User manuals reduce customer service cost in a way that is easy to measure once you put a number on each avoided call and each avoided in-home visit. The clearest case study we can share is a programme we ran for Canadian Tire, one of Canada's leading retail chains. Facing steep competition from e-commerce and from other big-box retailers, Canadian Tire had made high-touch customer service a cornerstone of its value proposition. The problem was that superior service is expensive, and the demand for it was being driven in part by product manuals that customers could not follow.
Rewriting those manuals turned out to be one of the highest-return investments the programme made. The same principle applies to any retailer that sells complex technical products across a long geographic footprint.
Why customer service is so expensive at a retailer like Canadian Tire
Canadian Tire sells complex technical products that benefit from in-home installation or guided setup. The brand's in-home installation services covered 13 product categories, including televisions, window air conditioning units, and electric fireplaces, with four additional categories including furniture assembly being added in 2019. Each of those categories is a potential source of calls, returns, and dispatched service trucks when a customer cannot make sense of the documentation.
According to LinkedIn, Canadian Tire employed roughly 3,700 customer service managers across Canada at the time of the project. The team was spread across some 500 stores, but the catchment area of a single store can be enormous. The brand's most northern store, in Fort McMurray, Alberta, covers a radius greater than 100 kilometres. Glassdoor data put the base rate for a customer service representative at around 12 Canadian dollars per hour, with specialised staff earning more.
Layer in the cost of fuel, vehicle wear, materials, and the opportunity cost of pulling two highly skilled reps off the floor, and a single in-home service call to a remote customer easily runs over 100 Canadian dollars. That is before you count the customer frustration, the product returns, and the reputational damage that comes with a bad first experience.
The hidden cost of unclear user manuals
In 2012, Canadian Tire reached out to us because its own service data had surfaced a pattern. A significant share of the calls reaching the service centre were not coming from defective products. They were coming from customers who could not follow the existing product manuals. The manuals had been written — in some cases by the suppliers, in some cases by the retailer — without a consistent methodology, without clear visual step sequences, and without the kind of plain-language review that makes a document usable by a first-time buyer.
The downstream effect was predictable. Customers called support. Some returned their products rather than call. Some filed negative reviews, which depressed conversion on future visitors. Each of those outcomes carried a cost that ultimately sat on Canadian Tire's balance sheet, even though the root cause was a documentation problem.
What we did: 60 manuals rewritten in six months
Working with Canadian Tire's merchandising and after-sales teams, our technical documentation services group rewrote more than 60 product manuals in six months. The categories included power generators, air compressors, and power tools, which are exactly the products that generate the most support calls when the documentation is unclear. Each manual went through the same standardised workflow:
- Audit the original manual against real support ticket data
- Restructure the content by user task, not by internal product hierarchy
- Replace ambiguous illustrations with step-sequenced diagrams
- Rewrite safety and warning copy to the relevant market standards
- Test each draft with a sample user before final delivery
The outcome was a consistent set of documents that Canadian Tire could ship with confidence across its store network. Customers could follow the instructions without calling, the support team could point to a clear page when they did call, and the in-home installation team could skip the tickets that were really documentation problems in disguise.
How user manuals reduce customer service cost in practice
The economics of a manual rewrite project are almost always positive for a mid-sized or larger retailer. If a rewrite reduces support calls on a single SKU by 10 percent, and that SKU ships 20,000 units a year, you can calculate the saving from the published average cost per ticket for your own support function. Most retailers find that a single category of rewritten manuals pays for the project inside one sales season.
The savings compound in the second year, because the same rewritten manual keeps reducing calls for every unit that ships. The initial investment is a one-time cost. The downstream saving is permanent. This is why large retailers who have run the numbers rarely go back to supplier-provided manuals for their own-brand products.
The 2026 context: accessibility and right to repair
Two regulatory shifts since the Canadian Tire project have raised the stakes further. The EU Accessibility Act came into enforcement on 28 June 2025, which means any brand selling into the European Union must now provide product documentation in accessible formats for users with disabilities. The Right to Repair Directive 2024/1799 requires manufacturers of a widening list of product categories to publish detailed repair instructions, spare parts information, and diagnostic data for independent repairers. Both regulations are written on top of the same foundation: the user manual has to be genuinely usable. Retailers that invest in the documentation layer now are both cutting support cost and building the compliance infrastructure they will need in the next two years.
How Impala runs these programmes today
Our technical documentation team is now fully integrated with Pergamon, our sister company's AI documentation platform. Powered by Pergamon, we can rewrite and restructure manuals faster than the pure-human workflow we used on the Canadian Tire project, with the same native-speaker review and the same market-specific rule sets applied at the end. For a long-range view of what makes a manual work in the first place, it is worth reading our companion piece on the 5 key components of effective user manuals.
If your own support data is telling you that documentation is driving avoidable calls, the next step is a short audit of your highest-volume SKUs. Get a Quote and we will scope a rewrite programme against your own ticket volume and service cost.
