Aftercare Instructions Customers Can Find Later

The sheet handed over at the end

Many service businesses finish a job by handing over instructions: how to water new sod, how to care for a fresh tattoo, how long to keep cars off new concrete, what to do after a treatment.

They are written with care, printed on a sheet and given at exactly the moment the customer is thinking about something else: paying, leaving, getting home.

Three days later the sheet is somewhere in the house, and the question it answers has just come up.

Publishing the same instructions on the website, where a customer can open them on a phone, takes a few hours once.

Where paper instructions end up

• The kitchen drawer, under the takeout menus.
• The car, on the floor on the passenger side.
• The recycling, with the invoice it was stapled to.
• With the other person, who was not there when it was explained.
• A photo on a phone, too blurry to read.

The fourth is the one businesses rarely picture. The person who has to water the lawn or change the dressing is often not the one who stood at the counter and heard it all.

When the question comes up

Instructions are needed at a particular moment: the third morning, the first hot afternoon, the evening something looks wrong. That moment often falls outside business hours.

A customer who cannot find the sheet calls, guesses or searches. Searching finds someone else's instructions, written for someone else's work, sometimes contradicting yours.

And when the result goes wrong, the job gets the blame, not the advice they followed.

What an aftercare page holds

Everything on the sheet, in the same order and the same words. A customer comparing the two should find no differences.

Steps tied to time: the first day, the first week, the first month. People look for where they are now, not for the whole story.

What normal looks like, and what does not. A short list of signs that mean call us, with the number written out, saves an anxious evening and an unnecessary visit.

Photographs help where words struggle, such as the colour healthy new sod should be, or how cured concrete looks next to fresh.

General on the site, personal on paper

Not everything on the sheet belongs on a public page.

Instructions every customer receives can be published. Anything specific to one person, such as a dose, a measurement or a condition, stays on paper or in a private message.

Health practitioners should also check what their professional body allows on a website before publishing anything that reads as advice about treatment.

A worked example

A Chinese medicine herbalist on a busy shopping street fills prescriptions of dried herbs, weighed into a paper packet for each day.

Every customer leaves with a printed sheet: how long to soak the herbs, how long to simmer them, which small packet goes in near the end, and when to drink the result.

The sheet was in small type, in Chinese and English, and usually ended up stained on a kitchen counter or thrown out. The phone rang most evenings with the same questions, often after closing.

The mechanism was timing. The instructions were needed at the stove, days after the visit, and the only copy had to survive a kitchen.

The herbalist published one page for each form the remedies come in, raw herbs, granules and pills, in both languages, with the times set large and a photograph of the pot at each stage.

The sheet now carries the page's short address, and the receipt email links to it. Each customer's formula and dose stay on the packet label, never on the site.

Written to be read at the job

An aftercare page is read on a phone, in a yard, a garage or a kitchen, often with wet or dirty hands.

Number the steps, keep the type large, and put times and quantities where the eye lands first.

Publish it as a page rather than a PDF. A PDF on a phone needs pinching and sideways scrolling, and many people give up on it. A print button serves those who still want paper.

Where to link it from

Print a short address on the paper sheet itself: your domain followed by one word. It is the one thing on the sheet worth typing.

Link the page from the confirmation email or invoice, and from any follow-up message sent a few days after the job.

Give it a place in the site's menu or footer too, so a customer who remembers only the business name can still get there.

Pages other people search for

Aftercare questions are searched constantly, by your customers and by everyone else's.

A page titled in the words people use, such as how to water new sod, with your business name and area on it, can be found by people who have not met you yet.

Link it to the service it belongs to. Someone reading careful instructions for a job is close to the kind of customer who wants it done properly.

One version, kept current

When the instructions change, change the page and the sheet on the same day, and print a date at the bottom of both.

Two versions that disagree are worse than one, because a customer who notices cannot know which to follow.

The counter-case

Some instructions are too short to need a page. One line on the receipt covers how often to rinse a new filter.

Others vary so much from job to job that a general page would mislead, and a personal note is the honest format.

For the instructions every customer gets and nobody can find later, though, the website is where they belong, with the paper sheet pointing to it.

From paper to page

1. Collect every sheet you hand to customers.
2. Mark what is general and what is personal.
3. Publish one page for each kind of job.
4. Print the short address on the paper sheet.
5. Link it from confirmation emails and invoices.
6. Title each page in customers' own words.
7. Date both versions and update them together.

Step four is the one that connects the two. The paper will still get lost, but anyone who saw the address once can find their way back to the version that cannot be thrown out.

Writing up the job itself while it is fresh is covered in the project write-up done the week the job ends.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.