We love software documentation. We think it is really, really important. But even we would be hesitant to claim that your software documentation could get you a better review from a major technology publication.

That is, until recently.

Over the past couple of months two ScreenSteps Live customers, BaseKit (5 stars) and RunRev (4 stars for their LiveCode product) have had their documentation mentioned as one of their “Pros” in MacWorld reviews (see the images below). The “Pros” is a section at the top of the review that points out the 2 or 3 best things about the application. In both these cases the reviewer felt that the software documentation created by these companies was one of the most important benefits of their respective applications.

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About a month and a half ago I posted an article titled “Moving Beyond Customer Support: Focusing on Customer Success”. I’ve received a lot of emails form people saying how much they enjoyed the post and how they are dealing with those same issues in their business.

So today I wanted to give you an update on what we have done, what has worked and what hasn’t. With anything like this, experimenting and collecting data are very important. Without data you are just guessing about whether your changes have helped or not.

Experiment: Improve the First Run Experience

We track two very important numbers regarding ScreenSteps Desktop, number of trial downloads and number of purchases. Because we don’t require any user information to download a ScreenSteps Desktop trial we can’t map a specific download to a purchase. But over the last seven months the percentage of downloads to purchases has been pretty consistent. Our download to purchase ratio over the 7 months prior to Feb 2011 was 25%. Roughly one quarter of the people who downloaded ScreenSteps purchased it. We made one important change that boosted this conversion rate from 25% to 40% (a 60% improvement). Here is how we did it.

Our theory was that if we could help users accomplish a meaningful task with ScreenSteps right out of the gate we could improve this percentage. To do this we looked at our demo download page.

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Over the last couple of weeks we have been thinking a lot about customer support vs. customer success. For the purposes of this article and several follow-up articles I plan on writing I am going to the define these two terms as follows:

• Customer support: Helping your customers solve problems they encounter when using your product. This includes addressing bugs as well as providing information about how to accomplish specific tasks with your product.

• Customer success: Helping your customers improve their business, their organization or their lives by using your product.

Customer support deals with small, focussed issues. Customer success deals with the macro application of your product to achieve larger goals. To create real evangelists of your product or service you need to have great systems in place for supporting your customers, but you also need to have systems in place to ensure their success with your product or services.

We are really good at customer support. We have great systems in place that help us address support issues quickly and consistently. But our results with ensuring customer success are more mixed. We have some customers who are fantastically successful with ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live and who evangelize it regularly while other are simply satisfied customers that are happy with the product.

To a small company like ours the value of a thrilled customer who shouts our name from the roof tops vs. a satisfied customer who occasionally uses ScreenSteps is huge. If we were to put a monetary value on those customers the difference would be literally thousands of dollars vs. a one time $40 or $80 purchase.

What is the main difference between these two types of customers? Our “satisfied” customers just use ScreenSteps to create documentation. They are using it to complete one of the tasks that need to get done in the course of running their business or organization. Our passionate users use ScreenSteps to change the way they run their business or organization. ScreenSteps and/or ScreenSteps Live don’t just change their documentation. They change their business.

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