Deliver Excellent Customer Support With The ScreenSteps Support Suite
The ScreenSteps Support Suite allows companies and organizations to transform the way they approach customer support. It is built around a simple philosophy: each step of providing instruction to a customer should be easy.
- It should be easy to create customer tutorials and guides.
- It should be easy to publish them.
- It should be easy to deliver those guides to the customer.
- It should be easy for the customer to access and understand the information they are given.
By making clear communication easy, the ScreenSteps Support Suite helps you turn customer support into customer satisfaction.
What Is The ScreenSteps Support Suite?
The ScreenSteps Support Suite is a collection of applications and services that make visual communication easy. The suite is comprised of ScreenSteps Desktop for content creation and ScreenSteps Live for publishing, distribution and collaboration.
ScreenSteps Desktop is the content creation and editing module of the ScreenSteps Support Suite. With ScreenSteps Desktop, users of any ability can quickly create customer tutorials and guides that any customer can follow.
ScreenSteps Live is the hosted publishing, distribution and collaboration component of the suite. ScreenSteps Live allows users to quickly publish, distribute and reuse the content they have created with ScreenSteps Desktop.
Instant Productivity
ScreenSteps allows teams to increase their productivity from day one. With about 5 minutes of training, support representatives can start creating visual guides that solve customer issues. These visual guides can be created in about the same amount of time it would take to write a text-based response.
Where Does The ScreenSteps Support Suite Fit In the Customer Communication Process?
ScreenSteps is finely tuned to show people HOW to do short, focused tasks. When you are trying to answer WHY and WHAT questions about your product then other forms of media will probably be more effective (e.g. screencasts, webinars and white papers). But when it comes to teaching customers how to do specific tasks in your product, ScreenSteps is the best tool available. It is quicker to create, publish and update visual tutorials with ScreenSteps than with any other solution available.
A simple example of using the right media to respond to a customer question:
- A customer asks “What does your product do?”
Create a screencast, host a webinar, etc. - A customer asks “How do I configure my export options in your product?”
Use ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live.
The ScreenSteps Philosophy
ScreenSteps is most effective when you follow the ScreenSteps philosophy for creating content. The ScreenSteps philosophy is based upon three principles:
- Teach Tasks, Not Features
- Plan Not To Plan
- Start Small, Expand as Needed
Teach Tasks, Not Features
If your documentation is focused around features, your customers will have to do the work of translating features into tasks they want to accomplish. By focusing your documentation around tasks you will provide content that helps your customers get real work done.
Task based documentation also makes it much easier for your customer to pick out just the parts of your manual that they need at any given moment.
Plan Not To Plan
Everyone knows that in order to create great support materials you need to do some careful planning, right? Wrong.
If you spend all of your time planning your documentation it will never get done. You probably have a lot of responsibilities and each one pulls you in a different direction. Documentation will always be the last thing on your list. This is why you should “plan not to plan”.
The “plan not to plan” method allows you to skip the long drawn out (and many times useless) planning stage and get right to creating content that will improve your customer support. Here is how it works:
- Write down the questions customers have asked.
- Create tutorials in ScreenSteps Desktop that answer those questions.
- Post the answers as a manual to ScreenSteps Live.
- When a customer asks a new question, do one of two things:
- If you have a tutorial that answers the question then send it to them.
- If you don’t, create one, add it to the manual and then send it to them.
The key is, ScreenSteps allows you to be extremely flexible. You can modify your support materials in real time to respond to actual questions your customers are asking instead of watching your carefully planned support materials become useless as it meets the real world.
Start Small, Grow as Needed
Don’t worry about getting everything finished before you launch your ScreenSteps Live site. The goal is to decrease customer support requests. Answer the most frequent questions first then launch your site. You will start saving time right away. Then add to your support materials as you are able to. The ScreenSteps Support Suite makes it easy to start small and expand.
Collaboration
The integration of desktop authoring and server-based publishing in the ScreenSteps Support Suite enables easy and efficient collaboration among content creators. Team members post tutorials to a central repository. Authors sync to this repository so that they always have the latest content. This repository enables rapid assembly of existing tutorials into new collections of information to meet specific customer needs on demand.
Distribution
ScreenSteps Live really shines when it comes to distribution. For those who need a quick solution, the content you publish can be made available to your customers through their web browser. In addition you can customize the skin of your ScreenSteps Live account so that it looks and feels like your company’s website. But ScreenSteps Live doesn’t stop there. Included with all accounts is our powerful API that allows you to distribute your content however you need to. Need to manage content through a WordPress blog? We provide a WordPress plugin that uses the API just for that. Do you need to search your ScreenSteps Live account from within Zendesk so you can quickly answer customer questions? We have a widget just for that. Maybe you need to display your content in a desktop application. Not a problem. With ScreenSteps Live the possibilities are endless.
Improve Your Customer Support Today!
The ScreenSteps Support Suite helps dramatically improve the effectiveness, efficiency and customer satisfaction of customer support interactions. Support staff and other content creators are able to create, publish and deliver exactly the information the customer needs in the moment they need it. This dramatically decreases repeat requests to customer support which in turn decreases customer support costs. At the same time, organizations see a dramatic increase in customer satisfaction.
Register for a free ScreenSteps Live webinar: to learn more about how you can improve your customer support process. Or, if you want to get started today, sign up for a free 30-day trial at http://screenstepslive.com/signup.