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?

Here are three simple tips for keeping your documentation up to date:

1. Make it simple to know when docs need updating (pictures really help)

If your documentation only has text it becomes really, really hard to figure out what needs updating. You literally have to read everything. But if your docs use a lot of screenshots then you can quickly scan the documentation to see what needs updating.

2. Remove the barriers to updating your docs

If you have cumbersome authoring or approval processes then your docs will stay out of date. Make sure that your authors can quickly get access to source material, especially the original images used for your screenshots. You should also make sure that your review processes are not overly draconian. The more barriers you can remove the better chance your docs will have of staying up to date.

3. Make sure your docs get used

This is the single best tip. If you and your customers are using your documentation on a regular basis then your docs will stay up to date. The best way to get your docs used is to include your documentation in the customer support process. Your customers will instantly tell you when something is out of date and you can get it taken care of right away.

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.

Optimizing your responses for 140 characters

If customers are going to ask for support in 140 characters then you need to respond in 140 characters. Let’s say your customer asks, “How do I integrate my account with x service?” on Twitter. You obviously can’t explain every detail in 140 characters and responding across multiple tweets can get really tedious. That isn’t what Twitter is good at.

But Twitter is really good at sharing links. So, instead of trying to provide all of the details in your tweet you need to share a link to your online documentation that has the answer your customer needs. On Twitter you need to point customers to the answer they want instead of trying to write that answer in 140 characters or less.

Do your docs pass the Twitter test?

But this won’t work if your online documentation isn’t optimized for use on Twitter. How do your get your online documentation ready for Twitter? They key is to have many small help topics that focus on specific questions your customers have.

Take this test. Look at the last 20 or so questions you’ve received in your support queue. How many could you respond to with a single tweet? Your tweet should look something like this:

@customer Here is how you do that: http://link_to_your_answer_in_your_online_help_system

If you can’t respond with a link that points exactly to the answer your customer needs then your online documentation has failed the Twitter test. It doesn’t matter if the answer is in your documentation “somewhere”. If you can’t send a url that points exactly to that answer you fail the test.

Many organizations fail the Twitter test because they clump too many help topics onto a single help page. We call this connecting your documentation with cement. What you want to do is connect your documentation with velcro.

If you want to learn a little more about what it means to connect your docs with velcro so that they can easily be pulled apart then watch this video, “Connect Your Software Documentation with Velcro”.

Offering customer support on Twitter doesn’t have to be hard. If you take the time to organize your online documentation you will find that you will be able to quickly answer questions and thrill your customers.

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Oh the horror. What if your GPS treated you the same way?

Don’t attach your documentation with cement. Move your docs online and attach them with velcro so that you can easily pull out just the information your customer needs.

1. Documentation that provides a road map
2. Documentation that removes roadblocks

Roadmaps vs. Roadblocks

A Road map tells someone where to start and what steps to take to arrive at a desired destination.

A Roadblock is something that keeps someone from continuing on the path they are already traveling.

The main difference is that someone who has encountered a roadblock already knows where they want to go. They are just stuck and need help getting unstuck.

Someone who needs a road map doesn’t know where they are going yet. That is why they need the road map.

For example, a consultant setting up Salesforce in a new org who gets stuck with setting up single sign-on doesn’t need a road map. They know what they want to do. They just need documentation that helps them remove the roadblock that is preventing them getting single sign-on working.

But a brand new Salesforce admin probably needs a road map that will help them implement Salesforce correctly and achieve product adoption. Removing roadblocks won’t help them yet since they don’t even know which road to take.

Customer Support vs. Customer Success

Our popular Plan not to Plan methodology is ideal for removing roadblocks. Someone gets stuck, they ask you a question and you answer it with crystal clear instructions. The next time someone asks the same question you have a ready-made answer.

But what about that person who needs a road map? Their needs are very different. They know the outcome they want. But they have no clue how to get there. The Plan not to Plan methodology doesn’t meet the needs of these people because they don’t even know which road they should be on. In providing a road map you need to address broader topics and best practices as opposed to just how-to’s. This takes planning.

Were do Road maps and Roadblock apply

Road maps should be used for:

• New customer onboarding
• Establishing best practices
• New user onboarding (when a new user is added to a plan or an account)

The goal with road maps is to give your customer a clear understanding of how they should be using your application.

Roadblock removal comes into play after the customer has the road map. The purpose of roadblock removal is to decrease customer support requests and keep your users sailing through their daily workflow.

Providing road maps will allow customers to adopt best practices which will ensure customer success. Removing roadblocks will decrease customers support requests.

As you develop your documentation strategy you need to address both issues. In a future post we will explain how we are tackling this issue here at Blue Mango.

Software documentation shouldn’t be permanent, forum posts should

Software documentation shouldn’t be permanent. It should change whenever your application changes. You need to think of your software documentation site as the authoritative source for how-to information on your product. That means, if a software documentation article is no longer valid for your product you need to delete it or update it.

Forums are for user discussion. They are a place where users can post questions or problems and where you or your user community can do your best to help them out. If you start using your forums for documentation it can become tricky to figure out what to do with old postings. Do you delete them? Do you update them? Do you go through all of the old postings and put a note that says “This discussion doesn’t apply to the latest version of our software?”

It’s a tricky situation for you as a company and even worse for your users. Many times, your older forum posts will rank higher in search rankings, especially if they had a lot of inbound links. So what happens when I go to Google to search for a resolution to the issue I am having? I get an outdated forum post as the top result. Not a good user experience.

How to get forums and software documentation to work together

Remember that your software documentation site should be the authoritative source for the “how-to” information about your product. Follow these steps to keep everything where it belongs.

1. Make sure you create software documentation articles that answer real user questions.
2. Make sure those articles can be easily referenced (they have a unique url that you can share somewhere).
3. When questions are posted in user forums answer with a reference to your software documentation article that answers the question.
4. If you don’t have an article that answers the question then create one.

Let’s look at an example.

A user comes to your forums and creates a post asking, “How do I integrate your product with WordPress?” You might be tempted to respond inline. Don’t. Go to your software documentation site. Do you have an article on integrating with WordPress? If so, add a link to it in your forum response. If not, then create one in your documentation site and add the link to the forum post.

Now, let’s fast forward 3 months. Your product has changed slightly and the method of integrating with WordPress has changed as well. All you need to do is update your software documentation article. Since the forum post points to that article, any future visitors will be linked to the current, correct information. They won’t be presented with outdated instructions that simply won’t work.

Caveat – Make Sure Your Software Documentation Doesn’t Stink

This only works if you have great software documentation. If you point users to documentation articles that are unfocussed or unclear you are just going to create more frustration. If you want some tips about how to structure your documentation in a way that will work effectively with user forums as well as other areas of the web (social media, etc.) then check out our eBook, “5 Keys to Successful Software Documentation”.

Summary

If you remember that software documentation is for authoritative answers and forums posts are for user assistance you will know where your content belongs. If you start pointing forum users back to specific articles in your documentation managing customer support will be easier and your customers will be happier.

Getting Started

1. Prepare your documentation

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.

2. Don’t worry about always having it on

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.

3. Remember to say goodbye

When you step away be sure to switch your status to offline. That is the only way your chat service will know that you aren’t available. If you leave the chat on but aren’t at your computer you are going to get a lot of customers typing, “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?” I say this because I have done this many times.

4. Use some sort of text macro program

Most of the chat services I have seen allow you to set up macros. I personally use TextExpander for this sort of thing. Setting up a few macros can really save you a lot of time and help you avoid typos in your chats. I find that short macros for commonly used words or phrases work better then full responses. Full responses in a macro often seem canned and impersonal (because they are). I use macros for the following text snippets:

• Major urls (our store, our documentation site, our home page, etc.)
• Product/business names (ScreenSteps, ScreenSteps Live, Blue Mango Learning Systems, ScreenSteps.me, ScreenSteps Workgroup)
• Phone numbers/email addresses

5. Know when to take it offline

Sometimes you might run into an issue that is too complex to deal with over chat. Don’t be afraid to move your chat conversation to a different medium. If something seems a little too involved for chat we will ask the customer if we can switch the conversation to a phone call or a GoToMeeting session if necessary.

Conclusion

Online chat is a fantastic tool and, for us, a very important part of our customer support and sales strategy. If you aren’t currently using online chat then you really should get started. If you have the right resources and strategies in place then it will become an invaluable tool instead of a time sapping burden.

Is online chat worth it?

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.

It is also great as a customer support tool, but this is where you need to be careful. If you don’t have the proper systems and resources in place then online chat can end up taking a lot of time as you try to explain solutions to your customers’ problems. This is where ScreenSteps Live makes a big difference for us. We leverage our ScreenSteps Live documentation site to reduce the time we spend answering support chats.

Using ScreenSteps Live with Online Chat – Basekit

Basekit, one of our customers, has had a lot of success integrating ScreenSteps Live into their online chats. They use their ScreenSteps Live documentation to handle two types of questions, “Does it do this?” (pre-sales questions) and “How do I do this?” (support questions). In the video below Gordon Plant from Basekit explains how ScreenSteps Live is helping them scale their online chat support.

Read our full case study on how Basekit uses ScreenSteps Live

Basekit will even create new documentation in their ScreenSteps Live site during a support chat and send the answer to the user.

How to Leverage ScreenSteps Live in Online Support Chats

Most of the articles in our ScreenSteps Live documentation site answer specific questions such as “How do I configure my desktop software?” or “How do I create a custom template?” When a user asks one of these questions we use the ScreenSteps Live Support Client to find the article that answers their question. The ScreenSteps Live Support Client lets us quickly copy a url that points to the article with the answer the customer needs. Instead of spending a lot of time typing out an answer that is either lengthy and confusing or short and incomplete, we just paste in a url. The user clicks on it and is instantly taken to an article full of detailed pictures that helps them accomplish whatever task they are struggling with.

This works even better with more involved chats. Sometimes we have customers that are trying to accomplish a more complex task. We can point them to the articles they need for each step of the process. Many times I will send multiple articles in a chat and the customer will reference them after the chat session has ended. Once again this saves us and our customers a lot of time and spares us a lot of the confusion that is inherent in text only communications.

The best part is that our customers love it. They will often read a help article that we have sent them, come back to the chat and thank us for providing such clear instructions. Like Gordon said in the video above, it is a great outcome for both of us. The customer is happy and we don’t spend all day typing.

• 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.

To one group we have offered great customer support. To another we have somehow ensured customer success.

Our successful customers are evangelists. They tell everyone who will listen to them about ScreenSteps. The results to our business and bottom line are significant. Here are just a few examples:

We have one customer who read about us through a blog post, downloaded a trial and then reached out to us. We have had great interactions with him through telephone calls and web meetings where we have talked a lot about not only how to use ScreenSteps but how to successfully implement ScreenSteps in his organization. He is part of a major division at a Fortune 100 company. They are now one of our largest ScreenSteps customers, are looking at deploying ScreenSteps across the entire division and have other divisions evaluating ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live as well.

Another customer who was attending the Dreamforce conference noticed that there was going to be a session on training. She told one of the speakers that he needed to check out ScreenSteps. The speaker reached out to us and we spent some time showing him ways to create successful training with ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live. As a result he made ScreenSteps a major part of his presentation to a standing-room only audience at his Dreamforce session.

Another one of our customers contacted us last week to let us know that he was recommending that all of his customers get set up with ScreenSteps Live. ScreenSteps Live helped him communicate more clearly with his customers and helped his customers be more successful with the services he was providing them.

Look at what we received from these three examples, all with zero dollars spent on marketing or direct sales:

1. Deployment of ScreenSteps across a major division at a Fortune 100 global organization.
2. Prime presentation time to an audience who are prime candidates for benefiting from ScreenSteps (Salesforce administrators) at the premiere Salesforce event of the year.
3. Steady stream of referrals from a customer creating repeatable, recurring revenue for us.

Even fantastic “customer support” wouldn’t have been enough to create the type of customers I have listed above. Those customers are passionate not because we solved customer support issues they might have had with ScreenSteps but because we made sure that they were successful with ScreenSteps.

The good news for us is that our customer support process is established, effective and repeatable. The bad news is that our customer success process isn’t. Every customer that uses ScreenSteps or ScreenSteps Live only occasionally or who only uses our products to “create documentation” is a customer success failure on our end and a lost opportunity. The questions for us are as follows:

• How do we replicate the experience that our most passionate customers have had with our happy but less passionate customers?
• How do we create more evangelists?
• How do we ensure the success of more customers?
• How do we make customer success a standardized, repeatable process?

We are running some experiments in this area right now. I will let you know how they turn out in a future post.

I would love to know what your experience with customer success has been.

• What companies have done a great job of making sure you are successful with their products or services?
• How have you helped your customers be successful?
• What has been the result?

This is a major area that we are focusing on right now so anything you can share in the comments would be great.

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.

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.

Linda found this webinar to be demeaning.

Actually, Linda said a lot more than that. If you want to see her full reaction, download the PDF of the presentation and check out page 11.

Linda then goes through each member of her team, asking them how they think that their group is an asset to the company. Most of the other team members dismiss the video as well. Except for Tim.

Tim looks Linda in the eye. “I agree with what you’re saying about those movies,” he says, “But as much as I hate to say it, that Documentation Stinks webinar does have one point I agree with. We don’t know our audiences well enough.”

Tim explains to Linda how he regularly interacts with customers as part of his role, but that the rest of the team does not. I like this line at the end of page 23 describing how Tim responds to Linda:

Tim knows who approves his paycheck, so he didn’t quite come out and say, “Put up or shut up.” But the implication was there.

Tim is right. Talking about talking to users is a lot different than actually talking to users.

There are lots of great nuggets in this presentation. I especially recommend checking out the following sections:

• Pages 14-15 about Gems (essentially, creating content that helps customers implement best practices with your product).
• Page 26 for Linda’s takeaways from her conversation with Tim.
• Page 31 for Linda’s takeaways regarding creating passionate users. I especially like, “We should become the first resource customers go to when they have a question – not because they have no other choice but because we develop ‘go to’ content that they trust and respect.”
• Page 32 about improving the domain expertise of technical writers.

I’m sorry Linda didn’t like our webinar. Our intent isn’t to offend, just give people a simple, workable framework for improving their businesses and organizations. But regardless of how Linda feels about our webinar, it sounds like she is on track to making some good changes in her organization. I like how Linda responds to her President:

The User Assistance group communicates JournalTech technology so that our customers continue to want to use our products and services.

If you are helping your customers continue to want and use your products/services then your group is succeeding. If you aren’t then maybe your documentation stinks and you should watch our webinar :). Just make sure you do it with a thick skin.

Yesterday Lance Walley, their CEO, posted about why they had to change their prices. Essentially, they had priced themselves into a corner. They worked primarily on a freemium pricing model but with a premium sales and support process. The two don’t mix well.

Their original pricing made it very easy for businesses to “try out” their service. Any business could use Chargify to manage up to 50 subscription users for free. After that there were various price plans based on the number of users you had.

We already had a billing system in place before switching to Chargify but Chargify had a lot of features that were really nice, saved us a bunch of time and mode our lives easier. After starting out with the service we eventually became paying customers.

The problem for Chargify was that they experienced all of the costs associated with our account when we were free customers.

Chargify isn’t simply a service you turn on and it starts working. Especially if you are going to use their API (which is the approach we took). Working with API’s, no matter how good they are, takes time for customers and creates a lot of questions. Organizations that offer API’s often have to spend a lot of time answering those questions.

In our early days I had questions about the product and how it worked that were quickly answered by phone, email and Twitter. And I eventually became a paying customer. But according to what Chargify is saying, there were many, many customers that never converted from free accounts to paying accounts, simply because they weren’t growing fast enough.

Once again, most of Chargify’s support costs were incurred while accounts were free (now that we are a paying account I rarely contact support at all). If your support costs are high for free accounts and very few of those accounts become paid accounts then your business will run into trouble very quickly which is exactly what happened to Chargify.

Matching Your Sales/Support Plan With Your Pricing Model

Chargify’s support has always been fantastic, but it was the wrong sales/support model for the pricing model they had implemented. If you are going to offer a freemium service then the sales and support process needs to be largely self service.

Chargify had a pricing model that required self-service but a setup process that required a lot of one-on-one interaction. The two don’t mix. If set up is going to require a lot of one-on-one time then you need to do one of the following:

• Charge for setup
• Require a minimum paid contract after setup
• Retain the customer for a long enough time and at a low enough ongoing support cost that they are profitable

I am not a fan of the freemium model, especially for new B2B businesses. We tried it in the early days and things have gone much better since we went away from it. But if you are going to have a free or low cost solution you need to make sure that you have resources in place to effectively scale your business.

Good Documentation Eases Support Costs

One of those resources is good documentation. I really believe that better documentation could have really helped Chargify out. They recently launched a new documentation site. This is much better than what they previously had but it still isn’t there. The lack of a search feature is a major omission which just serves to increase their support costs. In addition, support resources are now spread out across a knowledge base, software documentation, forums, an FAQ and API documentation. In the end it is easier to contact support than to find an answer to your question.

We have had many businesses come to us who were in the same situation. We had one customer come to us who was just about to shut their business down because of high setup costs. They started using ScreenSteps Live and support requests instantly dropped. We regularly hear the same story from other customers. Having good documentation that is updated regularly helps them scale their business.

Now, not just any documentation will do. Our customers are following a simple methodology for creating documentation that decreases their support load and improves their business. If you have the methodology in place then things work great. If all you do is create documentation and pray that it works then you won’t get very good results.

Changing Prices and Grandfathering Existing Customers

One of the major causes of backlash for Chargify was their refusal to grandfather existing customers as they rolled out new plans. It is fairly typical for SaaS based products to grandfather existing users when they roll out new pricing plans (Grandfathering is the process whereby existing users are able to keep their current pricing regardless of new pricing for new users). Zendesk learned this the hard way several months ago and eventually ended up grandfathering customers. I am assuming that Chargify is doing this because the cost of supporting existing customers is higher than the profit gained by those customers.

You can’t grandfather customers if existing customers are causing you to lose money. Don’t put yourself in this position.

The lack of grandfathering really ticked a lot of people off. As a customer it really felt like a breach of trust to have pricing changes sprung on us with such little notice. But obviously, it was a move Chargify felt they needed to do quickly.

This is another area where better docs could really help them since the majority of the costs associated with existing customers are support related.

Let’s be clear. The Chargify guys are much smarter and accomplished than I am and have created some incredible businesses (Grasshopper, Engine Yard, etc.). As far as marketing, product development, and PR they really know what they are doing and we can (and have) learned a lot from their examples and blog posts. But I believe that if they would have focussed on their support and documentation costs from the beginning then they would have been in a better position to raise prices for new customers while keeping existing customers happy. They could have made sure that at least their existing paid customers were profitable customers.

The One Thing We Have Done Right

We have done a lot of things wrong in our business but we have always focussed on having great documentation. We see this as being a key factor in allowing our business to grow. We develop and support three significant products, ScreenSteps Desktop, ScreenSteps Live, ScreenSteps Workgroup, and plan on launching a new service, ScreenSteps.me, fairly soon. There are only two of us but we always answer the phone and respond to support tickets quickly.

But we don’t get that many calls. And we don’t receive that many support requests. Our customers are doing some really amazing things with our products and integrating with a wide variety of services. But because the docs are good and are in a simple, centralized location our customers’ questions are answered before they have to contact us.

This gives us a lot of flexibility as we go forward. We have a subscription service, ScreenSteps Live, that is really affordable for our customers. At some point we will probably increase prices for the service. But because our support costs for existing customers are so low we will easily be able to grandfather existing accounts, allowing them the option to keep their existing pricing and plans, only upgrading to higher priced plans if they want to. We have already done this once in our history and received zero push back from our customers. They viewed the new pricing as optional as opposed to obligatory. We were able to make it optional because of low support and infrastructure costs.

Could that change? Yes. If our infrastructure costs dramatically increased then we could be in a position that we would have to increase prices for existing customers. But infrastructure costs seem to be going down instead of up so I don’t really see that happening.

Will we be sticking with Chargify? Yes. They have a great product and great service. And the new pricing isn’t really that big a deal for us. The way the pricing increase was handled left a bit of a sour taste in our mouth and changed what was unbridled enthusiasm to something a little less glowing.

I should probably be careful in what I say. We haven’t experienced the kind of growth and press attention that I am sure Chargify has. And maybe things would be different if we did. But I do know that the money our customers pay us is more than what they cost us in support. That gives us a lot of options as we grow our company.

If you would like to read an excellent summary of what of what Chargify learned from this experience you can find it here.

The truth is, most FAQs aren’t updated continually. They are created once and then left alone. Creating the FAQ page is a project. Once the project is completed then it isn’t revisited unless absolutely necessary.

Let me suggest a better approach. Don’t create a FAQ. Create a FUA (Frequently Updated Answers). Just changing the title causes you to rethink the way you approach it.

What makes a good FUA?

Here are the principles behind a good FUA:

1. An FUA is always up to date. You don’t let stale information stay in your FUA.
2. An FUA is constantly changing. You might have discovered a new use case for your product, or introduced a new workflow. The FUA should contain answers to all of the new questions that arise.
3. An FUA should get used. You should point your customers, your support staff and your sales team to it. This way you only have to answer questions once, instead of 500 times.

Do we use an FUA?

Our documentation for ScreenSteps basically functions like an FUA for our products. And it saves us hours and hours in decreased support time. The place where we need to do better is in our policies. We don’t have an FUA for things like, “What is the difference between ScreenSteps Workgroup Connection and ScreenSteps Workgroup Concurrent?” or “Do you accept purchase orders?” These answers are spread out around our website which means neither we nor or customers can remember exactly where to go to find the answers. The result is that we spend a lot of time answering those same questions over and over again. It is something that we are going to be looking at improving in the next couple of weeks.

I quickly fired up ScreenSteps and grabbed a few screenshots showing the bug and how to recreate it. I then went to their support site to submit a ticket. This is what I saw:

It is a very nice form, but there is no way to attach a file. And there was no email address listed where I could send an email with an attachment. So instead of sending some nice pictures of the bug report I had to type in a description. It took me longer to describe the problem and it will take their techs longer to understand it. Both of our lives would be easier if I could send them screenshots of the problem instead of just describing it in text.

Are you making it easy for your users to communicate visually with you? I know that when we get bug reports that have screenshots attached to them we can usually solve the issue in a fraction of the time. Don’t prevent your customer from sending you screenshots. You are just creating more work for the both of you.

• I drop the car off. The service desk gives me a time estimate when they think it will be ready.
• One or two hours after their time estimate has passed I still haven’t heard anything from them.
• I call them and they say, “Oh, yeah, it has been ready for awhile now. You can come pick it up at anytime.”

Despite their promise to call me when my car is ready I have never received a call back. And this isn’t just a at one service station. It is at every one I can remember going to. That is why I don’t feel any loyalty to any one particular service station – they have all broken their promises to me.

I really believe that 80% of providing great customer service is about keeping your promises. There have been times when we haven’t been able to solve a customer’s issue. They may have been disappointed but they were never upset. Breaking a promise to a customer is pretty much guaranteed to make them upset.

Here are few steps that will help you set expectations for your customers and keep your promises:

1. Don’t Make Promises You Can’t Keep

It is much better to tell your customer that you can’t get an answer for another three days than to make a promise you can’t keep. Sometimes companies want to seem “bigger” than they actually are so they make promises that they can’t possibly fulfill. Do you have the staff to guarantee that a customer support request will be addressed within one hour? If not then don’t promise that you will. Adjust the customer’s expectations to what you are reasonably able to deliver.

2. Don’t Remember Your Promises, Write Them Down

Don’t try to keep all of your promises in your head. Eventually one of them will fall out. Use some sort of task manager where you can set due dates to make sure that you don’t forget the promises you make. I use OmniFocus. As soon as I make a promise to a customer I create a task in OmniFocus with a due date. That helps me make sure that even if I forget the promise I made, OmniFocus will remind me about it.

3. Establish Processes and Use Tools That Help You Keep Promises

Processes and Systems help you keep promises. Have a return policy. Document the steps to process a return. Use a help ticketing system. That will help you make sure you have responded to all support requests in a timely fashion. The more processes you have in place the better you will be at consistently keeping your promises. Choose software tools that help you establish these systems and your life will get much easier.

4. Give Your Promises a Due Date

This a principle that I just learned recently. Open ended promises are much harder to keep then ones with a specific due date. So instead of saying, “I will get you that proposal to you,” say:

“I am going to try to get the proposal to you in 3 days. If I can’t get to it by then I will let you know.”

The promise has a due date. Both the customer and I know what is expected and when it is expected. At least in my case, promises without due dates tend to slip through the cracks.

What is your experience with customer support promises?

Have you had a time when an organization didn’t keep their promise? Or, even better, when a company went out of their way to keep a promise? What was the experience like? Please share your experiences in the comments below.

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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.

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