If you have been following our blog you may have seen a few of our announcements regarding Clarify Clarify is a new product we have been working on for several months designed to help you communicate more clearly online. As people have been introduced to Clarify several questions have come up. Here are some answers to the most common ones. Why did you create Clarify? Isn't this the same as ScreenSteps? At first glance Clarify may seem very similar to ScreenSteps but it has some important differences. The idea for Clarify was born when we introduced our ScreenSteps.me service for sharing ScreenSteps documents online. Prior to that, ScreenSteps had always been a software documentation tool. But with the simplicity of ScreenSteps.me we began to use ScreenSteps to create one-off communications with our customers. This wasn't really software documentation. It was just communication. But it worked really well - except for one thing.

I have written before on this blog about how much we love Wistia. To me, Wistia is to business video publishing what ScreenSteps is to online documentation. Just like ScreenSteps takes the headache out of creating documentation, Wistia removes all of the headaches associated with publishing and distributing online video. You don't have to encode the video in 500 different formats. You don't have an ugly YouTube player with ads on it. You don't have to worry about what device your audience is viewing the video on. You just upload the video and Wistia takes care of the rest. Wistia just posted a video showcasing all of the pain they can remove from online video. It's called "Why Web Video Sucks". When I watched it yesterday I cracked up laughing. Check it out below:

A question was recently posted on Twitter, "@donmcallister @podfeet opinions on what problems are best solved by/use cases for Mac apps such as ScreenSteps, Screenflow, Skitch, others?" We get that question a lot. We answered it in depth in a webinar we did last year titled "Video, Screencasts and Still Images - Using the Right Tool at the Right Time." But for those who are interested in a shorter answer, here it is. These are some simple rules that we use.

I read two articles recently. One article highlighted the technical communication work of a six-year-old while the other was by a professional journalist for a major online publication. One example communicated information clearly and concisely. The other talked in abstractions. Can you guess which was which? Anne Gentle of Just Write Click showcased some technical communication work from her friend's 6-year-old daughter. The aspiring instructional designer created a step-by-step guide showing how to create a Play-Doh apatosaurus. When you look at the results you might notice something - there are no words, just pictures.

Last month I purchased GarageBand for my iPad. I used to be pretty involved in the music industry, so I was really interested to see how Apple had translated a music sequencer into an iPad application. The result is really amazing and I had a blast assembling drum tracks, bending guitar strings and playing B3 organs. But then I gave it to my 7-year old. In about 15 minutes he had created a song. It had a drum track and some rock guitar and it sounded pretty good. In fact, in his mind it was amazing. He instantly wanted to send it out to grandparents, aunts and uncles and would play it for anyone who would listen. He had discovered the joy of creating music. Why do I tell you this story? Because often in the software world we get caught up with "feature lists." Feature lists make it so easy for us to compare our software against our competition. But feature lists don't ensure outcomes.

As you have probably already heard there were some problems with ScreenSteps Live and ScreenSteps.me over the past 36 hours. ScreenSteps Live is hosted on an Amazon Cloud infrastructure and Amazon had some major problems yesterday which are still going on as I write this. The problems they had affected a lot of sites, including Reddit, Quora and Foursquare just to name a few.

In our previous article we talked about how we and some of customers use ScreenSteps Live to scale our support services through online chat. In this post I wanted to give you a few tips on getting started with online support chat. Following these tips have made offering chat support to a customers a benefit instead of a burden to our business. Getting Started 1. Prepare your documentation If you have your help resources set up correctly then you don't need to be intimidated about getting started with online chat. Just make sure you have a list of urls that point to common questions your customers have. Have this list handy so that you can easily paste the urls into your support chats. If you are using ScreenSteps Live for your documentation then be sure to set up all of your support agents with the ScreenSteps Live Support Client. The Support Client will save your agents hours of time when responding to support chats. 2. Don't worry about always having it on You don't need to feel like you always need to have the chat service on. If things get too busy or you need to step out it's not a big deal. All the chat services we have seen will let the user leave a message that will get emailed to you. Chat is a tool to help your customers and help your business. Don't become a slave to it. Also, be aware that many chat services will let you limit the maximum number of simultaneous chats an agent can run. If all agents are busy then new chat requests will just go to your dropbox where they can leave a message.

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.

This week, Trevor left on vacation and won't have much access to email. But he has support tickets that have been assigned to him in Zendesk. If a customer responds to a pending ticket, we didn't want them to have to wait for Trevor to get back for us to reply to them. But Zendesk doesn't have a way to "send an agent on vacation." So this is what we came up with. Create a New Trigger We set up a new trigger in Zendesk. Use These Search Settings We are going to set the trigger to process any ticket that is assigned to Trevor and that is updated. When a user replies to a ticket that was assigned to Trevor this trigger will be activated. Configure Actions In the actions we are going to: 1. Assign the ticket to me. 2. Send an email to Trevor so that when he gets back he can quickly see what tickets were taken over by me. Just hit Update trigger and we are done. Now I just need to remember to turn this off when he gets back.

This week one of our service providers, Chargify, went through a major business model change that shocked their customers and caused quite a stir on the Twitter, TechCrunch and Hacker News. To their credit, they were out engaging early and often trying to quickly make modifications to their new plans to appease their angry customers. Yesterday Lance Walley, their CEO, posted about why they had to change their prices. Essentially, they had priced themselves into a corner. They worked primarily on a freemium pricing model but with a premium sales and support process. The two don't mix well. Their original pricing made it very easy for businesses to "try out" their service. Any business could use Chargify to manage up to 50 subscription users for free. After that there were various price plans based on the number of users you had. We already had a billing system in place before switching to Chargify but Chargify had a lot of features that were really nice, saved us a bunch of time and mode our lives easier. After starting out with the service we eventually became paying customers. The problem for Chargify was that they experienced all of the costs associated with our account when we were free customers. Chargify isn't simply a service you turn on and it starts working. Especially if you are going to use their API (which is the approach we took). Working with API's, no matter how good they are, takes time for customers and creates a lot of questions. Organizations that offer API's often have to spend a lot of time answering those questions. In our early days I had questions about the product and how it worked that were quickly answered by phone, email and Twitter. And I eventually became a paying customer. But according to what Chargify is saying, there were many, many customers that never converted from free accounts to paying accounts, simply because they weren't growing fast enough. Once again, most of Chargify's support costs were incurred while accounts were free (now that we are a paying account I rarely contact support at all). If your support costs are high for free accounts and very few of those accounts become paid accounts then your business will run into trouble very quickly which is exactly what happened to Chargify.