Customer Case Studies

The Details

Tom had a growing company at a critical stage. Their application had some early customers and was taking on a lot of demo sites who wanted to try the product out.

But they were having a scaling issue.

Each new customer that came on required a lot of time on the telephone for initial training. There simply weren't enough hours in the day for their small team to train all of their customers. But if they couldn't add new customers, how could they grow the company?

They tried creating training videos, but without much success. Tom explains their frustration:

The time to create help files is immense. We tried building the help by creating flash videos but you need to be a Hollywood production team to create help files in those applications. And then the resulting files are huge.

Then they came upon ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live. Tom had used ScreenSteps several months ago on a different project. But that was before the launch of ScreenSteps Live. Initially they just planned on integrating ScreenSteps into their current workflow. But when they looked at the integration between ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live they decided to move everything over to ScreenSteps Live.

Tom continues:

I downloaded ScreenSteps to create the help files and we had planned on managing the help files on our server. But then we took a look at ScreenSteps Live and it was just too well done for us to try and create our own solution. At that price point it makes a lot of sense to offload that task to ScreenSteps Live. Plus you have that wonderful package feature that is just fantastic.

We already had a whole process for creating, tracking and uploading the help, and we could have plugged ScreenSteps into that process. We had it setup for any kind of document, any kind of flash file, etc. But it still involved a complicated set of steps. It went form Excel to XML, etc. etc.

But the logic on ScreenSteps Live with the manuals, the search and the tags - that is really powerful and we would have to build all of that. I said for that price, we are going to spend way more than that just keeping track of our help files and on ScreenSteps Live it is done.

For me it was simply a matter of cost.

Improved Customer Support

Tom explains how ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live have improved their customer support:

A new user of our product has an immense amount of questions. I have been using ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live to respond to their questions. A user will email with a question and instead of calling them back and fumbling on the phone I create a ScreenSteps lesson and then just send them the link. And it's wonderful and it works. It's support on the fly. I have yet to see another product where I would see an email question come in and I would say, "Well, I need to make a help file and send them the link." I wouldn't want to try and do that with the other help authoring tools I have used.

Unexpected Benefits

Tom and his team are also using ScreenSteps to improve their product. They hadn't planned on using it this way, but as they were creating the help files with ScreenSteps they began to see ways they could streamline their own product.

We are using ScreenSteps to clean up a lot of the logic in our application. The step by step method has been really revealing to us. It forces a good discipline on us to evaluate our software from the point of view of the user.

When I went into it I just wanted to get the help files done. I didn't realize that this was going to happen, that we would be evaluating each and every step and saying, "Hey, that could be better," but that is the way it has gone.

Distributing the Workload

Vetport consists of four people, two in India and two in the United States. ScreenSteps Live lets them easily collaborate on their help files. And it is so easy that anyone on their team can do it.

I had used ScreenSteps before. But we had another person who hadn't used it. I sat her down and said, "Make the help file". In 5 minutes she was familiar with ScreenSteps and in about 10 or 15 minutes she had produced the help file. I thought that was pretty remarkable. It's just simple to use. I think that anybody can get up to speed on ScreenSteps really fast.

A Light At the End of the Tunnel

Tom is no longer losing sleep about his support issues. There is still work to do, but the task has become manageable. Now they can spend more time focussing on improving their product and growing their customer base.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Two weeks ago I couldn't see how we were going to get the help done and if we couldn't get the help done we weren't going to be able to support the product.

ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live have become a very important part of our product.