After you roll out your knowledge management system to employees and customers, you may encounter a lack of adoption. I've got two tips that can help with that.

Why don't people visit your knowledge base?

First, let's discuss a few of the reasons employees and customers don't visit your carefully crafted knowledge base:

1. They don't know about it
2. They don't know how to use it
3. They can't find what they need (or what they do find isn't helpful)

Those first two are pretty simple to resolve by using your knowledge base during training, onboarding, and when responding to questions. It's that third one that can be a little tricky.

These next two tips relate to making sure end users can find what they need, which leads to better adoption of your ScreenSteps knowledge base.

Six months ago, the ScreenSteps team received several support tickets for setting up Single Sign-on (SSO).

These tickets required phone calls or lengthy back-and-forth emails before finally being resolved.

Now, we love helping our customers, but our team was frustrated that our self-help documentation was falling short for this particular operation. Admittedly, SSO can get a tad complicated—even I shuddered a little when I had to get involved with SSO troubleshooting—but isn't the point of self-help documentation that customers can perform tasks on their own without involving support?

Even though we had very detailed help articles for setting up SSO, apparently those articles weren’t very helpful to the majority of customers who were setting up Single Sign-on.

What was going on?

We are getting ready to release an update to the ScreenSteps template.

In the training world, it’s easy to just do what everybody else does. But there are a number of misconceptions about training that you should be aware of.

After helping hundreds of customers get started with ScreenSteps, I can safely say the three most common requests I get are:

1. "How do I convert Word docs into ScreenSteps articles?"
2. "How do I convert PowerPoint decks into ScreenSteps articles?"
3. "How do I include videos in ScreenSteps articles?"

In fact, converting existing Word docs to ScreenSteps articles was the first priority for Washington State Community and Technical Colleges once they purchased a subscription. (I personally transferred 600 of their Word docs to ScreenSteps.)

I have a good friend (whom we'll call Rick) who runs a small agency that helps online businesses.

Rick's agency is very successful, but he's at a point where he's stuck.

The problem is that if Rick's agency brings on any more clients (especially larger clients), he will run out of hours during the day to get all of the work done that needs to be done. That's because every time Rick adds another client, it requires specific tasks to be performed that only Rick knows how to do.

When Owen Hutchison helped the Royal College of General Practitioners roll out Salesforce, he put together a robust plan of action.

Owen's Change Management Plan included:

• The impact the Salesforce rollout would have on each department (based on the changes to procedures and technology)
• A training schedule for each department, including usability testing
• Detailed procedure documentation (created in ScreenSteps)

When new employees are hired on, your company needs to take care of 3 main things:

1. Paperwork (insurance, taxes)
2. Compliance training (e.g. ethics training, security awareness training)
3. Operations training (policies, processes, and procedures)

I'm betting that you've already got something in place for #1 or #2. Plenty of HR systems deal with paperwork, and several LMS apps deal with compliance training.

The question for today is, do you have a system in place for #3?

This is the second of a 7-part series where we talk about different kinds of job aids that your Support Reps need you to make for them.

This is the first of a 7-part series where we talk about different kinds of job aids that your Support Reps need you to make for them.