Quality and customer satisfaction are very closely intertwined. Quality can be defined in many different ways and it means different things to different people.
Hackos provides us with a broad definition of quality which nevertheless suits the purposes of this study. She defines quality as “meeting the needs of the customer” (Hackos 1994: 12). In other words, when defining quality, the customer of the product should be kept in mind and quality should be looked at from his point of view.
In the annual report of 1999, Risto Mäkitalo, the president of Raute Group, states that the company will focus its efforts “on proactive R&D, consultative selling and high-quality products and services” (Raute Group 1999). In addition, RWN has a policy for the company’s operations, and one of the four key elements of that policy is high customer satisfaction. All employees, including the company management, have committed themselves to acting according to the company policy. It is important for RWN to maintain good customer relationships since the number of potential customers worldwide is rather small, about 1,000. The quality of the operations, including the quality of the technical customer
documents, is controlled via feedback forms. They provide RWN with valuable information about the customers’ opinions about the quality of RWN’s products and services.
Although I said earlier that this study does not deal with the technical customer documents as such, I will include them in this discussion on quality, because they are the result of a documentation process. Also, it is usually thought that it is the documents where the quality is most visible and where it can be most easily evaluated.
When developing the documentation process at RWN, one of the goals is that the outcome of that process is high-quality documentation. Hackos emphasizes the importance of a sound documentation process with regard to quality. Hackos says that
Standards and good people, although useful, are simply not enough to sustain quality through many years and many different people and projects. Only with a sound process in place and people trained in
managing the process can quality be consistently produced. (Hackos 1994: xiii.)
Hackos also lists characteristics of high-quality publications that benefit the producer as well as the user of the publications. According to Hackos, high-quality publications:
• make information more accessible.
• make customers more productive more quickly.
• reduce training costs.
• lower the barriers for discretionary and infrequent users.
• foster use by diverse user communities.
• reduce the cost of customer support.
• can reduce the cost of field maintenance.
• can increase sales of a product. (Hackos 1994: 12-14.)
These reasons for producing high-quality publications amount to reducing costs and saving time on several areas, for example, in customer support and field maintenance, which usually require a lot of resources. The fact that high-quality publications can increase the sales of a product is a good argument to improve the quality of publications which usually interests the management of a company.
Others have studied the effects of the increase in demand for quality technical manuals. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Kimberly Eiland did a survey on
industrial companies and contractors. The survey revealed that “organizations are developing new techniques of management and are shifting old priorities in order to integrate production, technical writing, and marketing in an effort to produce better manuals.” (Killingsworth & Eiland 1995: 118.) According to their study, there are three functional groups that influence manual production in most
companies. These groups are product development, technical communication and marketing. At the same time, some of these groups can be seen as customers of documents.
Nagle says that there are three simple steps to assure quality of documents and those three steps are editing, critical reading and proofreading (1996: 200). Here editing, according to Nagle, means light editing, that is an overall check for consistency and a check for gross errors, such as missing parts or word
substitutions (for example, now for not). It can be a critical error in an operation instruction, for example. The spell-checker in the text-processing system is a good tool to do this kind if editing, but it should not be trusted blindly since it will not catch word substitutions as the one mentioned above. (Nagle 1996: 200-202.)
The second step to assure document quality according to Nagle is critical reading. Critical reading is reading from the audience’s point of view. The document is checked for order, significant content and logic. It is easier to read someone else’s document critically since we become blind to the oddities in the way we have presented information in a document. When we read our own documents critically, we should let them cool down and read them with a fresh set of eyes. Last and, in this case, least is proofreading, which is the least important step in assuring quality documents. If the first two steps have been done thoroughly there is no need to do the third step; the first two steps in other words include proofreading. If there is no time for editing and critical reading, then a document should at least be proofread. Proofreading consists of looking for wrong words, format inconsistencies and problems with data presentation.
(Nagle 1996: 206-212.) These three steps can be included in a documentation process to assure high-quality technical customer documents and they will be taken into account when designing the new documentation process model for RWN.
One more aspect to quality can be added to this discussion. Annette D. Reilly argues that “the only way to achieve quality is through professional
communicators” (1995: 293). According to Reilly, quality in the product, in the process or in the users’ perceptions is not as important as quality in the
professional communicators (1995: 293). The importance of a professional communicator seems to be a recurring issue if Reilly’s opinion is compared with
Hackos’ maturity model. It was Hackos who said that stepping from level 0 to level 1 is achieved simply by hiring a professional communicator (1994: 52).
This issue about technical communicators will be discussed further in chapter 4 (see subsection 4.3.4).