Using ScreenSteps to create customer support documentation is simple, fast and effective. But before you can really start using ScreenSteps to improve your customer support you need to figure out where you are going to send your customers to view your documentation.
ScreenSteps offers you several options for delivering your documentation.
- Send them to your ScreenSteps site
- Integrate ScreenSteps with Zendesk and send your customers to Zendesk.
- Use the ScreenSteps API to pull content into your own app or publishing system.
Here are some tips to help you make your decision.
Many of our customers take this option. ScreenSteps takes care of all of the publishing and navigation for you so you don't have to do anything except decide on two factors:
- How you will authenticate users to view your documents
- How you will template/brand your site
1. User authentication on a ScreenSteps site
If you plan on making your documentation public then you don't need to worry about authenticating your customers. Anyone who comes to your site will be able to view your docs. Just go ahead and skip to the branding section.
If you are going to require users to login to your ScreenSteps site then you want to think about how to manage those user accounts. While you can create reader accounts in ScreenSteps, most of our customers who use ScreenSteps for "customer support" don't choose this approach.
Here are the most popular approaches for ScreenSteps customers who don't want to make their documentation public:
- If they are already managing their users in their own application, they use ScreenSteps Remote Authentication (ScreenSteps Remote Authentication is only available on certain plans).
- They don't require a login, but instead just hide their ScreenSteps site from search engines. Any user who comes to the site can view the content, but the site content won't show up in search results.
- They provide a link inside of their app that automatically logs a user into the ScreenSteps site when the user clicks on it.
You can read more about reader authentication here:
Understanding the different ways you can authenticate readers to your ScreenSteps site
If you have any specific questions about setting up authentication for your site, don't hesitate to get in touch.
2. Branding your ScreenSteps site
Many customers choose just to upload their logo and customize their site colors to brand their site. You can read about basic site customizations here.
In addition you can use your own domain name for your ScreenSteps site.
There are a lot of benefits to publishing to a Zendesk.
- You probably are already managing user permissions in Zendesk. By publishing to Zendesk you can leverage their existing user management system.
- You have probably already branded Zendesk. Because the ScreenSteps content gets injected into Zendesk it will inherit all of the styling you already have.
- Zendesk has help ticketing system and all of your content will be integrated into your support process.
You can embed an iframe with a ScreenSteps article into other systems. Refer to the following article for instructions:
Using iframes to embed ScreenSteps articles in other services
The final option is to use the ScreenSteps API to pull content from ScreenSteps into your own application or publishing process. The ScreenSteps API is a read-only API so you won't be using it to create content, but you can use it to pull content into any content system you develop.
This offers a lot of flexibility but will require developer resources on your end.
The ScreenSteps API has a rate limiter. If you make more than 300 requests/minute the API will be temporarily disabled.
Still have questions?
If you still have questions about which approach would be best for you to take, don't hesitate to get in touch. We are always happy to help.
0 Comments
Add your comment