Documentation is one of those things everyone agrees is important, but when budgets are tight or timelines are short, it’s often the first to be cut. You can think about documentation as insurance for your house. Everybody knows that it’s important, but it’s very low on the priority list for many. Yet, just like insurance, skipping it can lead to much greater costs down the road. For documentation managers, technical writers, and product teams, justifying investment in documentation is a challenge.
The key? Speak leadership’s language: business impact. Strong documentation isn’t just a nice-to-have. It reduces costs, improves user satisfaction, and helps your company scale faster. IDC reports that document challenges account for a 21.3% loss in productivity, costing businesses approximately $19,732 per information worker annually.
This article breaks down how to build a compelling case for documentation investment by aligning it with measurable business outcomes.
The main benefits of documentation investment
While you might already know the benefits of investing in documentation, it’s crucial to showcase them to the leadership team.
Reduce onboarding friction
Poor onboarding is one of the biggest churn drivers in SaaS and API-first businesses. If users can’t get up and running quickly, they’ll leave. Good documentation enables self-service, accelerates adoption, and reduces the burden on support and success teams. Studies have shown that 40% of users prefer self-service over human contact, highlighting the importance of accessible documentation during the onboarding process. By providing clear, detailed, and easily navigable resources, organizations can facilitate a smoother onboarding experience, leading to higher user satisfaction and retention.
Xenett, an accounting platform, improved its user onboarding process by creating a public knowledge base with Archbee. “Now, if people have any questions, they look for the answers in our knowledge base. That also helps reduce our support tickets.”
Lower support costs
Support teams often act as the fallback for missing or unclear documentation. Every minute they spend answering a repeat question is money lost. A study by Plivo highlights that large companies (with annual recurring revenue over $100 million) typically allocate 5% or less of their ARR to customer service team costs. This shows that the support team is already underfinanced and overworked. High-quality docs dramatically reduce repetitive tickets by helping users to find answers on their own.
Phokus, an AI-driven ecosystem built for sport, also chose Archbee to support their customers in the onboarding process. Even from the early stages of the implementation, they’ve seen great results. “We’ve just launched and are already seeing a reduction in customer support queries. Feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive.”
Prevent churn
For API and platform companies, documentation is the user interface. If developers hit dead ends or can’t understand how to integrate, they’ll abandon your product. Clear, accurate, and up-to-date docs are essential for long-term engagement. Actually, 8 in 10 users say they’ve deleted an app because they didn’t know how to use it.
Improved internal knowledge management
This figure highlights the positive relationship between reducing internal silos, enhancing collaboration, and achieving higher organizational performance. Source: Silo-Busting: Overcoming the Greatest Threat to Organizational Performance
Reduced risk and errors
Clear documentation decreases the likelihood of costly errors, miscommunications, and compliance violations. Consistent documentation practices promote accuracy and reduce business risk. According to a study by the IDC, employees spend approximately 2.5 hours per day searching for information, which amounts to nearly 30% of the workday. This inefficiency doesn’t only impact productivity but also increases the risk of errors due to reliance on outdated or incorrect information.
Cost vs. ROI: how to quantify documentation impact
You highlighted the main benefits, but leadership wants to know: what’s the return on documentation investment?
Estimate cost savings
Let’s say your support team fields 1,000 tickets a month, and 30% are due to lack of or unclear documentation. If each ticket costs $15 to resolve, that’s $4,500 per month, or $54,000 per year, lost to documentation gaps. To reduce customer service costs, you can create a self-service support portal. Actually, 88% of users expect companies to have a knowledge base that they can use independently.
Track self-service metrics
Use tools like Google Analytics, search logs, or help center analytics to show that users are engaging with documentation. Highlight metrics like:
- Pages per session
- Search success rate
- Ticket deflection rate
Documentation platforms like Archbee also have search analytics where you can see exactly what your customers and employees are searching for in the documentation. This helps you create educational content that matches the needs of your customers.
Internal time savings
Documentation also improves internal efficiency. Employees waste time searching for information that can be located in an internal knowledge base. If every employee saves just 2 hours a week thanks to internal docs, that’s a huge productivity win. According to a study by McKinsey, employees spend an average of 1.8 hours per day, or about 9.3 hours per week, searching for and gathering information.
Source: The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies
Competitive Advantage: The strategic value of documentation
Influence customer decisions
Documentation isn’t just support, it’s part of the product experience. Buyers, especially in technical markets, evaluate your docs before they even try your product. High-quality technical product information significantly influences perceptions of a company (84.5%), product quality (96.4%), and purchasing decisions (88.7%).
Accelerate sales cycles
Sales and customer success teams rely on documentation to answer technical questions, explain edge cases, and showcase capabilities. Strong docs reduce back-and-forth, shorten sales cycles, and make it easier for prospects to say yes. According to research by Gartner, customers who received helpful information during the buying process were 2.8 times more likely to experience a high degree of purchase ease and 3 times more likely to make a bigger purchase with less regret
Ask your sales team how often they send documentation links during the sales process—it’s probably more than you think.
Common pushbacks: How to address them
While justifying documentation investment you can encounter various pushbacks for leadership and that’s normal. Leadership objections are often rooted in misunderstanding. Here’s how to counter them:
“We don’t have time to invest in docs.”
You’re already spending time answering the same questions again and again. Documentation is a force multiplier, every hour you invest now saves many more down the line.
“Customers don’t read documentation.”
The data says otherwise. According to Harvard Business Review, 81% of customers try to take care of a problem themselves before reaching out to a representative. If they’re not reading your docs, the problem may be visibility or quality—not interest.
“It’s too expensive.”
Compared to the cost of support, churn, and lost sales, documentation is one of the most cost-effective investments you can make. Using a documentation platform can help you cut these costs even more, while also enhancing the end-user experience.
“Documentation quickly becomes outdated.”
Documentation should evolve alongside your product. Investing in tools, workflows, and dedicated personnel makes maintaining up-to-date documentation manageable and sustainable. Establishing regular review cycles or integrating documentation directly into your product development process ensures it stays accurate and relevant.
“Our product is intuitive enough without documentation.”
Even intuitive products encounter edge cases, advanced features, or complex integrations that require documentation. Additionally, documentation supports diverse learning styles and user preferences—while some customers jump right in, others prefer structured guidance, detailed references, or troubleshooting resources.
Building a business case for documentation
Getting leadership to invest in documentation often requires translating your documentation needs into clear business outcomes. To effectively convince your stakeholders, your business case needs to focus on measurable impacts and align directly with organizational goals.
Here’s a practical framework:
Identify the problem clearly
Clearly state the documentation gaps that your organization faces. Frame these issues not merely as documentation problems but as business challenges. For example:
- High volume of repetitive customer support tickets
- Long onboarding times for new users or developers
- Low adoption or increased churn due to unclear guidance
Explain how these issues negatively impact productivity, customer experience, or revenue.
Collect supporting data and metrics
Gather quantifiable evidence showing how documentation impacts business operations:
Support metrics:
Calculate the percentage of support tickets that could be resolved by improved documentation. For instance, “30% of support tickets are repetitive documentation-related queries, costing the company $X per year.”
Productivity losses:
Leverage statistics such as IDC’s finding that document-related issues can cause a 21.3% productivity loss, costing approximately $19,732 per information worker annually.
Customer onboarding metrics:
Present data on average onboarding time, highlighting potential improvements. Example: “Currently, onboarding takes three weeks on average—better documentation can reduce this by at least one week.”
Outline financial and productivity benefits and competitive advantages
Clearly outline the anticipated ROI:
Reduced costs:
Show potential savings from decreased support volume, increased productivity, and reduced customer churn.
Increased revenue:
Cite how strong documentation can accelerate sales cycles and improve conversions. For example, studies show that clear product documentation positively influences purchasing decisions, especially in B2B and developer-driven markets.
Productivity gains:
Demonstrate how internal documentation enables faster knowledge sharing, reduces duplicated efforts, and improves engineering and operational efficiency.
Competitive advantages:
Explain how better documentation differentiates your product or service from competitors, influences customer decisions, and strengthens market positioning.
Define clear implementation steps
Provide a practical roadmap:
Phase 1 (Short-term):
Start with quick wins—prioritize documentation updates in the highest-impact areas (FAQs, onboarding guides, high-volume support issues).
Phase 2 (Mid-term):
Establish clear KPIs (support ticket volume, onboarding time, customer satisfaction scores) and document the improvements achieved.
Phase 3 (Long-term):
Scale documentation practices across teams, establish internal standards, and regularly report on documentation performance to leadership.
Show how it helps each team
For engineering: Emphasize dev productivity and reduced context-switching
For product: Highlight how good docs drive adoption and reduce friction
For support: Show how docs reduce tickets and improve customer satisfaction
For sales/marketing: Make the case for documentation as a conversion tool
Documentation investment means business growth
Investing in documentation isn't just about creating guides and manuals. It's a catalyst for growth, a driver of efficiency, and your secret weapon for gaining an edge over competitors. High-quality documentation directly translates into measurable business outcomes: reducing onboarding friction, lowering support costs, enhancing internal productivity, and influencing critical customer decisions
The strongest argument you can present to leadership is to connect documentation directly to your organization's priorities—revenue growth, customer satisfaction, productivity, and market competitiveness. Make documentation's value visible through relevant statistics, industry insights, and your internal metrics, demonstrating that documentation is not just beneficial, but essential.
Archbee’s robust documentation platform provides the tools you need to create, share, and maintain high-quality documentation—helping you reduce support costs, improve user onboarding, and boost team productivity. See how Archbee can transform your documentation strategy with a free trial.
