Cost Benefits: ROI

If you want to learn to drive, you take lessons. If you want to learn to play the piano, you take lessons. If you want to learn anything new, you take lessons - unless you want to spend a very long time over it and make a lot of mistakes.

So it makes sense, that if you want to learn how to write good documentation, you need not a whole string of lessons, but just one day's training.

This one-day Technical Writing Course teaches you the essentials of writing professional documentation. And it pays off. It helps you to sell your products / services, it reduces complaints and support calls, and it improves your company image.

Learn how to Improve the Way you Write

If you struggle with documentation, then you need to know the Easy Way to Write. This course shows you the correct approach to Technical Writing; how to plan the documentation in minutes, so that you include all the relevant material; and how to write it so that your readers will understand you.

So, do something about it. This Technical Writing Course can really improve the way your staff write documentation. Learn the essentials in just One Day - which is not a lot to take out of your work schedule.

Improve your Company Image

Book a Technical Writing Course so that you can produce consistent, well-written manuals and help guides.

• Show that you mean business.

• Show that you care for your customers.

• Show that you want them to get the very best out of your product/service.

Company image helps you to win orders.

£ Reduce the Cost of your Support Calls

• Good documentation reduces complaints because customers can find the answers without phoning your help desk.

• Proper search facilities mean they can find information easily.

• Correct use of language means they can understand what it says.

• This can reduce your support overheads considerably.

£ Improve your Sales with better documentation

A Help file or Manual that impresses people is a Sales Aid. Good documentation shows that you care about your customers. Find out how to write correctly with our Technical Writing Course; then you can give your prospects peace of mind about buying from you, and turn them into customers.

£ Help Users to train themselves

"It's great. I give new staff one module to learn, and they are moving on to the next by themselves!"
- Sheena W. Team Leader, Major International Pensions Provider.

Learn how to create and structure Help files and Manuals, so that readers can teach themselves how to use your product / service; or carry out procedures correctly, etc.

This adds value, because it saves considerably on one-on-one training of new staff.

Here are some of the benefits of learning the correct way to write "clear English"

£ New manual in plain Language saved 125 support calls a month

"In one test, customers who used the clearly written manual in plain English made about 125 fewer calls a month than customers who used the old manual."
- Cathy J. Spencer & Diana Kilbourn Yates, A Good User's Guide Means Fewer Support Calls and Lower Support Costs, 42 Technical Comm. 52 (1995).

£ British Telecom complaints down by 25% by using plain English

British Telecom was receiving almost a million enquiries a year from customers about their phone bills. Specialists "worked with BT to organize information logically - providing summary billing information on the first page and more detail on follow-on pages. [The revisions] grouped charges, explained them in clear English, and provided easy-to-understand calculations."

With the new bill, customer complaints and inquiries fell by 25%. Also, customers paid the new bill more promptly, improving cash flow and reducing the cost of collecting overdue bills.

£ Royal Mail saved £1/2 million in 9 months by using plain English

When you move to a new address, you complete a redirection-of-mail form for Royal Mail.

The old form was so confusing that there was an 87% error rate when customers filled it in. This cost Royal Mail about £10,000 a week trying to sort out the problems caused. 

Plain English specialists redesigned the form using plain English, and this substantially reduced the error rate, saving Royal Mail £500,000 in the next nine months.

$ US Navy could save $250 to $350 million a year by using plain language

A 1989 study of naval officers who read a business memo that was written either in a plain English style or in a bureaucratic style. Officers who read the plain English memo, besides having significantly higher comprehension, took 17% to 23% less time to read it and felt less need to re-read it.

If the plain language were used to communicating with all naval personnel (not just officers), it would save $250 to $350 million a year!    - James Suchan & Robert Colucci, The High Cost of Bureaucratic Written Communications, 34 Business Communication 68 (1991).

$ FCC Enquiry staff reassigned by using plain language

"When the FCC's regulations for CB radios were written in legalese, the agency needed five full-time staff members to answer questions from the public.

In 1977/78, the FCC rewrote the regulations in plain English and was able to reassign the five staff members." - Plain English Language Pays, Simply Stated No. 63 (Document Design Centre), Feb. 1986