Grace is a Lead Technical Writer at Swift, managing a team of writers in the DC Metro Area. Grace is passionate about customer experience and how to strengthen customers’ journeys through Swift’s knowledge resources. As a data-driven individual, Grace leads her team to explore and investigate how their customers are consuming their publications to produce actionable objectives for the future.
Grace graduated from the University of Tennessee and is a proud Vol. In her free time, you can find Grace volunteering at her church, working out at the gym, or being a tourist in DC (mostly in search of good eats). Ask Grace about anything food related – don’t be shy 🙂

My No. 1 Customer is Customer Support (Yours Should Be, Too!)

This session covers how the documentation team I manage at Swift has built and leveraged its relationship with Swift’s Customer Support Center (CSC) to strengthen customer experience.
CSC staff are the first line of support to answer customer questions and concerns related to the software products/services offered by Swift. To support our customer’s user experience, my team has proactively embedded itself into the customer support journey – which first begins with a call to the CSC.
CSC staff must know the documentation my team produces inside and out. If a customer calls, then the easiest way that CSC staff can support the customer is through published documentation as a resource for quick help. Because CSC staff consume my team’s documentation so consistently and as part of their daily functions, my team is passionate about improving documentation to help the business from the inside-out; increasing efficiency and knowledge sharing within the CSC itself.
The Documentation team and the Customer Support Center began to meet regularly to understand the individual missions, goals, and functions of the other. We built relationships by meeting in person and putting ourselves in the others’ shoes. In doing this, we gained a new understanding and respect for one another and uncovered our common goals – there were many. We also humanized the experience of the customer support journey by discussing our roles and how we aim to better support our customers – this was a major step forward especially as we continue to evolve in the post-pandemic world.
There’s a direct relationship between our new partnership with the CSC and our customers’ experience with Swift as a whole. As the relationship between documentation and customer support strengthens, so does our impact toward our customers from around the globe. With that in mind, we endeavor to track if customer interactions with our documentation have increased while calls to support have decreased in duration and/or volume.
I’m passionate about how we serve customers in the best ways possible at Swift. I look forward to sharing my experiences with the technical communication community at LavaCon!

In this session, attendees will learn:

• The “documentation life-cycle” at Swift
• The role of documentation in the customer support journey
• How Swift uses data to drive actionable outcomes (regarding documentation)
• How we partnered with the Swift Customer Support Center
• Why partnering with the Swift Customer Support Center is important
• Why they should consider partnering with their own customer support colleagues
• How to begin building a relationship with their own customer support colleagues