Your customer help desk is probably one of the most poorly used groups in your organization. Your help desk has more contact with actual, paying customers then anyone else in your company. But too often organizations limit the role of the help desk to simply closing out help tickets or answering support calls. Here are three suggestions for getting a lot more out of your help desk:

1. Have Your Help Desk Develop New Products

Your help desk team talks with customers all day. They will often speak with customers who are trying to use your product to do a job that it wasn’t designed to do. If your help desk gets enough similar requests it might be a sign that there is an opportunity for a new product. Have your help desk team enhance your existing product or create a new complimentary product that will work for these customers.

2. Have Your Help Desk Fix Bugs In Your Software

The help desk has to hear customers complain about bugs in your software all day long. If you put the help desk in charge of fixing bugs in your software the most important bugs will get fixed first.

3. Have Your Help Desk Write Your Software Documentation

Your help desk knows what questions customers have. They know how to answer those questions. Let them write your documentation and you will get help files that are more useful to your customers.

By this point in the article you are probably thinking:

“Is he crazy? You can’t have the help desk develop products, fix software bugs and write software documentation.”

No, you probably couldn’t with most help desk teams. But what if you had someone from your product management, software development and documentation teams “man the phones” once a week? Each one of those people would go back to their teams with an amazing amount of insight. Your products would be better. Your most important bugs would get fixed faster. Your documentation would be better.

It’s not about making your help desk people do things they weren’t trained to do. It’s about getting everyone in your organization on the help desk team.

Think this is crazy? Freshbooks has been doing this for awhile with what appears to be great success.

In his post, “‘Digital Natives’ and the end of traditional hotline support”, Ellis Pratt describes how the model of support has changed from the 1990’s. In the 1990’s users would seek immediate support form people who were geographically near them (usually in the same office or workspace). With the advent of social media, geography is no longer important. Users, especially younger users, are first turning to Google, Twitter, email, instant messages and other forms of social media to get answers to their support questions.

These forms of communication are almost uniformly text-based. Where does traditional software documentation fit in this new process?

Quoting from Ellis:

So what’s happened to the manual – where does that fit in?

In many cases, the manual is now a collection of Web pages. It’s moved up to the top of list, although many may not recognise it as a manual. It might not have an index, page numbers or a table of contents, but it serves the same function.

Ellis is correct. Users are looking for help on the web. If your software documentation is locked inside of a PDF file then it is essentially non-existent to today’s users.

Ellis makes some very good points in his post but I think he draws the wrong conclusion in the end:

If companies want to sell to “Generation Y” , they will need to ensure the ways they assist their users reflect this preference for text-based content.

“Generation Y”, or any generation for that matter, does not prefer text-based content. They prefer to communicate with tools that only allow for text-based communication. This is a subtle but important difference.

Putting the Customer Help Desk on Twitter and Online Chat

We quite often will provide customer support via Twitter or a online chat system that we offer via our website. These are text-only delivery systems. We can’t include images or videos. But we can provide urls.

Our ScreenSteps Desktop and ScreenSteps Live documentation has been optimized for use in this exact situation.

1. The documentation is broken up into small bits that answer a single question.
2. The documentation answers “How do I” questions which are the types of questions we receive in support.
3. Each section of the documentation has a unique url that we can share in Twitter, chat, email or forums.

Though we are communicating in a text only format, we are providing image-rich communication that better answers our users’ questions.

For example, if a customer asked us, “How do I set up a custom domain on my ScreenSteps Live account?” our response might look something like this:

Just follow these instructions: http://bit.ly/9B1WWU

The answer is concise and easily comes in under 140 characters (you can see how we have structured our help system here).

As Ellis states in his post, “Essentially, people followed the easiest path to solve their problem.” For many users that involves asking and answering questions via text-based communication. Make sure that your help content is optimized for sharing in that format and you will dramatically improve the results you get from your software documentation.

Check out our post, “Online Help Documentation – 5 Keys To Making It Work” for more tips on how to author, format and deliver your documentation.

Tech support is often looked down upon as a cost center as opposed to a money maker. This is a shame because tech support is an easy way to do some very inexpensive customer research. What you learn in tech support can help you improve your product, your marketing and your business.

Marketers often have a tough time finding customers who will talk to them. Your tech support team has people that are begging to talk to them. Treat tech support a little more like market research and you can get some great information while at the same time doing a better job at helping your customers.

Here are 4 simple things you can learn from your customers who contact tech support:

1. Who they are

One of the biggest questions marketers try to answer is who their target market is. When someone contacts tech support take a moment to ask them what they do. You may find that they fit the description that your marketing plan has drawn up. But you may find that they are someone completely different. This may be a new group you haven’t considered before that you should be marketing to.

2. What they want to do

People contact support when they are stuck. They are trying to accomplish something with your product and something happened along the way that kept them from reaching that goal. Don’t just find out where they are stuck. Find out what they were trying to accomplish. Is this a workflow you could optimize? If so, could it open a new market for your product?

3. When and Why they are using your product

I am grouping these together because in our case they are really the same question. Asking your user when and why they are using their software will help you understand what outside stimulus prompted them to open your application or go to your website.

When we initially launched ScreenSteps we saw it more as a software documentation tool. As we talked to customers who contacted us for support we discovered that many of them were using ScreenSteps and especially ScreenSteps Live for customer support. We updated our marketing message accordingly.

4. Where (or on what company) are they using your product

For some businesses, the physical location where the product is being used might be important. For us it is important to understand what other products are being used around ScreenSteps. We want to know where in the workflow ScreenSteps is being used. What products are the user trying to integrate ScreenSteps or ScreenSteps Live with? What products are they trying to support?

Recently we discovered, through tech support, that we had several customers that were trying to integrate their ScreenSteps Live content with Salesforce. A few tweeks to how ScreenSteps Live worked made this much easier for users and is once again opening a whole new type of user to both ScreenSteps Desktop and ScreenSteps Live. Our integrations with Mindtouch, Confluence, Blogger, and Google Sites came about in a similar fashion.

Conclusion

Next time you are in a support chat, email exchange or phone call, ask a few questions. You’ll get valuable information that will help you improve your customer support and your marketing.

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.

We have seen some changes recently in how our customers are using ScreenSteps that are very interesting. ScreenSteps for a long time has been used mainly to create software documentation for single applications. But now we are seeing more and more customers using ScreenSteps to support the integrated use of many applications.

This is an interesting development in several ways and shows what challenges small businesses, non-profits and educational institutions are facing.

Applications in general are becoming more modular in nature. Looking at our own business, we use separate applications for:

• Help desk
• Online knowledge base
• Email marketing
• CRM
• Project management

We much prefer this approach because instead of getting one app that does a lot of things “kind of well”, we get several apps that do one thing really well.

But this also presents a challenge – integrating all of these apps into a consistent workflow that works for our business. The vendors of the various applications can’t possibly provide documentation on how we will use these products together. If that documentation is going to exist we need to create it because it only applies to us.

For a long time we have used ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live to help ourselves make better use of the technology we purchase. We create documentation that is primarily for internal use. This benefits our business in a variety of ways:

• We spend less time re-learning workflows
• When someone is not around it makes it easier for other workers to take over their responsibilities.
• It makes it easier to add new people to our team on a temporary or permanent basis.
• It helps us integrate the various products/services we use more efficiently.

When we first launched ScreenSteps we were telling a lot of businesses that they should be following this same method of documenting things internally, but our suggestions seemed to largely fall on deaf ears. The companies we were talking to were interested in creating documentation for their customers, but not their employees.

But over the last few months we have really seen a change. We are talking to many more customers that are primarily using ScreenSteps to support their internal employees. We recently did a case study on Jenna Baze at Aero-Metric, Inc. using ScreenSteps and Google Sites to support her colleagues on Salesforce. Her primary job is to keep the sales team running efficiently. Good documentation helps their business run better.

We also did a case study on Judi Sohn at C3. Judi is using ScreenSteps and Google Sites to help her non-profit use Salesforce, WordPress, and other technologies..

We have also seen an uptick in interest from school districts and universities (one of the early adopters of ScreenSteps Live was Saddleback Valley Unified School District who grasped onto the concept of building visual knowledge bases right away and has had fantastic results.)

All these organizations have faced the challenge of getting the maximum benefit out of the technology products they are using. They want to turn technology features into business results. Documentation is helping them do that. ScreenSteps is helping them create that documentation more quickly and more clearly.

We are seeing this shift on ScreenSteps Live as well. Previously we would only hear from users who wanted to use ScreenSteps Live to support external customers. The thought was that internal employees could somehow get by without the same level of support that customers needed. But in recent weeks I would say at least half or more of our ScreenSteps Live customers are starting to use ScreenSteps Live for internal help files as well as external facing material. We are also seeing an increase in users who are only using ScreenSteps Live for internal facing help files.

It is an exciting time to be a small business. There are so many tools available that help you accomplish quite a bit with limited resources. The trick is tying it all together. Creating clear and simple documentation that is specific to your business or organization, regardless of the documentation tool you use, can really help you get the most out of your technology investment.

As a start up or a small but growing business, the most precious resource you have is time. It is something you never have enough of and something that can never be replenished. Every business owner knows this and they do all they can to protect their time.

Unfortunately, many small businesses think that the best way to protect their time is by building barriers that prevent their customers from contacting them when they have problems. While this may protect their time it creates frustrated customers who either won’t purchase or won’t recommend the company’s products.

If you protect your time at the expense of customer satisfaction your business will suffer.

Your customers who need support don’t want your time. They just want answers to their problems. They don’t care how they get it as long as the answer is correct and easy to understand.

You have two choices:

1. Build walls around yourself to keep the customer from getting to you, or
2. Surround yourself with information that gives customers the answers they need before they ever need to contact you.

BAD – Build a Wall of Obstacles to Keep People Out

Building a wall around yourself generally takes two forms:

1. Hiding contact information.
2. Not responding to support calls/emails/forum posts.

This will definitely save you time in the short term but with the high cost of dissatisfied customers. Customers will quickly figure out that you are only interested in their purchase of your product and not their success with your product.

GOOD – Build a Wall of Information to Help People Out

Option 2 is to surround yourself with information. Remember, as soon as your customer finds the answer they need they will go away satisfied. Surround yourself with helpful information and many of your customers will never need to contact you directly. This will free up time for you to work with those who do need direct interaction.

Here are four tips for surrounding yourself with helpful information:

1. Don’t lock your documentation up in a PDF manual. Make sure that you offer online help that is useful.
2. Don’t lock your training material up in videos that are too long or aren’t searchable. Your customer needs to be able to find the information.
3. Don’t use text when a picture would be better. Visual help files are the most effective way of answering how-to questions. Use them. Programs like ScreenSteps make creating visual help files very fast and very easy.
4. Find where your information is lacking and improve it. If you are missing an answer to a question, create a new help file that can be reused in the future. This will save you time down the road.

Helping your customers doesn’t have to be time intensive. Instead of building up barriers for your customers, surround yourself with answers to their questions. Doing this will protect your time, help your customers be successful and make your business better.

Using a web knowledge base to answer customer questions can be a tremendous resource. They are easy to access and easy to update.

Most web knowledge base articles are text based, however. Adding screen captures or other visual elements to your knowledge base articles can dramatically improve the results your knowledge base delivers. Most people think that it is just because the articles are more clear (visual information makes instructions easier to follow). But they also affect the user’s decision making when they are determining whether or not to read an article. Let’s look at why that is.

Knowledge bases usually contain “how-to” type articles. When a user views an article in your knowledge base they need to quickly answer two questions in their mind:

1. Does the knowledge base article apply to me?
2. Is the knowledge base article current?

Adding screen captures to your articles helps them answer these questions instantly.

Does The Knowledge Base Article Apply to Me?

By just adding a few screen captures the user can instantly see:

• Where the starting point of the article is
  

  Are there certain requirements that need to be met before you can use the information in the article? For example, if your article covers a function of Excel, does the user need to have imported some data before they can do what is described in the article? A screenshot of Excel with the data already imported will communicate that immediately.

• What part of the application the knowledge base article applies to

  If the application you are supporting has multiple screens, a screen capture will instantly communicate what part of the application the article covers.

• What type of result the knowledge base article instructions will produce

  If the user can see an image of the end result the article produces they can quickly decide if that is the result they are after.

Is The Knowledge Base Article Current?

This is probably the most important question you can answer. There is nothing more frustrating for your users then to follow the directions in your knowledge base only to discover that the instructions no longer apply to the version of the software they are using. Screen captures help the user quickly determine whether the version of the software that is described in the knowledge base article matches the version that they have. This saves a lot of frustration and lot of confused email/calls to technical support.

Visual Knowledge Base Example
Here is the same article both with and without screen captures. Notice how much more information is communicated with the simple addition of visual elements. (Knowledge base example taken from http://help.hover.com)

Conclusion

If users can determine that an article is applicable to them then they are much more likely to put the effort into reading it. by adding screen captures you can help your users make that decision in less time and get them to engage more quickly. This will dramatically increase the effectiveness of your knowledge base.

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