As a user, nothing is more frustrating than reading instructions that are out of date. Help files that describe buttons, icons or features that simply don’t exist anymore are one of the cruelest things any organization can inflict upon its users.
Unfortunately it is all too common. How often do your update your docs? What if you GPS was only updated as often as your documentation?
People are increasingly turning to Twitter to get customer support. Reaching out to a company on Twitter is simple and fast. But all companies that offer customer support via Twitter struggle with one question:
How do you answer customer questions in 140 characters or less?
The answer is that sometimes you can’t. Some answers require more detail. The trick is to optimize your online content for Twitter support. All you need is a Twitter account and a willingness to rethink how you structure and deliver your online documentation.
Have you ever answered a customer question by sending them to page 97 of your software manual? Or page 153? Or page 256?
Oh the horror. What if your GPS treated you the same way?
Without clear goals your software documentation is bound to fail. Recently we have started thinking of our documentation in two contexts:
As I wander the web I run into a lot of organizations that try to use user forums for software documentation. This is a big mistake. It creates a poor experience for your users and sets your organization up for customer support headaches. Software documentation and user forums have different purposes and need to be treated differently if you are going to deliver superb customer support.
In our previous article we talked about how we and some of customers use ScreenSteps Live to scale our support services through online chat. In this post I wanted to give you a few tips on getting started with online support chat. Following these tips have made offering chat support to a customers a benefit instead of a burden to our business.
If you have your help resources set up correctly then you don’t need to be intimidated about getting started with online chat. Just make sure you have a list of urls that point to common questions your customers have. Have this list handy so that you can easily paste the urls into your support chats. If you are using ScreenSteps Live for your documentation then be sure to set up all of your support agents with the ScreenSteps Live Support Client. The Support Client will save your agents hours of time when responding to support chats.
You don’t need to feel like you always need to have the chat service on. If things get too busy or you need to step out it’s not a big deal. All the chat services we have seen will let the user leave a message that will get emailed to you. Chat is a tool to help your customers and help your business. Don’t become a slave to it. Also, be aware that many chat services will let you limit the maximum number of simultaneous chats an agent can run. If all agents are busy then new chat requests will just go to your dropbox where they can leave a message.
For quite awhile now we have offered online chat from our website. A lot of our customers have asked us about our experience with offering chat support. They ask because they are concerened about adding chat to their website. They are worried about how much time it will take and whether or not they will get inundated with chat requests. In this post I’ll tell you about our experience with online chat as well as how we and some of our customers use ScreenSteps Live to improve the chat experience for our customers and support agents.
Yes! We added chat to our site over a year ago and it has definitely been worth it. I would say that over half of the chat requests we receive are actually pre-sales questions. Often someone just has a question about a feature, an integration or product licensing. By being able to answer their question instantly we have been able to close many sales that would have otherwise been delayed or abandoned. I have spoken with several other users of chat services and they report similar experiences. So, from a strictly monetary standpoint, chat makes a lot of sense.
Over the last couple of weeks we have been thinking a lot about customer support vs. customer success. For the purposes of this article and several follow-up articles I plan on writing I am going to the define these two terms as follows:
Customer support: Helping your customers solve problems they encounter when using your product. This includes addressing bugs as well as providing information about how to accomplish specific tasks with your product.
Customer success: Helping your customers improve their business, their organization or their lives by using your product.
Customer support deals with small, focussed issues. Customer success deals with the macro application of your product to achieve larger goals. To create real evangelists of your product or service you need to have great systems in place for supporting your customers, but you also need to have systems in place to ensure their success with your product or services.
We are really good at customer support. We have great systems in place that help us address support issues quickly and consistently. But our results with ensuring customer success are more mixed. We have some customers who are fantastically successful with ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live and who evangelize it regularly while other are simply satisfied customers that are happy with the product.
To a small company like ours the value of a thrilled customer who shouts our name from the roof tops vs. a satisfied customer who occasionally uses ScreenSteps is huge. If we were to put a monetary value on those customers the difference would be literally thousands of dollars vs. a one time $40 or $80 purchase.
What is the main difference between these two types of customers? Our “satisfied” customers just use ScreenSteps to create documentation. They are using it to complete one of the tasks that need to get done in the course of running their business or organization. Our passionate users use ScreenSteps to change the way they run their business or organization. ScreenSteps and/or ScreenSteps Live don’t just change their documentation. They change their business.
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.
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:
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
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.
Just came across an interesting presentation by Cheri Lockett Zubak via Anne Gentle’s “Great State of the Union for Tech Comm” post. Cheri’s presentation is titled, “Developing Content as a Business Asset”.
The presentation follows a User Assistance Group at an imaginary company as they try to explain to their President why their group is an asset to the company. I was clicking through the slides and came to this one:
I was quite surprised when I clicked the arrow and found that it took me to our webinar on software documentation. The title of our webinar is “Why Your Documentation Stinks and How to Fix It.”
Apparently, Linda, the protagonist in this story, didn’t like the webinar.
Blue Mango Learning Systems
© 2011
