I was always an advocate of the detailed support replies in an email/ticket – the more information you provide to your clients, the more they’ll learn about your product. Plus, it’s an email/ticket reply (it’s not live chat where you have to be extra quick!) and you can always take your time and emphasize the most important part of your reply first, which solves the clients’ problem, and then you can include any extra information and details that might assist the client further.
The only problem with this approach is that, in some cases, clients won’t even read a reply that long. That’s why addressing the problem first and marking it visually can help. However, when the solution to the problem requires from a client to do several different steps or even more, adding screenshots can greatly assist! On Mac, for instance, you can quickly take a screenshot by pressing Command + Shift + 4 and then, holding and dragging the cursor to mark the area of your screen which you want to capture.
However, there is an even easier way to assist your clients that can help both you (a Customer Support Representative) and your clients. The method that I had in mind was to use animated GIFs.
With animated GIFs, you can quickly and easily provide the steps that are needed in order to solve the problem your client has. Or, you can also use an animated GIF in order to educate your clients how to use certain features (that’s where the aforementioned extra information can be placed too).
Enter LICEcap
There is an app which I started using on a regular basis since I became a Happiness Engineer at Automattic. Inspired by this article, the awesome app I recommend is LICEcap and both Windows and Mac users can install it.
Simply open the app and resize its window to the area of the screen which you wish to record. Hit Record at the bottom right and start pressing buttons and moving your cursor around. Basically, start showing the necessary steps that your client needs to do in order to solve the issue he has. When you are done, hit Stop at the bottom right. Save the .gif file and upload it to a publicly visible place on the web like Cloudup or Imgur. Paste the URL to the file into your reply and you are done! 🙂
Using animated GIFs greatly improved the support I provide. I hope it will do the same for your’s 🙂
