a single source, nothing corroborates it

Answer support with a recording and a snippet

Cut the time between someone wanting help and having it: embed a rough screencast on every complicated page, keep canned explanations with a link to the matching article as keyboard snippets, and run the help centre as a cheap blog where staff-only notes surface in the same search. Recording a short walkthrough answers the questions a launch generates faster than prose, and an hour spent on postponed interface annoyances clears more than the dread suggests.

The method

1. 01

   Build your help centre as a cheap self-hosted blog with a support theme rather than a hosted help desk, so you can keep staff-only articles that turn up in the same search as the public ones.

2. 02

   Embed a short screencast on every complicated page of the app, and ignore the design fashion that says needing a video proves the interface is too complex.

3. 03

   Store a one or two sentence explanation plus a link to the matching help article as a keyboard snippet, and you have almost all the value of a help desk product with none of the overhead.

4. 04

   Minimise the clicks and the elapsed time between a customer wanting help and having an answer, and plan each channel separately - where the phone number lives, which inbox tool handles email, who writes the docs.

5. 05

   Answer the questions the launch generates with recorded video instead of prose: a two-minute walkthrough of the product, and a screen recording of the sales page being coded

What it returned

• 95%

  The author puts it at 95% of the value for a single-person team, using annotated screenshots from Skitch and screencasts made in Screenflow and hosted on YouTube

• Storemapper used the KnowHow theme plus a membership plugin to mark posts visible only to logged-in staff, which meant onboarding the first support hire was just issuing them an account, and it avoided migrating hundreds of articles later

• Recorded with Screenflow with the author narrating, hosted on YouTube or Wistia, with no attempt at production values; he argues only a team with interaction designers and usability testing can iterate its way out of needing one

• Video preview made after repeated emails asking how the course worked; live recording of the hand-coded sales page published after people asked what platform it used

Sources

• How to design a customer support processJustin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · How to design a customer support process · undated
• Join me as I create & launch a product in 24 hoursNathan Barry · nathanbarry.com · 72-hour update & live coding: · 2014-12-01
• Don’t start from scratchNathan Barry · nathanbarry.com · Fix the little things · 2015-03-25
• Micro-SaaS Ebook: Retention & SupportTyler Tringas · tylertringas.com · Tools of the trade · 2017-07-31
• Customer Support for Solo Founders - Tyler TringasTyler Tringas · tylertringas.com · Tools of the trade · 2015-09-14