If you perform any type of customer service, your goal should be to help your customers be successful. Especially in today's Yelpified-social media saturated world where word of mouth marketing and customer loyalty can make or break you. But how do you know that what you are doing is really helping your customers be successful? How can you tell that your best tools and help-desk software are really improving the overall quality of your customer service? Coming up with the right metrics, and then being able to effectively track those metrics, can be tricky. But you need to do it, otherwise you'll never be sure whether your investment in getting the best customer service tools is really paying off.

This last month we added a third person to the Blue Mango team, Jonathan (Ja) DeVore, our new Director of Marketing. You might notice some commonality among the names here. Trevor and I are brothers and have been business partners since 2003. Ja is our younger, but taller brother. He comes to Blue Mango after several years at PricewaterhouseCoopers, so he has some legit experience behind him. Ja is an incredibly creative person, but had very little experience with many of the tools that we use here. He comes from a corporate environment and is used to corporate tools. We are a small business so we use a lot of web applications to get our work done each day. The list of tools we use is getting pretty extensive, and training someone on all of them can seem overwhelming. But Ja was productive from day one. In fact, for his first three days I was in Boston on a trip with my 9 year-old. How did Ja hit the ground running? Though he's pretty smart, he's not smart enough to instantly know how to use all of the software applications we use. The key was that we had documentation that was optimized for delegation.

We get the question "Why would I purchase Clarify if I already own ScreenSteps? pretty frequently. I may not be able to answer that for *you* but I can tell you why *I* use both Clarify and ScreenSteps and why we created Clarify in the first place. Why did we create Clarify? The simple answer is that we had a need that ScreenSteps wasn't meeting. We used ScreenSteps all of the time for creating how-to's and documentation. But there were dozens of times each week when something like ScreenSteps would be perfect. But we didn't use ScreenSteps. We muddled on with text-only communications. What were these situations? It was firing off a quick how-to to a customer that only applied to them. It was filing a bug report with a software vendor. It was trying to get help with a technical problem we were having. It was trying to point out website revisions. It was trying to point out key elements of a report. In each of these situations ScreenSteps seemed too "heavy". We had to decide what to title the lessons we created. The lessons got stored into our library whether or not we wanted to keep them. And in ScreenSteps we had all of these features that made creating documentation simple but got in the way of quick, one-off communications. For awhile we tried to add these workflows into ScreenSteps. But it never worked. We never really adopted the new workflows and explaining what ScreenSteps "did" became increasingly difficult as it was trying to do too many things. We decided that we needed to create a totally new product that focused on creating speedy, one-off communications instead of creating documentation. It was take the essential parts of ScreenSteps and streamline them. That is what Clarify is. So what do I use now?

We have been talking a lot lately about the importance of providing road maps for our customers. As we looked at our own customer education material we realized that while we offered a lot of documentation tips, we didn't have a clear guide that helped our customers establish and implement a successful documentation strategy. Some customers were able to piece together a complete strategy from the articles we produced, but to do so they had to bounce around to a lot of different places.

Too many people think of software documentation as a project they will complete as opposed to a process they will establish. Software documentation projects almost always fail. They fail to meet the real needs of users. They fail to provide up-to-date information. They fail to deliver real business results. The key to creating great docs is to abandon projects and instead establish a documentation process. I explain the details of how you can accomplish this in the short video below. The tips I share in this video are what our most successful customers use to make software documentation a key part of their business strategy.

Without clear goals your software documentation is bound to fail. Recently we have started thinking of our documentation in two contexts: Documentation that provides a road map Documentation that removes roadblocks

Do you answer yes to any of these questions? Is your customer support group inundated with repetitive requests for the same information? Are your employees clamoring to find out the details of your company’s new policies? Do you need to efficiently and effectively train new clients on the use of your product? Do you need to train your employees on the technology products you use to run your business? Managing knowledge bases without an easy way for groups of people to access them can suck productivity out of your business. If your customers and employees are constantly scrambling to find the information they need you need to consider the hidden power of an online manual. Online manuals centralize all of your pertinent data for specific groups. Whether it is a customer support manual, an employee handbook, a research guide, a lesson plan, an employee hiring test or a product tutorial guide, online manuals can solve your problems of distributing information to a large or small audience. Compare this to what a lot of organizations are doing - locking their knowledge in PDF and Word files. Capturing your organization's knowledge in these formats makes that knowledge hard to access and hard to update.

We have all experienced the frustration of wading through wordy, unclear documentation, just trying to find the information we needed. For some reason some authors believe that we need to know the life history of an application before we are allowed to do anything with it. We created this video to show what life would be like if GPS units treated us the same way. Enjoy!

If you have been following our blog you may have seen a few of our announcements regarding Clarify Clarify is a new product we have been working on for several months designed to help you communicate more clearly online. As people have been introduced to Clarify several questions have come up. Here are some answers to the most common ones. Why did you create Clarify? Isn't this the same as ScreenSteps? At first glance Clarify may seem very similar to ScreenSteps but it has some important differences. The idea for Clarify was born when we introduced our ScreenSteps.me service for sharing ScreenSteps documents online. Prior to that, ScreenSteps had always been a software documentation tool. But with the simplicity of ScreenSteps.me we began to use ScreenSteps to create one-off communications with our customers. This wasn't really software documentation. It was just communication. But it worked really well - except for one thing.

I have written before on this blog about how much we love Wistia. To me, Wistia is to business video publishing what ScreenSteps is to online documentation. Just like ScreenSteps takes the headache out of creating documentation, Wistia removes all of the headaches associated with publishing and distributing online video. You don't have to encode the video in 500 different formats. You don't have an ugly YouTube player with ads on it. You don't have to worry about what device your audience is viewing the video on. You just upload the video and Wistia takes care of the rest. Wistia just posted a video showcasing all of the pain they can remove from online video. It's called "Why Web Video Sucks". When I watched it yesterday I cracked up laughing. Check it out below: