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."

The ScreenSteps knowledge base has an article that explains how to download the desktop editor.

Since ScreenSteps customers have one of two operating systems (Mac or Windows), we needed to create an article that would show customers how to download the desktop editor for either of those two systems.

It looked like this...

If you've ever tried to document a narrative for a flowchart, you're already familiar with how challenging it is to write something end-users can follow.

But things have changed, and a new ScreenSteps editor has made it easier than ever to transform flowcharts into interactive tutorials that even the least techy person can follow.

The new workflow article has some amazing capabilities. You can write documentation that includes decision trees, checklists, and "click to continue" buttons.

But if you're new to writing workflow articles, you may find it difficult to author because workflows require you to write your help documentation a little differently than you're used to.

So, if you're having a difficult time writing workflow articles, here's a tip: Next time a customer calls in, record your phone conversation. Then, document that conversation as a workflow article – questions and all.

Your customer support knowledge base has two main purposes:

1. Deflect support tickets.
2. Decrease ticket escalation from your tier 1 support agents to your tier 2 support agents.

If it's not doing those two things very well, then you may have this problem...