A Fifth of Our Docs Started as Support Replies
If somebody had to ask, the page was not good enough. Treat every ticket as a documentation bug.
Support and documentation are usually separate teams with separate backlogs, which guarantees the same question gets answered privately forever.
Every Ticket Gets a Docs Verdict
When a support conversation closes, whoever handled it marks one of three outcomes: the docs covered this and the user did not find it, the docs covered it badly, or the docs did not cover it. The second and third open a ticket against the documentation.
Findability Failures Are Different From Content Failures
If the answer existed and the user could not find it, rewriting the page is the wrong fix. That is a title, search or navigation problem, and it is the most common category by a wide margin.
The Reply Is Usually Most of the Draft
A good support reply is already a short article written for a real person with a real problem. Lifting it, generalising it slightly and giving it a symptom-shaped title is far faster than writing from scratch, and it is measurably better because it survived contact with an actual user.
The Number We Watch
Repeat questions. If the same thing is asked five times in a quarter, that is a documentation defect with a ticket number, not a support workload to be absorbed.
