Sharing Screenshots – 6 Ways I am Using ScreenSteps.me

Category: Keywords: ScreenSteps.me, customer support, marketing, screenshots, ScreenSteps Desktop Status: draft

We just launched our public beta of ScreenSteps.me last week and the response has been pretty exciting. I have to say that I haven’t been this excited about a new feature in ScreenSteps since we released our integration with ScreenSteps Live and ScreenSteps Desktop. ScreenSteps Live solved a huge problem for me as a business owner. It let me support more customers with less time and effort. During the two weeks I have been using ScreenSteps.me, it has saved me hours time. Here are just a few of the ways I have been using ScreenSteps.me.

1. Communicating with virtual workers

We recently started working with a freelancer on Elance. She is doing some CSS work for some new templates we have coming to ScreenSteps Live. Elance has a message board where I can give job descriptions and provide feedback on the work provided. I have been using ScreenSteps.me to do two things:

• Describe the work I want done
• Provide feedback on the the work that has been submitted

The whole process has gone very smoothly. I have never had to send follow up messages to clarify what I need. Almost all of the “back and forth” that is usually involved in trying to describe how I want a job done has been eliminated. I ask for something and a day or two later I get a message that it is completed. It is wonderful.

View an example of one of our Elance posts

2. Bug reports

I use a lot of software products everyday in my business. Invariably I find bugs in the products I use (including the ones we develop). But describing bugs in an online chat or email can be tedious and usually involves a lot of back and forth communication as the company tries to understand the problem I am having.

With ScreenSteps.me I just document the bug and send the company a link to the ScreenSteps.me page. In the past two weeks I have used this to post in forums, send in support emails and describe problems in online support chats. It takes me less time to describe the bug (less typing) and I don’t get follow-up emails with additional questions.

3. Email marketing/web page marketing

With our recent launch of ScreenSteps 2.8.7 we wanted to provide a brief overview of the new features. We wanted to push this announcement into three areas:

1. Email announcement via MailChimp
2. A “What’s New” page on our site
3. A “What’s New” page in our documentation

I used ScreenSteps.me HTML templates to prepare my MailChimp campaign in just a few minutes. I copied the same HTML to use in our “What’s New” page on our site, and then published the lesson to ScreenSteps Live as part of our manual. In just a few minutes I had published my content to three locations, a process that would have previously taken me at least an hour.

4. Personalized customer support

Several times over the past two weeks I have been corresponding with customers that had an issue that could easily be solved by showing them a couple of screenshots. One customer was having trouble upgrading their account on ScreenSteps Live and another wanted to do some unique formatting with in a lesson. In both cases I just sent them a link to a lesson I posted on ScreenSteps.me and the issue was resolved immediately.

One of these lessons I may polish up and include in our manual. The other was really just for that one customer. ScreenSteps.me gave me a fast and simple way of communicating clearly in these unique situations.

View an example of customer support post

5. Communicating on projects

As we were going through the final testing and design of the latest ScreenSteps Desktop release there were many times when I needed to provide feedback to Trevor. ScreenSteps.me made this so much easier. We aren’t in the same office so we mostly communicate via IM during the day. We also use Pivotal Tracker to manage all of our development. There isn’t a real easy way to add images to Pivotal Tracker stories so we just inserted links to pages on ScreenSteps.me.

6. Writing blog posts

I didn’t write this blog post in ScreenSteps. But I did use ScreenSteps to prepare all of the images. I then published to ScreenSteps.me and used the image urls that were returned to me to insert into the blog post. It was a lot faster than uploading images one by one via the WordPress web interface.

How are you going to use ScreenSteps.me?

ScreenSteps.me is one of the most exciting developments we have had with ScreenSteps yet. I am able to communicate more clearly in less time and use ScreenSteps in situations where I never have before. We’re excited to see what our customers will do with ScreenSteps.me as we move forward.