Screen recording make quick work of training others

We answer dozens of questions each day from users. Most of these questions come in the form of "how do I do this?" and take just a few minutes to explain over the phone. However, that is a few minutes each and every time the question is asked. That's a waste after the first time and expensive for the customer.

There is a convenient, inexpensive way to answer these questions even better: screen recording.

TechSmith's Camtasia and DebugMode's Wink are two products that allow you to record what you are doing on your computer screen and record your narrative as you are doing it. The result is a short movie file or Flash movie which can be emailed, burned to CD or stored on your website which contains a visual and audible guide for the user.

They see a short clip that shows them exactly what to do on the screen and provides your voice guidance as to how to do it. You can include tips, pitfalls to watch out for and even suggestions as part of the voice recording.

We use Camtasia to record short training clips. We send these to our support desk callers when they ask a question and then we post them on our website so the next user who needs the same answer can find it on their own without needing to call us. That makes our "interactive support" available 24x7x365 for almost no cost.

An example of our use of Camtasia is here: Registering for the DeepRun BNI website

Camtasia, a commercial product, is available for MS Windows. Wink is freeware and is available for use on MS Windows as well as Linux x86.

TechSmith's Camtasia
DebugMode's Wink