Screen Shots Can Help Close Support Requests More Quickly

When it comes to tech support, a few pictures can save you a lot of time and prevent a lot of frustration. We talk a lot about using ScreenSteps for software documentation. But it can also be very helpful in corresponding with users to resolve support requests.

Yesterday I had one of those very confusing support situations. A customer emailed in that none of her users could login to their ScreenSteps Live site. This seemed strange since we hadn’t changed any of that code lately and hadn’t heard of this problem from any of our other users. She sent me the username and password she was using and I was able to login no problem.

I asked her to try again and she still couldn’t get in. Strange.

To this point we had only used email and text to correspond. This leaves for a lot of ambiguity in the conversation. So I decided to create a ScreenSteps email that showed her exactly what I was doing to log in. I then asked her to follow those steps exactly and see what the results were.

Her response? It worked. The details aren’t important but it turned out she was pointing non-admin users to an administration page. Once she pointed them to the right area it worked fine. Because the email I sent had pictures for each step of what I was doing it was impossible for us to misunderstand each other. She could instantly see if what was on her computer screen was matching the pictures I had sent her.

The use of a few pictures instead of text saved us both hours. She learned that she needed to do something slightly different and we learned that we needed to alter the behavior of ScreenSteps Live for a certain scenario to present some sort of error message to the user.

Had we continued corresponding with text-based emails there would have been many more emails back and forth which would have lead to frustration on both sides.

If you are stumped about a problem with a user, start sending some pictures. It is very likely that things will get cleared up very quickly.