Whether they know it or not, most companies probably already have standard operating procedures. Standard operating procedures are repeatable steps that employees can take when a known input occurs, helping them achieve a desired outcome.

When companies first start out, they may have a small team of employees that establish a certain method for performing tasks, and everyone knows what to do — leading some to think they don't need to write their procedures down. Unfortunately, this causes ambiguity and inconsistency in the way procedures are completed and can lead to siloed or out-of-date knowledge.

Last Friday, my team asked me to run a remote training session with a new support agent. 

Instead of the typical PowerPoint lecture or demonstrations of random features in our systems, I used the scenario-based training approach, which means that I basically asked a bunch of questions like this:

Simply put, scenario-based training is the way of the future. It's a better way to train for both your trainers and your employees, and it pays enormous dividends for your company. Here's why we believe so strongly in ditching outdated training models and upgrading processes for a more human, pragmatic form of on-the-job training.

Are you struggling to train your employees? It's alright if you are — most employers and trainers struggle to do so. Employee training today is surrounded by a lot of uncertainty. Some believe that memorization works, while others think that fancy e-Training or assessments are the solution. We're here to tell you that the way most trainers and employers are training isn't working. But, with a few changes it can work, and quickly.

Last week, I was trying to figure out why my home printer wasn't printing.

While searching the web for an answer, I came across this help article from Epson (the kind of printer I have):

While reading this article, I noticed that it had a lot of "if this...then that..." type of instructions. I instantly thought, "Holy smokes! This would be so much better as a Workflow Article!"

So I took on the challenge of recreating it as a Workflow Article for the sole purpose of demonstrating how you can take some of your help articles that have "If this...then that..." type of instructions and turn them into Workflow Articles that are way better.

You can go right to the example article Workflow Article I created by clicking here >> Epson Example Workflow to see what it looks like and how it flows. Below, I show you how I went about turning the original Epson help article into the amazing ScreenSteps Workflow Article so you can see how a ScreenSteps Workflow Article could replace (and dramatically improve) your traditional troubleshooting guides.

A buzzword that's been going around for quite some time is "Knowledge Management."

The idea is that subject matter experts can write down what they know in knowledge articles and transfer their knowledge to somebody else.

 But here's where organizations are getting a little confused – transferring knowledge isn't the ultimate goal of knowledge management. Writing down everything you know so that somebody else can read a bunch of information isn't really what managers and executives want.

Last year, the ScreenSteps team did a customer story with Stephanie Beal, a manager at a contact center. She told us how she used ScreenSteps to decrease the time-to-proficiency for new agents by 75%.

Before ScreenSteps, it took about 60 days to get new agents to a strong level of proficiency. With ScreenSteps, it took 15 days.

I remember being on the call and asking her to clarify, not sure I fully understood. How could ScreenSteps do that?

Stephanie then broke it down for me and explained how she formatted help articles as "call flows" that could walk support agents through any customer interaction. She continued to explain her main focus during new-hire training was to teach new agents how to use those call flows efficiently so that agents could help a customer on a call without having to memorize everything first.

Chargify is a SaaS product for managing revenue. I was checking out its customer support knowledge base and saw a few help articles that could potentially be a little easier to read if they were converted into workflow articles.

In this blog post, I'll walk you through how I (if Chargify ever asked me to) would make over the article using the ScreenSteps Workflow Article type.

FullStory is an amazing application that helps developers and designers "fine-tune the customer experience." And from the looks of it, Fullstory uses Zendesk Help Center to manage its knowledge base.

And it looks really great!

But, while reviewing their help documentation, I noticed several articles that could (IMHO) be clearer if they were workflow articles. This blog post will walk through how I (if FullStory ever asked me to) would make over the article by using the ScreenSteps workflow article.

The ScreenSteps team has been helping customers create workflow articles, and the most frequently heard comment has been, "Workflow articles make this procedure so much easier to understand."