Less of the manual, more of the digital

Digitalisation is a hot topic at the moment. It has also been driving progress and change at SEEBURGER. To help you easily do your work regardless of where you are, we have been expanding our portfolio of integration software in the SEEBURGER Cloud. However, digital progress shouldn’t – and doesn’t – stop at our software. We’ve also turned our attention to the cloud’s support documentation, to make it as easy as possible for our customers to work with our Cloud Services. The technical writing team proudly present the new SEEBURGER Cloud Online Help.

How has digitalisation changed how we search for information?

These days, it’s quicker to find answers than ever before. Instead of spending hours with a pile of books, the information you need is only a few clicks away on the web. We live in a time where anyone can repair their own washing machine with help from YouTube tutorials. As our lives become more digital, we expect to have information at our fingertips.

Having to search for a long time is frustrating in our fast-paced times. When an issue occurs, we want an immediate solution. We want the answer now. That’s why modern communication is all about being where the customer is. As our world has become more digital over the past years and decades, new forms of communication channels and platforms have sprung up and become an integral part of our business and personal lives. Whether looking for a new job on LinkedIn, sharing moments from your life on social media with friends and followers or – something which is now second nature – searching for information on Google, these relatively new technologies are part of our lives and we use them to communicate with the world. And, of course, this is no longer confined to a desktop computer. Instead, you can access information wherever you are with your smartphone. Indeed, such internet-enabled mobile devices have made it even quicker to get the information we need, while simultaneously prompting and promoting technical progress.

We need to keep these developments in mind when providing information for our customers. Where are users searching for the information they need, and how can they find it as quickly as possible?

An online help section for the digital age

The customer portal for the SEEBURGER Cloud is now part of this digital trend. It lets customers easily access the services they’ve booked through a web browser. This means that registered users can use our products regardless of where they are. And customers don’t need to spend time installing and updating programmes on their systems.

The previous SEEBURGER Cloud help section was more traditional. It contained a selection of user manuals in pdf for users to read. However, you needed to be logged in to the cloud to access these. They were not as quickly and easily available as we would now expect in our digitalised world. We also now expect to electronically search content, just like on a search engine. To this end, the help section for SEEBURGER’s Cloud Services has been moved to its own website. And it doesn’t require you to register.

We have also changed our approach. Instead of describing the user interfaces, the help section now looks at how to perform the tasks you need from the Cloud Services. These are known as use cases. After all, what use is a detailed description of a drill if you need to drill a hole in the wall? We hope that this new approach makes it easier to use our help resources and addresses the support questions you need.

We also want to promote a community on our help pages. In the digital world, people communicate online. A particularly popular function is crowdsourcing, where people who have experience of a company’s products but are not employed by the company work together to share knowledge and opinions on the products. Therefore, on SEEBURGER‘s Cloud Online Help site, users are encouraged to write comments on the help pages. This means that users can play a key role in continually improving our online help pages to ensure that the content meets their needs and gives them value.

The online help section contains a number of video tutorials on the SEEBURGER Cloud. These short films, in which images and screenshots are complemented by animation and explanations, quickly and simply explain how to resolve common issues. We have used subtitles on the films instead of narration so that they can be easily viewed in the office and don’t require any further equipment, such as a headset.

Information is valuable

Getting information should be as simple as possible. This doesn’t only mean it should be easily accessible. It should also be easy to understand. Incomprehensible gobbledygook is just as useless as no help at all. Therefore, it is important to keep pace with digitalisation in the less obvious area of user help, as well as the more prominent areas. We at SEEBURGER are continually working on this for the cloud, and have already released some of our new content. And, as a change of direction is easier with a good guide, why not visit us on the SEEBURGER Cloud Online Help site and tell us how we are doing?