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Easy-Bake Release Training: A Marcomm/Tech Writing Success Story | Sam Barney and Anthony Vinciguerra
- 1. Easy-Bake Release Training A MarCom/Tech Writing Success Story
- 2. ©athenahealth Meet the Speakers 2 Tony Vinciguerra ● Senior Manager of Technical Writing ● 19 years in the industry ● Specializing in healthcare, e-commerce ● Fun fact: Fished in 12 states and in 3 countries Samantha Barney ● Senior Manager of Technical Writing ● 15 years in the industry ● Specializing in healthcare, academia ● Fun fact: Visited 30 countries
- 3. ©athenahealth Agenda 3 ● Survey clients about training needs ● Target specific users with training ● Accommodate various learning styles ● Work cross-functionally (break down silos) ● Deliver a customer-centric experience
- 4. ©athenahealth What’s the problem? 4 ● Releases are disruptive ● Low adoption of functionality ● Increase in customer service cases ● Training is not one size fits all ● No “one source of truth”
- 5. ©athenahealth Hypothesis 5 Including feature benefits and videos in release documentation will improve adoption of new features and reduce calls to customer service.
- 6. ©athenahealth I want my cake and to eat it, too 6 “I want the release notes to be shorter but more detailed.”
- 7. ©athenahealth Testing our hypothesis 7 Showed two different designs, which included feature benefits, video, and FAQs.
- 8. ©athenahealth The winner 8 ● Addressed the “no one source of truth.” ● Addressed feature adoption. ● Banking on high engagement. ● But did it meet clients’ needs?
- 9. ©athenahealth Who can we talk to? 9 Physicians Front desk staff Billers Practice managers Anyone else?
- 10. ©athenahealth How we asked for feedback 10 ● Survey: via email or form (Google Forms, Survey Monkey, etc.) ● Phone interview: Live, 1:1 conversations ● Community website ● Account management
- 11. ©athenahealth Feedback via Survey 11 The majority of clients agreed or strongly agreed with these statements: ● “Demo videos helped me feel more prepared for the release.” ● “The videos are a valuable addition.” The majority of clients agreed with the following statement: ● Do you like having frequently asked questions in release notes?
- 12. ©athenahealth 12 Feedback via Survey ● What type of information do you need to prepare for the release? ● The “How this works” section is valuable. ● The “What users are saying” section is valuable. ● Do you like FAQ content incorporated into this release note format? ● 50% of respondents want only the highlights. 36% want all the details. ● 92% say this overview is valuable. ● 43% find results from alpha/beta participants valuable. ● 100% The new release note format improves my ability to understand the value of this feature and how it works. “Like the direct, fast way of learning about new enhancements at the click of a finger. Everything is included in the release note and to the point.”
- 13. ©athenahealth Feedback via Phone Interview 13 Survey showed that new release note format was good, but phone interviews revealed that… ● Clients still doing extra work to train their users: ○ Creating PPTs for the highlights ○ Deconstructing and rebuilding content by role ○ Prioritizing most impactful changes ● We discovered new “release trainer” role. ● We could do more.
- 14. ©athenahealth The Release Training Package 14 ● Checklist of best practices ● Grid of features vs. roles affected ● Email templates ● PowerPoint slides ● Role-specific PDFs of notes ● Links to demo videos Customizable!
- 15. ©athenahealth The Release Training Package: Release Readiness Checklist 15
- 16. ©athenahealth The Release Training Package: Feature Grid 16
- 17. ©athenahealth The Release Training Package: Email Templates 17
- 18. ©athenahealth The Release Training Package: PowerPoint Slides 18
- 19. ©athenahealth Role-specific PDFs of release notes 19
- 21. ©athenahealth What’s in the package and who created it 21 Technical Writing Product Education ● Release notes (some users prefer reading) ● PDFs of release notes by role (to help trainers distribute) ● Feature grid with links to demo videos and long-form release notes ● PowerPoint slides ● Demo videos
- 22. ©athenahealth What’s in the package and who created it 22 Customer Marketing Product Marketing ● Email templates ● Checklist of best practices ● Benefits of adoption ● Proof points from alphas and betas
- 23. Release Training Package Results "The training package was helpful in me understanding what the new release had, and then pass that information on so that the entire team was able to understand the changes. So much better than trial and error. I felt like we were being set up for success :).” Summer Fall ● I will use the Release Training package in the future 90% 93% ● How helpful was the Release Training package 75% 88% ● Did the Release Training package save you time in creating 83% 88% training materials to prepare your organization for the release? ● The materials reduced my preparation time by 0-60 mins 44% 35% 1-3 hours 44% 46% 3-6 hours 4% 11%
- 24. ©athenahealth Customer satisfaction with training and documentation increased 24 Customer Satisfaction Survey Scores Over Time
- 25. ©athenahealth Lessons learned 25 ● Don’t make assumptions. Get to know your users. ● How to survey clients about their training needs. ● How to work cross-functionally ● Benefits of working across teams
- 26. ©athenahealth Get to know your users 26 ● Partner with other teams to find users to talk to ● Talk to users of all types (enterprise, small, billers, practice managers, etc.)
- 27. ©athenahealth How to survey clients about their training needs 27 ● Clarify the problems you want to solve. ● Refer to the personas you developed. ● Rely on your partnerships to recommend survey participants. ● Review your survey questions and talking points.
- 28. ©athenahealth How we worked cross-functionally to deliver the training experience 28 ● Weekly cross-functional meetings. ● Shared timeline of deadlines. ● Shared project plan. ● All deliverables on shared drive. ● Process documents. ● Calendar reminders. ● Dedicated instant messaging channel.
- 29. ©athenahealth Benefits of working cross-functionally to deliver the training experience 29 ● You’re not alone. ● Finding common ground breaks down silos. ● Better client experience.
- 30. ©athenahealth Summary 30 ● Surveyed clients about their training needs. ● Discovered release trainers. ● Packaged content to reduce clients’ training burden. ● Broke down silos to work cross-functionally. ● Delivered a customer-centric release training experience.
- 31. ©athenahealth 31
- 32. © athenahealth 32 Thank You
Notes de l'éditeur
- TONY: Prior to that, was an editor in the publishing world. SAM: Prior to tech writing, worked as both a reporter and news editor in Boston. SAM: athenahealth is a cloud-based SaaS company that offers billing, medical record, and network services for doctors’ offices and hospital clients. Billers, doctors, and medical staff who want to spend time with their patients, not their laptop. TONY: We’d like to save questions until the end in the interest of time. We’ll save plenty of time for questions at the end.
- SAM: Today, we’re going to talk about how we solve the problem of training very busy healthcare professionals and their users on new features, which we release 3x/yr. This is our case study on the importance of understanding your users and working cross-functionally to meet their training needs. This is the story of how we ended up creating a release training package and all that we learned in that journey, including how to survey clients, how to target specific users, accommodate various learning styles, work cross-functionally, and deliver a customer-centric experience. As technical writers, we couldn’t do it alone. We collaborated with our peers in Marketing and Education to create a better client experience. Narrative Problems: Disruptive releases, low feature adoption, high support call volume, no one source of truth. Hypothesis: We should include more feature benefits and videos in release doc. Video conference A/B testing of different ways to do that. Implemented T1 RNs. Surveyed clients about T1 RNs. Results were good. Phone surveys with clients revealed that we just scratched the surface. Discovered release trainers. Created release training package. Surveyed clients again.
- TONY: The spike in customer calls was usually because users couldn’t find the answer to their question even though the answer was in the training materials, but it was hard to find with all the pieces in different places. At the end of 2017, we noticed a pattern with releases: Releases are disruptive: All products are cloud-based. Single-instance, multi-tenant SaaS. Releases include up to 100 workflow changes and new features to learn while clients must simultaneously run their medical practices. No test environment to practice new workflows in advance. Low adoption of functionality: Analysis showed post-release that clients were not using many new features or enhanced workflows. Increase in customer service cases: After a spike in customer calls related to the release, we looked for ways to improve training. Tracked “training issue” calls. Training is not one size fits all: Surveyed clients to reveal many clients use a “train-the-trainer” model with one person doing lots of work to train staff. No one source of truth: Many artifacts (RNs, FAQs, Webinars, blogs, in-app alerts) available in multiple locations (in app, release center, website, CSMs). Confusing for clients to know where to start or what they need to know to prepare. So we asked ourselves, what can we do to improve the customer experience?
- SAM: By including the “why” behind a new feature or change and incorporating an alternative approach to learning, we hoped to drive down customer calls and increase adoption. By the way, we didn’t want to add more work to the team but leverage other training materials from our friends. As we said, we knew we couldn’t do this alone. Feature benefits appeared in marketing materials but were separate from release documentation. We partnered with marketing to incorporate this content into the technical documentation.
- TONY: Can I see a show of hands? How many of you have heard some version of this? “I want your document shorter, but more detailed.”
- SAM: When we say “release note” at athenahealth, they are not bulleted lists. Mini user guides. Cloud-based software with no sandbox environment. Describe a Tier 1 release note, but don’t use that term. Use “Major Feature Release Note.” Why change the format? Leverage the release note channel to show the value to viewers and highlight metrics and user feedback from beta testing Provide two levels of detail: an overview and in-depth instructions for users to access relevant information at their time of need Provide a more cohesive and efficient training experience for users who prefer to read release notes Simplify Release Center How FAQs can simplify instructions and functionality descriptions Moving some of the technical and situational detail to FAQs helps keep instructions and functionality descriptions clear and easy to grasp. Customers can still find all the nitty-gritty details. It’s also easier to find information that’s only relevant in specific circumstances, and the format lends itself to being easy to scan. Client request: Make release notes shorter but with more details We introduced a synopsis with the most important facts. We also added more information to the release note, but in a way that lets customers jump to what’s of interest to them. This combination provides customers with a short and long version of the release note. Partnered with UX to recruit clients for feedback on mockups Held video conference to test designs of the release note including feature benefits, video, and FAQs
- SAM: T1 RNs met some of these needs. Addressed the “no one source of truth” issue by combining marketing content with technical content. Addressed feature adoption issues by including benefits from Product Marketing and video from Product Education. Why do this in RNs? Because we saw in stats that RNs were highest viewed artifact. Super users engaged more with RNs than with other training materials, but then we found that wasn’t enough when we surveyed trainers. Does including everything in the release note result in more work for tech writers? No! By delivering all content in one package, technical writers can focus on what we do best – writing instructions and describing how the functionality works. And we can reuse the work of others, allowing them to focus on what they do best. For example, we incorporate value statements crafted by marketing and FAQs, beta results, and testimonials collected by R&D. This not only improves the content delivered to customers but also reduces work and duplicated efforts across departments because everyone can focus on their area of expertise. Before, technical writers, marketing, and R&D would each produce their own deliverables for customers, and there was a lot of overlap (and inconsistencies) among the documents. Did this change work? Let’s talk to clients…
- TONY: Understand your user base. You need to know your audience to best address their specific needs. Otherwise, you’re just shooting in the dark. Partnered with: Product/Customer Marketing to understand clients. Account Management for client feedback on docs. Active users on community site to empathize. UX researchers to create personas and survey.
- TONY: What we did: Surveying all customers who downloaded the package. Reading community feedback. Listening to feedback from account managers.
- SAM: Targeted at all users. Tier 1 RNs - surveyed clients on adding demo videos to the release note Doctors in particular that preferred watching videos over reading.
- TONY: Targeted at IT Enterprise users (because they are responsible for tech at their orgs). We talked directly with them to ask whether our materials satisfied their needs in preparing for a release. Discovered a role of trainer that we hadn’t fully addressed. They were creating PPTs and copy/pasting from release notes to create highlights to train staff succinctly. Define “Release Trainer.” Why are they necessary (users are busy). Give example of a “Jason Lovett”-like person. How did we find them? We found (through the community site) that certain users read everything and then have to train the other users who are very busy. Phone interviews are more interactive than surveys. You can ask follow-up questions and have a discussion. It’s less work for the clients than writing out their thoughts in a form. Learned a lot more in this format than surveys. We thought we had a good solution with the long-form RNs, but discovered clients were still doing more. We hadn’t quite hit the mark. Based on this feedback, we created the Release Training package.
- SAM: Takes all of the content and puts it in easier to digest formats. Accommodating various learning styles. Solves “one size fits all” problem. We were able to do this with little effort because of the improvements we made in phase 1 broke out the content into components. Our Summer intern who was new put the powerpoint together.
- TONY: A to-do list that has sections for pre-release, release day, and post release. What the trainers should do to prepare themselves and their staff.
- SAM:
- TONY: Many release trainers send out reminder emails about the release with training attached or linked. We took that work off of their plate.
- SAM:
- TONY: We (or more specifically, our summer intern) divied up all of the release notes by role, and created a separate PDF for each role (one for billers, one for doctors, etc.)
- SAM: Here’s a screenshot from the release center on our community site, which is a nice visual of all the teams that contributed.
- TONY: TWs of course wrote the documentation. PE/IDs created the videos.
- SAM: Incremental improvements from long-form RN helped us create this package.
- SAM: *Result includes ranges 4 and 5 (“somewhat helpful” and “very helpful”)
- TONY: Look at the orange line. Satisfaction with training is improving. The spike in customer calls was usually because users couldn’t find the answer to their question even though answer was in the training materials, but it was hard to find with all the pieces in different places. Numbers at bottom are just our seasonal release numbers.
- SAM:
- TONY: We discovered that we were missing an entire persona. Small clients have different needs from enterprise.
- SAM: We learned quite a bit about the do’s and don’ts of surveying clients throughout this process. Don’t pigeonhole yourself into one way of collecting feedback. Try multiple methods. Phone revealed more than written surveys.
- TONY: Don’t go it alone. We could have never accomplished this without the help of UX, Marketing, and Product Education. Releases are disruptive. These processes helped all teams keep up-to-date. Weekly cross-functional meetings. Shared timeline with mutually agreed upon deadlines. Shared project plan with links to all deliverables and statuses. Stored all deliverables on a shared drive accessible by all teams. Process documents to explain how the work flows from team to team--who does what when. Calendar reminders that spelled out who would complete which task by that date. Dedicated chat room (Slack channel) to allow for 24/7 real-time communication (it was fast and furious near the deadline) to ensure all teams had all of the latest info (as features were pulled or added to the release last minute)
- SAM: Talking points: Releases are disruptive (features pulled and added to the release last minute), and having this cross-team group helped all of us keep up-to-date Sharing rapidly changing info in real time. You’re not alone. Supporting each other to be successful. Finding common ground (client-focused approach) breaks down silos Better client experience (survey results showed)
- TONY: This is the story of how we ended up creating a release training package and all that we learned in that journey, including how to survey clients, how to target specific users, accommodate various learning styles, work cross-functionally, and deliver a customer-centric experience. As technical writers, we couldn’t do it alone. We collaborated with our peers in Marketing and Education to create a better client experience. Narrative Problems: Disruptive releases, low feature adoption, high support call volume, no one source of truth. Hypothesis: We should include more feature benefits and videos in release doc. Video conference A/B testing of different ways to do that. Implemented T1 RNs. Surveyed clients about T1 RNs. Results were good. Phone surveys with clients revealed that we just scratched the surface. Discovered release trainers. Created release training package. Surveyed clients again.