A couple of weeks ago we redid the design of our own ScreenSteps Live site. As part of the redesign we wanted to tie our ScreenSteps Live site into our Zendesk help desk. We use Zendesk to manage our support tickets and recently moved our forums over to Zendesk as well. The goal of the redesign was to bring our help tickets, forums and software documentation all together into one consistent interface for our users.

We are very happy with how things have turned out. We know a lot of our customers would like to do something similar so we have prepared several resources that will help you more tightly integrate Zendesk and ScreenSteps Live. As of today you can do the following:

1. Add a Zendesk custom template to your ScreenSteps Live site.
2. Add a “Documentation” tab to your Zendesk site that will point to your ScreenSteps Live site.
3. Add a “Documentation” search widget to the front page of your Zendesk site.

We have also prepared a new video that showcases all of the ways you can integrate ScreenSteps Live with Zendesk:

We have been long time sponsors of the NosillaCast podcast (A Technology Geek Podcast with an EVER so slight Macintosh Bias). Allison does a great show and has a very loyal following. To say that she is a strong proponent of ScreenSteps would be a vast, vast understatement.

Her listeners often kid her about this but they also like to show her the interesting ways that they use ScreenSteps. She featured a story on her show this week that I thought was great.

One of her listeners, James Fisher, was having problems downloading books into the iBooks app on his iPad. After a few emails back and forth with Apple he decided to create a ScreenSteps lesson showing exactly what was going on. The response from the Apple support tech started with “Thank you for the fantastic PDF guide.” They probably thought James spent about an hour putting it all together :).

If you want to read the whole story or see an example of what James did you can check out Allison’s show notes (scroll about halfway down the page for the ScreenSteps section of the show notes).

We talk a lot about using ScreenSteps for providing tech support. But it is also great for getting tech support. The key is it helps to clarify the conversation which speeds everything up and makes everyone happier.

You can subscribe to Allison’s podcast here.

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

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

Quoting from Ellis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting the Customer Help Desk on Twitter and Online Chat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by geishaboy500

We obviously create a lot of documentation. People often ask us what tools we use. Here is a quick rundown of the tools we use on a regular basis to create our documentation.

• We use ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live for creating and publishing our documentation.
• For creating video we mostly use Screenflow. It is a great combination of both screen recording and editing. If we don’t need to do much editing we will occasionally use iShowU.
• For creating flow charts or process diagrams we use OmniGraffle. It is a fantastic tool for creating simple or complex diagrams. We also have a simple method for getting OmniGraffle diagrams into ScreenSteps.
• If we need to do more detailed image editing than what is available in ScreenSteps then we use Photoshop or Acorn. We use these tools if we need to remove or blur parts of an image or somehow doctor it to look different than the original capture.

That’s pretty much it. What tools do you use?

When we first started Blue Mango Learning Systems we created a lot of training for 3D/4D ultrasound systems. The solutions we created were very media rich (lots of videos, animations, images and audio). During this process we had the opportunity to meet with many doctors and sonographers. As we saw them use these expensive and complex machines we noticed something. On the side of each screen were a bunch of sticky notes. The sticky notes had numbered lists on them detailing the steps required to complete a task. It was a task that the user had to perform somewhat regularly, but which they struggled to remember how to do.

When I saw this I thought to myself, these companies are spending all of this money to design a beautiful, high-tech machine. They spend time, effort and money to create multimedia education materials, user manuals and onsite training courses. Despite all of this effort and expense, what the user really wanted was a sticky note.

So, instead of spending time to improve documentation tools and media authoring systems, why don’t we try to make the sticky note better. We’re not going to make a better software manual. People don’t read software manuals. We will make better sticky notes. People use those all the time.

And that was when the first idea for ScreenSteps came about. We looked at the key elements of the sticky note:

1. Easy to create – Anyone could create a sticky note.
2. Task based – The notes focused on completing tasks, not describing features.
3. Succinct – The sticky note only had information that was absolutely necessary.
4. Convenient – The sticky notes were available right when the user needed them.

So, when we designed ScreenSteps we kept all of this in mind:

1. It had to be easy to use.
2. It had to create “task based” documentation.
3. It should push users to creating short, focused documents.
4. It should allow users to put their content where they needed to actually use it.

And then we made it better. We added pictures. So, if you want to understand ScreenSteps a little more, realize that it is a documentation tool that is the natural evolution of the sticky note. It lets you create sticky notes with pictures.

If you keep this in mind when you create your next lesson, you will find that the lessons you write are a little smaller, a little more focused in their content, and a little easier for your users to understand.

We have a number of customers that have been using ScreenSteps to document how their companies use Salesforce. Salesforce is highly customizable but with those customizations comes the need for documentation. With ScreenSteps you visually document your company’s Salesforce workflow and provide custom help tailored to your needs.

To show you how to integrate our ScreenSteps Live hosted documentation service with Salesforce, we have created a new integration manual. Currently the manual has one lesson showing how to add a new tab to Salesforce that displays your ScreenSteps Live documentation.

Here is a short screencast demonstrating how to set up a custom tab that displays ScreenSteps Live content.

Many businesses have a Technical Publications department that is in charge of writing software documentation. Most customers never read software documentation. Those two facts are directly related.

Technical Publication Departments Are Ill Equipped to Create Software Documentation

Tech Pubs have almost no interaction with actual users. They create “requirement” documents from the various stakeholders (marketing, compliance, engineering, sales, service, support, etc.) and then create documents that meet those requirements.

Unfortunately they rarely ask users what they need.

This lack of direct connection with end users means that tech pubs has no idea what information is actually important to their users. They don’t know what questions the users have. They don’t know how best to answer those questions. The end result is software documentation that meets the requirements of “stakeholders” but not users.

Guess what? The stakeholders aren’t going to use the documentation.

Your Customer Help Desk Has the Questions and the Answers

The people who are best equipped to write your software documentation are those that are working the customer help desk. They may not have training in technical writing but they know exactly what the most important issues are for your users. They know what questions need to be answered. They know the real answers to those questions.

Have your help desk people write your software documentation. Their daily interaction with users will help them write documentation that is much more useful.

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

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

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

1. Who they are

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

2. What they want to do

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

3. When and Why they are using your product

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

When it comes to tech support, a few pictures can save you a lot of time and prevent a lot of frustration. We talk a lot about using ScreenSteps for software documentation. But it can also be very helpful in corresponding with users to resolve support requests.

Yesterday I had one of those very confusing support situations. A customer emailed in that none of her users could login to their ScreenSteps Live site. This seemed strange since we hadn’t changed any of that code lately and hadn’t heard of this problem from any of our other users. She sent me the username and password she was using and I was able to login no problem.

I asked her to try again and she still couldn’t get in. Strange.

To this point we had only used email and text to correspond. This leaves for a lot of ambiguity in the conversation. So I decided to create a ScreenSteps email that showed her exactly what I was doing to log in. I then asked her to follow those steps exactly and see what the results were.

Her response? It worked. The details aren’t important but it turned out she was pointing non-admin users to an administration page. Once she pointed them to the right area it worked fine. Because the email I sent had pictures for each step of what I was doing it was impossible for us to misunderstand each other. She could instantly see if what was on her computer screen was matching the pictures I had sent her.

The use of a few pictures instead of text saved us both hours. She learned that she needed to do something slightly different and we learned that we needed to alter the behavior of ScreenSteps Live for a certain scenario to present some sort of error message to the user.

Had we continued corresponding with text-based emails there would have been many more emails back and forth which would have lead to frustration on both sides.

If you are stumped about a problem with a user, start sending some pictures. It is very likely that things will get cleared up very quickly.

What is impossible to buy, can only be earned with hard work and time and, once lost, is almost impossible to regain?

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.