Why Your Team is Secretly Using Slack as Documentation (And What That's Costing You)

Picture this: Your CSM needs to know how a specific feature works for a customer. Do they always check the documentation?

No. They Slack the product manager.

Your sales engineer needs competitive positioning. Do they check the knowledge base?

No. They message whoever did the last competitive deal.

A new team member needs to understand a customer's custom implementation. Is there documentation?

No. They schedule a call with the person who "knows that account."

After analyzing hundreds of conversations with B2B companies about their documentation challenges, one thing became crystal clear: the real documentation crisis isn't about what's written down. It's about all the knowledge that isn't.

The Hidden Documentation System Running Your Company

Every company has two documentation systems. There's the official one - either in a knowledge base, help center, or wiki. Then there's the real one - Slack threads, Gong recordings, tribal knowledge, and that one person who "knows everything about the infrastructure."

One CX leader discovered this the hard way when reviewing their $67,000 community platform. "Slim to none usage," she reported. Meanwhile, her CSMs had just asked to create yet another Slack channel for product questions because "they're going and Slacking the product manager" for every customer issue.

A marketplace startup founder was even more direct: "Guides don't really read. They're not gonna go to a separate place. They want it in product. They want it on demand."

The documentation exists. It's just not in your documentation.

"Garbage In, Garbage Out": The Fear That Keeps Companies Stuck

Here's the conversation that happens in every AI evaluation:

Company: "We need AI to help with support."

Also Company: "But our documentation is garbage. Won't AI just give garbage answers?"

One CX leader spelled it out: "Garbage in, garbage out. What are we going to talk to people about? How are we going to talk to people?"

This fear creates a vicious cycle. Companies believe they need to fix their documentation before implementing AI. But fixing documentation manually takes hundreds of hours they don't have. So they stay stuck, watching their support teams drown while sitting on the solution.

The breakthrough comes when companies realize they've been thinking about it backwards. You don't fix documentation then add AI. You use AI to fix the documentation.

The Goldmine in Your Gong Recordings

One of the most fascinating patterns: every company had hundreds of hours of recordings that contained perfect documentation.

• Sales demos explaining custom configurations
• Gong calls with detailed product walkthroughs
• Training sessions covering specific workflows
• Customer calls documenting unique implementations

"When a sales engineer is doing a call with a customer and scoping something, I can take that out and create internal documentation for that customer so I completely understand their implementation," one CX leader realized during her call.

Another leader watching a 2.5-minute video transform into five detailed help articles had an epiphany: "We have so many SE videos around this stuff."

The documentation already exists. It's just trapped in video format.

The $6 Million Customer With No Documentation

Perhaps the most striking example came from a healthcare company. "These people pay us $6 million," the CX leader emphasized. "How do we not know their implementation?"

This wasn't a small oversight. This was a massive enterprise customer whose custom configuration existed only in the heads of specific team members. When those people were unavailable, support ground to a halt.

The same pattern appeared everywhere:

• A legal tech company with completely custom UI that "bore little resemblance to the base product"
• A safety platform where "the actual content of help articles aren't even being indexed"
• A marketplace with 5,000 guides, each using the product differently

Generic documentation wasn't just unhelpful. It was actively misleading.

The Two-Week Reality Check

Every company worried about implementation complexity. They imagined months of setup, extensive training, massive disruption.

The reality is it takes two weeks and one line of code.

"I have a 3 week leave planned in October," one product leader mentioned, worried about timing. When told it would take one line of code and two weeks of data, his entire demeanor changed: "I think this is enough for me to take back to leadership."

Even the most security-conscious healthcare company, requiring extensive compliance reviews and dealing with California AI regulations, saw a clear path: "We'll be able to answer before September."

The Question Nobody Asks (But Should)

During one call, a product leader made an observation that changed everything:

"When you're always hearing stuff from a success team, it's always about wants. It's always about future roadmap. But when they're in the product, it's about something completely different."

This distinction matters enormously. Support tickets focus on feature requests. Actual in-product behavior reveals where users are genuinely stuck.

"This really mitigates and minimizes ultimately the noise," he continued, "and it focuses in on how do you perfect what is there versus just all these needs and wants."

When you can see what users actually ask when they're stuck - not what they tell you in quarterly business reviews - documentation priorities become crystal clear.

What Smart Teams Are Doing Differently

The companies successfully solving this aren't the ones with the best documentation. They're the ones who've stopped trying to document everything manually.

They're turning existing content into documentation:

• Product demo → 20-30 help articles
• Customer training call → personalized implementation guide
• Feature walkthrough → instant knowledge base

They're embracing "customer-specific" over "comprehensive": Instead of one massive knowledge base that serves no one well, they're creating targeted documentation for specific configurations, specific customers, even specific user types within accounts.

They're measuring prevention, not deflection: "Deflection sounds great when you're drowning in simple, repetitive questions," one CX leader noted. "But for businesses with big contracts or technical support, watch out."

The metric that matters isn't how many tickets you deflect. It's how many problems never become tickets in the first place.

Your Documentation Problem Is Actually an Intelligence Problem

After listening to dozens of these conversations, the pattern is clear. Companies don't have a documentation problem. They have a knowledge intelligence problem.

The knowledge exists - in recordings, in team members' heads, in Slack threads, in customer calls. It's just not accessible when and where users need it.

One engineering lead's reaction said it all. After seeing how his highly customized healthcare platform could have instant, accurate documentation generated from simple walkthroughs, he laughed: "I appreciate that you think we are cool enough that you're picking us for this pilot."

But he missed the point. They weren't chosen for being cool. They were chosen because their extreme customization, their compliance requirements, their complex use case represented the hardest possible problem.

If AI-powered documentation could work for them - extracting knowledge from videos, creating customer-specific help, updating automatically with each product change - it could work for anyone.

The question isn't whether you have good enough documentation for AI.

The question is whether you're ready to use AI to create the documentation you've never had time to write.

As one product leader put it perfectly: "This solves a lot of problems that I'm currently facing."

Sometimes the best solutions really are that simple.

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