Customer education is an important component in improving customer retention, product adoption and customer support. At the same time, as many businesses move to SaaS models, traditional training models are breaking. Doing an onsite training for a new product implementation is becoming less and less practical.

I'm not aware of any commandments, requirements, or laws for onboarding customers to a software platform - but I do have 3 rules that I try to live by: Find out what a user wants to do Motivate them to action Give them a map that shows them how to get wherever they want to be Why live by those rules? Well, during the onboarding phase, it's really important that your customers experience "wins" early on. If you know what they want to do, it's easy to motivate and provide a specific map. If you don't know what they want, you end up overwhelming customers with too much information.

A few months ago we launched a survey to see what kind of impact ScreenSteps was having in the businesses and organizations that use it. We were interested in answering a few questions: Did our customers feel more productive? Did they feel like they were creating better documentation? Was ScreenSteps helping them improve their business or organization?

It’s time to put your product documentation on the web We have been telling companies for a long time that they need to move their product documentation out of PDF and Word files and onto the web. This has been true for awhile, but over the last 12 months we have seen the number of companies doing this start to increase. Here are a few reasons why it is more important than ever to move your product documentation to the web.

Your boss just told you, “We need to do some product documentation. Can you look into that?” It can seem like a simple task at first but quickly gets overwhelming. We speak with a lot of people who have just been given the task of recommending a documentation strategy for their product and they aren’t quite sure where to start. Hopefully this article will help you out a bit as you try to break the task down into manageable chunks.

Reasons to Protect your Product Documentation One of the primary questions we get when customers are setting up a new documentation site is "How do I protect my documentation?"

Are you making these common documentation mistakes?

Over the last few years it has been interested to see the increased focus on self-service support options. Not too long ago, most knowledge bases looked like a glob of text vommitted out into some sort of wiki. Knowledge bases were ugly and, in most cases, ineffective at helping customers help themselves.

The old knowledge base template was a little outdated, and looked like this: Which is fine, if you like that that look. But some of you mentioned that it was too text-heavy and difficult to navigate through when you had a lot of documentation (and many of you have A LOT of documentation... like, over 400 articles). So, last week, we released a new template to make your knowledge base a little snazzier looking.

Once your knowledge base moves beyond a few FAQs, you will quickly start wondering about how you should organize your B2B software knowledge base. Many companies still implement a very flat structure in an attempt to organize their knowledge base — which is just a list of articles with no hierarchy to them. If you take this approach, you're really just relying on the search feature of your knowledge base since that's the only way anyone is going to find anything. A flat structure will make it very difficult for your customers to browse your knowledge base.