Based on Neara’s track record of getting distracted and not delivering end-to end features I was concerned that we would end-up delivering a feature without sufficient help documentation to guide a new customer through a self-serve workflow. Stakeholders was not convinced that their user documentation needed improvement but most customers created and maintained their own user documentation. I initiated a pure UX research initiative to validate this assumption.

Timeline: 2 weeks

Participants: 5 software trainers from Australian utility customers

Sessions: Online, 45minutes

Research goals: Understand how current users use the current help documentation and identify pain points and areas for improvement

Preparation: 

I created and presented a research plan to stakeholders. I wanted to validate my assumption that none our customers used the Neara Fresh Desk platform or Intercom help centre. In order to do that I had a developer help me to set up two testing environments. One environment with the current help desk setup and one environment where I curated the help experience.

I gave each participant a task to complete. They would need to use help documentation to complete the task.

Synthesis

Interviews were recorded via Otter.ai. A summary of each interview was documented in Fibery (similar to Confluence). Miro was used to analyse and synthesis the feedback into themes. From here I deducted actionable insights and presented it to stakeholders.

Insights

Documentation were missing key functionality 

• What was there was out of date

• The writing was too complex

• There was no onboarding documentation 

• Customers wanted to be taught how to solve a problem not how a tool works 

When asked to find documentation needed to complete tasks, most participants were not able to find anything. 

• Fresh Desk articles were not optimised for SEO

• Participants were unsure what words to use when searching 

• If they didn't find anything immediately they gave up 

Organisations need custom documentation for their specific workflows and assets aimed at their workforce 

• Org admins will use Neara documentation and then create/adapt for their workforce. This may also be 

• due to the lack of documentation available. 

Neara actively discourages customers from using Neara documentation and the generic support channel 

• None of the customers interacted with the Intercom chat. One never noticed it, others preferred to interact with real humans. 

Customers rely on the Help buttons to refresh their memory, increase understanding, and as a starting point to find in-depth documentation 

• Customers take language used in the Help buttons to then search google for help documentation 

 Neara’s existing approach to setting up customers means they become totally dependent on our customer success team’s support to use Neara, this approach cannot support a self-serve model.

• When customers need to do something outside of their normal workflow, they can't. They don't understand the terminology and concepts Neara use, and can't find relevant support documentation

• Support response times did not match user expectations

• Support expectations extended into a lack of notification on product updates and new features

Participant feedback on good customer support -

• Simple, short step-by-step tutorials aimed at novice users (contractors) 

• Video supported by documentation

• Forums

• Neara certification 

• Need to be contractor friendly 

Recommendation

• Move the current knowledge base from Fresh desk to the Help Juice platform, with enabled more customised documentation

• Consolidate the knowledge base and chatbot into one help icon

• Tooltips must not be used for help documentation

• Knowledge base to be used for help articles only

• Intercom to be used for support only

• Improvement of the welcome email to include links to the knowledge base and support 

• Product tour to introduce a new user to a Neara self-serve flow