iContact:
Removing "Training Stress" When Releasing Custom Salesforce Applications

Amber Neill and Karen McBride are both Salesforce administrators at iContact, a provider of online email marketing services. Amber and Karen recently released three new custom Salesforce applications. With their new releases came the need for end-user training. This isn’t the first time that Amber and Karen have released Salesforce applications in their organization, but, in the past, the training process has always been painful and ineffective.

Recently Amber and Karen made significant changes to the way they created and delivered their end-user training. Instead of posting Microsoft Word documents on their intranet or hosting live training sessions, they moved to creating their training content in ScreenSteps and delivering that content right within their Salesforce applications using ScreenSteps Live.

We spoke with Amber and Karen to find out how they had handled training for custom apps in the past and how they have incorporated ScreenSteps Live to improve the process.

How did you handle training for your Salesforce apps before using ScreenSteps Live?

Amber: It was badly done. It was always painful, un-fun and a dreaded part of every change or release.

What approach did you take?

Amber: We would periodically have what we call “Lunch and Learns”. We would advertise that, “Hey we are going to teach you how to use this new ‘wiz bang’”. Whoever showed up would get trained and whoever didn’t wouldn’t. They were poorly attended and they were often painful.

Karen: I would prepare documentation in Microsoft Word. If we had a process change, I would put it in place. We would have a new lead page layout or a new opportunity record type or something like that. I would put something in a Word document with the explanations and some ugly screenshots. That was the best we could do. We would print it as a PDF and then host it on our intranet somewhere. And hopefully they remembered where it was.

What were the challenges with this method?

Amber: Versioning was a huge issue. A little thing would change and you would have to go back in and modify the document. Because nobody remembered where the document was we had to resend it out to everyone again.

But even delivering the document was an issue. I would have this document and it had screenshots in it, and now the document would be huge and no one could get it via email. So then I had to put it on our intranet someplace which meant people had to download it to read it. Well, we all know that that didn’t happen.

Since they didn’t download the document it was just easier to find me in the hallway and ask me directly. But we are a 200 person organization. That only works for so long."

How did you incorporate ScreenSteps Live into this release process?

Amber: We found ScreenSteps Live relatively late in the game. Karen was working on her purchase order application and I was working on two other ones and we were pretty much working in silos. And then I found ScreenSteps. I tapped her on the shoulder and said, “You are never going to believe what I found.”

Karen: We saw the value of it instantly.

Amber: You didn’t have to convince me. Once I realized what I was going to get out of this and how easy it was going to be, I was like, wow, I wish I would have found this three or four years ago.

How has this release compared to previous releases you have done?

Amber: ScreenSteps Live preserved my sanity.

Karen: And mine.

Amber: Invariably the last thing you want to do is document because there are always tweaks to the application until the very last minute. Even if you are proactive and try to get on top of documenting things you run into the versioning thing again. You end up with old documentation that isn’t useful.

Then I have to worry about how do I get the documentation into the hands of my users. Well, they are already in Salesforce. It’s great having the documentation in Salesforce rather than in some third place where they can’t find it. Having the documentation available in Salesforce is huge.

So ScreenSteps Live reduced the stress of having to train people?

Amber: It reduced it to almost zero. I’m aware that people don’t read documentation, but when you have pretty screen shots and these giant red circles and arrows and it’s right in Salesforce it’s hard to miss.

How has ScreenSteps Live helped you write your documentation?

Karen: The program really forces you to set the instructions up correctly. It makes you be succinct. I like that about the program. Here’s your headline, here’s your text, here’s your screenshot. It really helps you break down a training document into a process very nicely. The template is already there in ScreenSteps which is what I really like.

In the past the concern has always been that as soon as you put a screenshot in there it is out of date. When I look at ScreenSteps I go, “Well it’s not that hard to change.”

Amber: After we released I had to make a change based on user feedback. Updating the field in Salesforce and updating a publishing the new documentation in ScreenSteps Live took me all of 20 minutes total.

Karen: The approval process that I built for our purchase order application had 20 different steps in it. I had to have a training guide for the admins who were going to be submitting the POs and then a separate training guide for management about how to login and approve the POs. I needed two separate guides for two separate audiences. It was great for me to be able to build one and then pull from it and make the other ones. It’s so simple and easy. It’s so great to just say here’s my screenshot and it’s in the page.

How are you planning on using ScreenSteps Live in the future?

Karen: I have a sales manual on my backlog of things to do. I think this is going to be huge relief for the sales team to have this training documentation. We looked at an outside consultant but that was too much money. We’ve been struggling with “How do we put this together?” ScreenSteps Live is going to be a great solution for us.

There may be a little bit of a learning curve at first because we haven’t had great documentation and it has been hard to find. I think that we are going to see a lot more activity around this just because it’s right there inside Salesforce. The tab is easy to find and the documentation is easy to read.