return policies, “where is my stuff?,” “why is my stuff late?,” “can I return this thing I bought at 2 a.m. after a glass of wine or three?” — all of it gets answered without a human lifting a finger.
The rest? The strange, the emotional, the oddly specific? Those get routed to a person mostly likely to be able to handle the query.
That’s it. No drama. No philosophical crisis about whether the FAQ is “complete.”
 |
We Built Libraries, Not Answer Systems
Meanwhile, over in technical documentation-land, we built… a library. A very respectable library, indeed. Shelves neatly arranged. Topics carefully labeled. Maybe even a search bar that works (most times). And then we sat back and thought, “There. That should do it.”
What we didn’t build was a system that handles questions and delivers reliable answers.