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: "How do I convert Word docs into ScreenSteps articles?" "How do I convert PowerPoint decks into ScreenSteps articles?" "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)

The problem with documenting complex procedures and workflows Writing a simple "how-to" guide is easy. But, in reality, most businesses aren't dealing with "simple" procedures. Many procedures are complex, involving multiple steps, decisions that have to be made, sub-processes that need to be followed, and exceptions to the "normal" flow that need to be accounted for.

Call Center Managers often struggle with agent churn. Churn rates in the call center industry are extremely high, especially early on in the agent's time with the company. What many managers don't realize is that many of their agents "feel stupid". They are thrown into situations where they don't know the answers and are constantly having to either put the customer on hold while they talk to their co-worker, or pass the customer onto their manager.

THE biggest challenge that we see companies encounter is getting started creating content. We see two camps: The "Document Everything We Can Think of" crowd The "Create the Perfect Plan Before We Start" crowd They both run into trouble. The first group starts out really strong, but quickly gets burned out. The worst part is they spend a lot of time writing articles that no one ever uses.

In most consulting engagements that involve any form of change management the consulting team is required to deliver some sort of training material to the customer. This often takes the form of a "train the trainer" approach.