One of the most overwhelming tasks for a new documentation manager or customer success manager is knowing what content they need to create.

After you've onboarded a prospect/new customer to your SaaS, and after they've gone through some additional training, your users may still have trouble using your product - not because your instructions are bad, but because your users may still not know what to do.

Many support teams make the mistake of trying to combine customer support and customer training resources into the same article. To understand the difference between customer support and customer training, read here.

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?