Many companies of all types and sizes utilize the services of virtual assistants because it’s proven to be an effective and easy way of delegating tasks, and allows more time in your schedule to handle all of the other items on your constantly growing to-do list. However, there may be times in which your virtual assistant will need to be trained or briefed on an assignment request and it is at this time that visual items such as screenshots and images can make a major difference in the details.

It’s so tempting to just shoot off a quick email full of instructions, but sending your virtual assistant a quick explanation of a complicated duty can result in misinterpretation and frustration on both ends. For example, you may ask your assistant to complete a task using a specific software program that they are unfamiliar with, and they end up totally missing the mark with the task. Now, not only is the task incomplete, but you will have to take additional time to re-explain the task or complete the assignment yourself.

We have a lot of customers who use Clarify to work with their virtual assistants. By taking just a few minutes to capture screenshots and images of the program’s interface, they are able to help their assistant get a clear idea of what they need. Many of our customers tell us that using Clarify to create their instructions actually takes less time than writing out an email. The result is a better experience for both parties. Our customer has a fully completed task, their assistant is paid and they are both happy.

If you are currently working with a virtual assistant or are thinking about hiring one, be sure to try out Clarify. You won’t find a faster or simpler way of delivering clear instructions that don’t get misunderstood.

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• 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.

Trevor is out of town this week so I am having to handle support requests by myself. Someone on our support chat was having a problem with ScreenSteps Workgroup.

The problem is that I don’t know much about the inner workings of ScreenSteps Workgroup. I know how it works, but I don’t know a lot of the troubleshooting information as it is a relatively new product for us and Trevor handles almost all of the Workgroup support requests.

I really didn’t want to have to bug Trevor and didn’t want to have to make the customer wait until Trevor got back so I took a quick look at our Workgroup manual that Trevor had authored. After stepping through just a few lessons I found a step that the customer had skipped. I pointed him to the lesson and his issue was resolved.

What is amazing about this is that I have never installed ScreenSteps Workgroup myself. I have no personal experience with the installation process. But with the ScreenSteps manuals I was able to see exactly what the user would be seeing. Because Trevor created everything in a step-by-step, task-based approach I was able to pinpoint right where the problem was.

What’s the point of this post? The point is to get the knowledge you have out of your head and into some form of documentation[software-documentation] as soon as possible. Knowledge that is only in your head, especially product knowledge, is a liability for your organization. Ifyou are gone, so is the knowledge. If you are unavailable, so is the knowledge. Great documentation is an asset that pays dividends over and over again.

Most importantly, great documentation means you won’t get a support call while you on a beach somewhere ;).

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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.

Survey.io is pretty simple. You can’t change any questions. All you can do is run the survey. It took less than 5 minutes to set up. Our goals in running the survey were as follows:

1. Help us know if we have created a product that our customers not only like, but love.
2. Help us know what words our customers use to describe our product.
3. Help us know what type of people our customers think should use our product.
4. Help us know what we need to do to improve our product.

The Purpose of the Questions

Let’s go through the questions one by one to see how it works (we ran two surveys, one for ScreenSteps Desktop and one for ScreenSteps Live but the questions were the same in both surveys).

1. How did you discover ScreenSteps (Live)?

This just gives us insight into how people have heard about ScreenSteps. This becomes more important as we look at the results to the following questions. Were customers who came through a specific channel more likely to be passionate users than those who came through other channels? We are still analyzing this data.

2. How would you feel if you could no longer use ScreenSteps (Live)? (Very disappointed, Somewhat disappointed, Not disappointed, N/A)

The purpose of this question is to gauge the product-customer fit. Have we created a product that meets the needs of a specific type of customer? If we get a lot of “very disappointed” responses then we know that we are fulfilling a very important need. If we get a lot of “somewhat disappointed” responses then all we have done is create a “nice to have”, but unnecessary product. That is bad. As a business you want to create a “must have” product.

The results from this question also help us interpret the responses to some of the later questions.

3. What would you likely use as an alternative if ScreenSteps (Live) were no longer available?

This lets us know what products or services our customers are comparing ScreenSteps products against in their minds. In creating our products and services we have followed a lot of the ideas presented in the Blue Ocean Strategy (basically, create a product in such a way that you have very few direct competitors). The good news for us was that according to the survey results we have pretty much been successful in this regard. Most respondents said they either would not know what to replace ScreenSteps with or would have to replace it with a combination of multiple products (Word or Pages combined with some form of a screen capture utility). Many expressed their dismay at the very thought :).

An interesting note here. ScreenSteps Desktop users had a harder time thinking of replacement products than ScreenSteps Live users did. That means that our marketing job is a bit tougher for the ScreenSteps Live product. It also means that we need to do a better job at differentiating the ScreenSteps Live product in our customers’ minds.

4. What is the primary benefit that you have received from ScreenSteps Desktop?

Studying these responses helps improve our messaging. We have created a product that we believe creates certain benefits. But our customers may perceive very different benefits. Or, they may perceive the same benefits but describe them differently. Basically, we want to use these answers to help us “speak the language” of our customers better.

5. Have you recommended ScreenSteps Desktop to others?

This is another gauge of how passionate our users are. A low number here would mean that our marketing job is going to be very difficult. For both ScreenSteps Desktop and ScreenSteps Live the number came in at around 70%. We were very happy with that result. Thank you to all of you who have recommended ScreenSteps to others.

6. What type of person do you think would benefit most from ScreenSteps (Live)?

This questions helps us with both our marketing as well as our product development. We will be studying these results to see if there are groups mentioned that we haven’t considered before. Once again, this helps us know how to better speak the “language of our customers”. We know the job roles we are targeting, but how do our customers describe those roles? We are still looking at this data.

7. How can we improve ScreenSteps (Live?) to better meet your needs?

This seems like a simple product suggestion request but actually becomes much more valuable in the context of the other responses, specifically the responses to question #2.

Let’s break our customers into two groups based on their answers to questions #2. Those who responded that they would be “very disappointed” if they couldn’t use ScreenSteps or ScreenSteps Live are “passionate” customers. Those who would only be “somewhat disappointed” are “happy” customers. Our goal is to turn as many “happy” customers into “passionate” customers as possible.

Obviously we will read all of the responses, looking for overall trends (and we are definitely already seeing some trends). But this data becomes even more important when you segment it between the “passionate” customers and the “happy” customers. If you take the group of customers who would only be “somewhat disappointed” if they couldn’t use your product and then look at what features they are requesting you can get a better sense of how to convert “happy” customers into “passionate” customers.

How Did We Do?

We were very happy with the results. The people at Survey.io say that you really want to have at least 40% of your users who would be “very disappointed” if they couldn’t use your product. The numbers are still coming in for ScreenSteps Live (it is currently at 53%, but that might change with more responses) but for ScreenSteps Desktop are results are as follows:

• 61% would be “very disappointed”.
• 35% would be “somewhat disappointed”.
• 3.4% don’t care what happens to us.

We are still studying all of the responses and there is a lot of data to sift through. But we have already received some great insights into things we can do in the short term to improve both ScreenSteps Desktop and ScreenSteps Live.

Try it Yourself

Survey.io is a free service and really gives some great insights into your business. Try it out for yourself and see what you learn about how your customers perceive your product or service.

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Good process documentation has saved us literally 10′s of thousands of dollars by allowing us to do more with fewer employees. But sometimes people don’t know what to document. They think they only need to document “big” things or things that they do frequently. We have found the opposite to be true. The most important things to document are the little things we do infrequently.

Here are 10 examples of things we document that have saved us a lot of time:

1. How to file our quarterly or annual tax forms. A lot of this is done online. I don’t know about you, but our forms are a little cryptic. Documenting this process turned what was usually at least an hour of work into about 5 minutes. Also, I no longer procrastinate the job and thus avoid flirting with late fees.

2. Importing CSV files. About once a week we have to import CSV files from our marketing analytics software to our CRM software. Before the data can come across it needs a little “massaging”. Documenting this has cut a 15 min. process down to about 3 min. and also prevents me from having to deal with bad imports because of mistakes I made in the import process.

3. Issuing refunds. We have a 100% percent money back guarantee on all our products. Fortunately, our customers very rarely ever ask for a refund. But documenting this process for the few times that it does happen has allowed us to process refunds almost instantly. The customer may not have been happy with the product but at least they go away with a positive impression of our organization.

4. Accepting wire transfers. Some or our international customers pay via wire transfer. It happens infrequently but documenting the process means we can get them the information they need right away when that is the only payment option available.

5. Preparing invoices for special situations. Every so often we have invoices that we have to prepare that don’t fall into the standard categories we bill for. It might be some custom work or a special way a reseller needs to be invoiced.

6. Downloading banking transactions. Unfortunately, each of our banks and credit card companies has a slightly unique twist on downloading transactions into our accounting software. Documenting this process saves us time, but more importantly, it gives us less excuse to procrastinate this necessary but dull task.

7. Setting up webinars. Every couple of months we will do a webinar. Documenting how to set up a new webinar helps us focus more on creating great content than dealing with the mechanics of running a webinar.

8. Installing WordPress on our servers. Installing WordPress is pretty easy. But remembering the unique details of how to do it with our hosting company can be a little tricky. After documenting it once it is a breeze to do.

9. Configuring a new computer. Everybody likes getting a new computer right? But getting everything set up can be a pain. Documenting some of the custom settings that need to be made for your work environment or network will make sure that you can add a new system with a minimal amount of pain.

10. Renewing our SSL certificates. This only needs to be done once every couple of years but the instructions our certificate provider has on their site are not very helpful. Documenting this process makes sure we don’t mess up our SSL certs.

All of the items listed above are tasks that we only occasionally perform. Those are the most important processes to document because they are the processes that are hard to remember. Add a little more process documentation to your business and I promise you will see big improvements in productivity.

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.

Trust.

If you do business the most important asset you have is the trust of your customers. As a new business this is the most important asset you can obtain (and often the most difficult).

We recently had two vendors announce price increases to services we use. With one company, after the experience was over, the trust I had in them had increased considerably. Was I happy about the price increase? No. But I understood why they needed to do it and how, in the long run, it would actually benefit our business.

With the other business the trust has been decimated and I don’t know if it can be recovered. A product we loved to use now has a taint around it.

Once you have the trust of your customers you should treat it like a precious treasure, never to be neglected or taken for granted.

Just look at Toyota. Think of how much money they are going to have to spend over the next years in an attempt to regain consumers’ trust.

Whenever you are dealing with your customers make sure that you pass your decisions through a “trust filter.” Ask yourself, will my action:

1. Increase the trust my customer has in me
2. Decrease the trust my customer has in me
3. Not affect their trust at all

You should always strive for decisions that will increase trust. Something that will decrease trust is never worth the short term gain.

Trust plays a huge factor in new sales. Do you know what I have found to be the best thing to say to a new prospect? “Our product may not be right for you.” (Of course, I only say this when I really mean it).

Many times we have people looking at ScreenSteps Live who want to do things with it that it really isn’t designed to do. They may be trying to create a marketing site or a blog with it. They may have just misunderstood what ScreenSteps Live is. By being honest with them and recommending other services that might better fit their particular need the trust they have in us as a company automatically increases.

Guess what the next question almost always is – “So how should I use ScreenSteps Live?” I then explain what ScreenSteps Live was designed to do and how they should use it. The vast majority of these people become customers. I can promise you that if I were to try to talk them into using ScreenSteps Live when another solution would be better for their particular problem I would instantly lose them as a prospect.

Gaining and maintaining trust is not easy. There are often hard decisions that fall into gray areas, and like any business, we haven’t always been perfect. But we have tried to do our best and quickly rectify any mistakes we have made.

When dealing with customers, error on the side of building trust. It is the most valuable asset you can obtain.

When the idea for ScreenSteps first came about there were already a wide a variety of media creation and software documentation tools. And many of them were very good at what they did. They had flash integration, video call outs, xml output, version tracking, translation controls, audit trails, all sorts of great things. But we had noticed something.

All software documentation that we saw was horrible. It was useless. It was always frustrating to use.

Software documentation tools had evolved by finding out what their users wanted. These users were usually technical writers who were charged with writing a manual. Most organizations didn’t rely on manuals for much. They were just something that had to get done and nobody really cared if they were effective or not.

In addition, it was the full-time job of these technical writers to work on documentation. They had time to learn complex tools and spend time fiddling with hundreds of options.

But we weren’t technical writers. We were business owners. To us documentation was useless unless it helped us run our business. And we weren’t full-time technical writers. We had to wear 20 different hats in our business each day so our needs were very different. We decided that, for us, three things were most important:

1. We had to be able to create the documentation quickly.
2. It had to be easy to add lots of pictures since that seemed to help our customers the most.
3. It had to be easy to update the documentation and pictures when things changed.

Those were the primary goals. Every feature we added had to help us meet those goals or at the very least, not take away from them.

Initially we thought our primary candidates for ScreenSteps would be technical writers. We were wrong. The three key items I have listed above were not the three most important items for technical writers. We quickly found that the things we cared about were not the same things they cared about.

We had two choices – change the product or change the target customers. We decided to change the customers. We tried to find people who cared about the same things that we cared about. This was largely influenced by Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Solution and Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy (both must-reads in my opinion). We were going to target non-consumption (people who should create documentation but didn’t) and carve out our own product niche.

Who were these people who should be creating documentation but weren’t? They were small business owners and IT support desks. The only thing these people cared about were actual business results. They needed documentation that was effective and that didn’t take a lot of time to create or maintain. They cared about the same things that we did and so it was a really good fit.

Things worked out pretty much as you might expect. Small businesses, IT support desks, consultants, school districts and universities have adopted ScreenSteps for their software documentation. They love the product and many have achieved phenomenal results. Technical writers still usually take a quick glance at it and move on since it doesn’t have the features they “need”.

Did we make the right decision? From a financial standpoint I don’t know. We could have created something with a much higher price point that met the needs of technical writers. But I don’t believe that creating tools for writing content that no one ever looks at is a great business to be in. I do know that watching our customers improve their organizations and businesses with ScreenSteps is really, really fun. So, from a life-fulfillment standpoint we definitely made the right decision.

So, what matters most to you? It is an important thing to figure out if you are creating a product or service.

Two bits of advice:

1. Make sure you know what matters most about the product/service you offer. Make sure everything you do contributes to what matters most.
2. Make sure you know what matters most to your customers. If it isn’t the same as what matters most to you then you need to either change what matters to you or change your customers. That will probably be the most important and most difficult decision you will make as a business owner.

When we used to do e-learning consulting, occasionally we would have to document a new “feature” on a product. The process for actually using the “feature” required so many steps that there was no possible way anyone would ever actually use the feature. The customers could use the feature, but they wouldn’t. The feature had clearly been developed with the goal of adding a bullet point to the product brochure but not without any intent of actually increasing the productivity of the organizations customers.

As you may know, we picked up an iPad about a month ago to do some documentation. When I haven’t been creating ScreenSteps tutorials for the iPad I have been playing around with it quite a bit. What have I noticed? I read a lot more. But I am not reading books. (I haven’t really delved into the eBook thing yet. I like lending good books to people too much. You can’t do that with an eBook.) I am reading many more blog articles, news items and even emails from relatives.

Why this change in my behavior? A lot has to do with Instapaper for the iPad. This is a great little utility that extracts the text you want to read from a website or email and stores it for you to read later. I have had this utility on my iPhone for awhile but have only used it sparingly. But the iPad really changed that.

I have found that the time I really want to sit down and read is after dinner and after all of the kids are in bed. But I don’t want to pull out my laptop to read something. I work all day at a computer and opening the laptop feels too much like work. This is my time to relax.

The iPad and Instapaper are perfect at this time. I open up Instapaper and instantly have a list of all the things I wanted to “read later”.

What is the feature of the iPad or Instapaper that has changed my behavior? It would be hard to list in a product brochure. In fact, Instapaper hardly has any features at all and the iPad is really just an iPod touch with a bigger screen. These products didn’t introduce stunning features. But they had the right mix of “something” to dramatically change my behavior.

Occasionally when people are looking at ScreenSteps they will ask us, “Well, can’t I do all of this with Microsoft Word and another screen capture utility.” We answer, “Yes you can, but you won’t.” ScreenSteps doesn’t have any features that let you do things that you couldn’t already do by using other tools. But ScreenSteps ties the workflow together in a way that is so easy that all of the sudden something people wouldn’t do (software documentation) becomes something they will do quite regularly. And some even think it makes documentation fun.

That was our goal when we created ScreenSteps. Could we take a bunch of people who aren’t currently creating documentation (but should be creating documentation) and change their behavior? Could we get them to create more documentation and better documentation? We still have a lot of work to do but I can say with certainty, in this regard, we have been successful. We hear all the time from our customers about how much documentation they are now creating with ScreenSteps and how much it is helping their business or organization. That is really rewarding.

Features matter very little. Products only improve your life if they help you do something better or faster. When you are building your next product or updating your current one, stop worrying about features. Ask yourself, “How can I change my customers’ behavior?” You’ll add a lot more value to their lives.

I don’t have any problem with these systems per se but it does concern me when companies rely on them too heavily. I was speaking with one of our vendors this week about a problem we were having with their system. He instantly went to their feature request database to see how many votes the feature improvement had so he could tell me when it would get done.

What?

They were basing what they were going to do next on the voting of a small handful of users. This makes absolutely no sense to me. Maybe if you could guarantee that all current users and all potential users had voted in your poll then you might have some actionable data. But when you have a handful of users voting on features all you have is another bit of information which may or may not be valuable.

Direct democracy has never worked out well. Not in governments and not in businesses. I like Jason Fried’s quote about software development:

Think of yourself as a curator. You want to be a curator. You have to decide what comes in and what goes out. Curator’s job is to say no. Curator takes an entire universe of options to decide whether or not something makes it into a museum. If you think of your product as a museum and your features as art then you’re in charge. If you take all of the possible art and put it into a room it doesn’t make it a museum. All the art in the world in a single room isn’t a museum it’s a warehouse.

Customer feature requests should inform your decisions, but not dictate them. Some developers think they are doing their customers a favor or that they are creating a better product letting their users drive their development decisions.

Our Approach To Feature Requests

We have found it helpful to treat every feature request with a large degree of skepticism. The main advantage our product, ScreenSteps, has over other software documentation applications is that it is easier to use. If we add in every feature request we receive then we would quickly lose the advantage of simplicity.

We like to take the following approach to feature requests:

1. Don’t take the feature request at face value.

The customer may be asking for a feature, but what they really want to do is accomplish a task. In their mind they have determined the best way to accomplish a task and have requested a feature that would help them do that. They may be right. They may be wrong. But we want to understand what they are trying to accomplish with the feature request, not just what feature they want implemented.

By talking to our customers we almost always come up with improvements that are:

• Easier to program than what the customer suggested
• Easier for our customers in general to use than what the customer suggested

By finding out what the customer really wants to do we can make a better decision about whether or not to implement the feature request.

2. Decide if this is something our software should do.

Now that we understand what the customer is trying to accomplish we need to decide if that task is something our software should be designed to accomplish. A software application can’t be all things to all people. This is probably the most difficult decision to make. On one hand you need to be flexible in your product vision because your customer may be introducing you to a new market that would readily accept the new functionality and improve your business. But on the other hand you don’t want to get distracted from what your overall product vision is.

Every developer has to weigh the pros and cons of the feature addition at this stage but trying to be all things to all people will quickly make you worthless to everyone.

3. Decide if this is something our software can do.

If we decide that it is a feature that we want to support then we next need to decide if it is something we can reasonably implement given our current resources. If it is then we will add it to our short term queue. If it isn’t then we put it on the back burner for a later date when we have things in place that will allow us to implement it.

Direct Democracy Doesn’t Work

Direct democracies don’t work anywhere. Organizations, businesses and products need leaders. If you are allowing users to vote on features, use that information to inform your decisions, but don’t let you users make your decisions for you. You’ll both end up being unhappy with the results.

It’s not MacHeist’s fault. It’s due to software vendors being totally unprepared for the flood of new users they are guaranteed to receive when they participate in something like the MacHeist bundle.

Here is a summary of my experience with several software packages in the MacHeist bundles*:

1. Purchase the bundle and download the software. This usually goes quite well. MacHeist does a pretty good job of making sure the purchasing and retrieval of the software keys goes smoothly.

2. Install and start using the software. Sometimes I get far. Sometimes I don’t. A lot of the applications in the MacHeist bundles are basically in a beta state. There are often bugs or incomplete/unintuitive features.

3. Go to company site to look for information. My first step is always to see if there is some documentation or at least a user forum. Of the product sites I have visited from the MacHeist bundle I have never seen any form of legitimate documentation. There might be 3 or 4 FAQ’s but not much more than that.

4. Contact support. Since there seems to be no hope of getting help on the website I contact support via email. Inevitably I get an email back that says something to the effect that they are buried in emails and will get back to me as soon as possible. I have never heard back from any of them.

So what is the result? I have a bunch of software that I got a great deal on that I never use. This is a missed opportunity for the vendor (I am certainly not going to recommend their product to anyone) and MacHeist since the whole process leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

I have essentially come to equate MacHeist products with terrible customer support. I doubt that is what the developers want. They are probably very nice people who work very hard. But they got flooded in support requests and weren’t able to keep up. They are like someone living in the time of Noah who decides to build an arc after the rain starts to fall. Guess what? It’s too late. You aren’t going to catch up.

Build the Arc Now

So, if you are thinking about having your product in one of these bundles consider me the crazy old man with the long beard who is telling you that the flood is coming. BUILD YOUR ARC NOW.

How do you build your customer support arc? It doesn’t have to take a lot of time or a lot of money. Here are 3 simple things you can do to make sure you don’t drown. (Note: If you don’t like the services I recommend here then swap out your own. Just make sure that you have a solution in each product category.)

3 Steps to Surviving the Flood

1. Get a Help Ticketing System

If you get any volume of support emails, your basic email inbox is going to break. Immediately. You need to have some sort of ticketing system. There are all sorts of solutions out there, but for the independent developer I am going to recommend Zendesk. If you have other suggestions for 1 or 2 people shops please post them in the comments below. Zendesk costs $9/month for the solo plan.

With a ticketing system you will be able to track which customers you have responded to and which you haven’t. If you keep getting the same questions over and over again you can set up macros with automated responses.

Also, remember that all help ticketing systems are not created equal. A free help ticketing system that is hard to use will end up costing you much more than $9/month. Zendesk is simple to set up and at $9/month your ticketing system will pay for itself in the first 30 min. Don’t be cheap. Do it.

2. Prepare two or three screencasts

This costs a little more money and takes more time. We personally use Screenflow which costs $99. It’s worth it. Record one or two videos giving an overview of what your product does and some of the features in the product. Don’t try to document your product using video. That will take too long and you don’t have time. You should be able to create 1-3 two minute videos that you can publish to YouTube and embed in your site. As an added bonus, YouTube videos will be playable on iPhones and iPads.

Why do this? You are part of a bundle. Many people will purchase the bundle without any clue about what your software does. They are going to come to your site looking for more information. A few good videos will go a long way in helping them understand what your software can be used for. (I know that MacHeist produces overview videos on their site but you need something on your site as well.)

If you want a good breakdown of what content you should include in your videos, check out our webinar “Video, Screencasts and Still Images – Using the Right Tool at the Right Time“.

3. Prepare some documentation/help files

I know you don’t want to. I know that you are saying, “But the software isn’t done so the documentation might change.” That doesn’t matter. Your job isn’t to have complete documentation. It is to keep from drowning in support requests. If you can anticipate the top 10 questions users are going to have and answer them in your documentation you will save yourself hours of time.

“Wait!” you are saying, “Nobody reads documentation.” It doesn’t matter if they read it. You are going to reference it when you reply to support tickets. Sending links to task-based documentation that includes pictures closes your support tickets more quickly. Just make sure that your documentation follows a task based approach that is optimized for use in the customer support process.

Don’t bother with a PDF file. It is going to be out of date before the first 10 support tickets are created. Publish your help files to the web so that you can update them whenever you need to.

If you need tips on how to structure your documentation for use in the customer support process, check out our webinar “Why Your Documentation is Useless and How to Fix It“.

Might I humbly suggest that you look at our product ScreenSteps Live to create documentation/help files really, really quickly. It costs $19/month for a single user and includes everything you need. Most importantly, it will help you respond quickly to support requests with clear, easy to follow instructions. By responding with visual documentation you will close your support tickets much more quickly.

Even if you don’t use ScreenSteps Live, do some form of documentation and make sure you include lots of pictures.

Budgeting Your Preparation Time

I know you don’t have much free time. Your software is about to go out to thousands of people and it isn’t even close to finished yet. That’s all right. Here is how to budget your time.

1. Sign up and configure Zendesk: 30-60 minutes
2. Create 2-3 videos: 1 day
3. Create some documentation: 30-60 minutes. (If you are using ScreenSteps. If not then it might take you a bit longer.)

You should be able to get everything set up and content created in 1.5 – 2 days. Doing this now will save you hours and hours once the support requests start coming in.

Budgeting Your Money

The approach I have laid out isn’t expensive. You say you don’t want to have recurring costs? No problem. Once the support requests have died down, cancel your Zendesk and ScreenSteps Live accounts. You can pull everything out of Zendesk with their API. With ScreenSteps Live you can publish your same content to static HTML pages and then host them on your site if you don’t want to pay the monthly fee.

But during the flood you want services like this in place because they will help you respond more quickly than the do-it-yourself alternatives.

Total cost for everything I have described:

Depending on what your time is worth this just needs to save about 2 hours or less of support time in that first month to pay for itself. And all you need is a handful of people to recommend your software to someone else because of your great customer support to totally zero out the cost.

The Flood is Coming – Build the Arc Now

If you are participating in a bundle like MacHeist, the flood is coming. MacHeist and companies like them are very good at generating a lot of customers for you. If you build your support arc before the customers come you’ll be all right. But if you wait until the rain starts to fall it will probably be too late.

* NOTE: I should say that there is one app that I got via a MacHeist bundle that I absolutely love, Picturesque. It does one thing and does it well. I have never had to contact their customer support.

1. Stage 1: Awareness (Video, Blogs)
2. Stage 2: Interest (Video, Screencast)
3. Stage 3: Investigation (Screencast)
4. Stage 4: Implementation (ScreenSteps)

If you have watched the webinar then you will remember that we felt like we had some good media for stages 2 and 4, but we have been missing a lot in stage 3. In preparing for our ScreenSteps 2.8 update we realized that our media for stage 2 wasn’t that great either. It was a little too specific. It focused on one aspect of the program but didn’t expose users to all that the product could do.

Since we were already working on updating our site for the 2.8 release we decided to redo all of our media as well. You might be interested in what we did.

Stage 2 Video – Interest

The goal of stage 2 is to create a video or screencast that moves the prospective customer to stage 3. That is all it needs to do. It shouldn’t be instructional in nature. It doesn’t need to be a support tool. It just has to generate enough interest that the customer wants to investigate the product in more detail. To do this the video needs to meet the following criteria:

• It needs to be short
• It needs to give a broad overview of the application (large scope, low detail)

To create our stage 2 video we used Screenflow, Keynote, Garageband and YouTube. The video shows up on the main ScreenSteps landing page. You can see an example of it here:

This was the hardest video to create. It took several days with a lot of edits and a lot of revisions.

Stage 3 Screencasts – Investigation

After watching the video we want to allow the visitor to investigate the product. To do this we set up a separate “Features” section of our website. On the left there is a menu that lists the features we are looking to highlight. For most of the features we include a short screencast highlighting that feature.

The purpose of this material is to make the visitor want to implement the feature. We aren’t worried about giving them enough information at this stage that they could implement the feature. Just enough to make them want to.

These videos need to meet the following criteria:

• One video per feature (more detail, less scope)
• It still needs to be short

These videos were actually very easy to create. By focusing on individual features the scripts are easy to write and the video is relatively straight-forward to record.

Here are a couple of examples of our feature videos:

• Capturing Images
• Annotating Images
• Replacing Images
• Creating Manuals

Stage 4 ScreenSteps Docs – Implementation

Finally, if the visitor has arrived to stage 4, we need to give them the tools they need to implement the vision we sold to them in stages 2 and 3. We didn’t change what we were doing here. We use ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live which work great for us and for our customers (see our documentation center).

But we did have to update almost every single lesson since the majority of the ScreenSteps user interface had changed. This meant replacing literally hundreds of screenshots in over 100 lessons. We will write a separate post on this process, but suffice it to say that it was much easier than we imagined. We had over 100 lessons updated in less time than it took us to record one video.

So, what do you think of the media we have prepared for stages 2 through 4? Are they effective? We’ll let you know what the results are in a couple of months, but we would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

• 40% of companies that used cloud computing services saw a 30% increase in revenue.
• 90% of companies that didn’t use hosted services saw a decrease in revenues.

Those are pretty dramatic numbers. But drawing the conclusion that using hosted IT services or cloud computing makes you profitable would be incorrect. It isn’t the act of using hosted services that makes you more profitable. It is the thinking behind the decision to use hosted services that really makes the difference.

Companies that use hosted services understand two important concepts:

1. Running lean is not the same as being cheap.
2. Any tool that helps you spend more time focusing on your core competency is a good thing to have.

Lean is Not the Same as Cheap

All small businesses should run as lean as possible. You shouldn’t have an office until you need an office. You shouldn’t have a PR firm until you need a PR firm. You shouldn’t have a $10,000 office chair ever.

But running lean isn’t the same as being cheap. Being cheap is stupid and can kill your business.

A cheap organization doesn’t want to pay for anything. They would rather do everything themselves for free. In essence, their time is worth less than their money.

On the other hand, lean and smart organizations understand that time can be just as, or even more valuable, than money. With this in mind they carefully evaluate each new expense based on the following criteria:

• Will this service make us money?
• Will this service save us money?
• Will this service save us enough time that we can better focus on our core competencies?

If the answer is yes to any of the questions above then they purchase the service.

Hosted Services Let You Hire “Specialists” At a Very Affordable Price

The best thing about hosted services is that you get to hire a specialist for each aspect of your business. For example, we currently use Zendesk, Basecamp, Mailchimp and Batchbook among other hosted services.

Now, we like to think that we are a pretty smart group of people here. Could we build our own help desk solution? Probably. Would it be as good as Zendesk? No. Not because we can’t but because we don’t live and breathe “help desk”. We live and breathe “documentation“. That is what we think about all day. How to make it easier to create and distribute software documentation. We’re never going to give “help desk” software the same level of attention that Zendesk does. I know Zendesk is thinking every day about how to make a better help desk. And I get all of the benefits from that which gives me more time to think about how to improve software documentation.

The same applies to project management with Basecamp, email marketing with Mailchimp and CRM solutions with Batchbook.

Another huge plus is that if these services ever go down it is their job to fix it, not mine.

It’s All About the Mindset

Will using hosted services make you more profitable? Maybe. But being lean instead of cheap and focusing on your core strengths will definitely help make you more profitable. For many small businesses, hosted solutions can help in both areas.