Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this episode, our host Bret Alarcon is joined by Education Manager, Zach Malloch, and Technical Writer, Julia Shefcheck to discuss education materials and self-help options that are available to you and your fellow Rectrac users. The group touches on the in-app help, knowledge base, and RecTrac Lab then asks the audience for feedback on what they would like to see in a new help platform.
Recording
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:00
Hearing the fine familiar sound of RecChat theme song and I realized Bret was going to do the intro and I just
Bret Alarcon 0:16
stole my thunder.
Zach Malloch 0:18
Please take it away.
Bret Alarcon 0:20
Reset. Hello, and welcome to this week's edition of RecChat. I'm your host Bret Alarcon and Zach totally stole my thunder anyway, for today's RecChat, we're going to be talking about self help resources over here at the Edu Department, we're trying to figure out ways to improve Vermont's self help options and resources. And we want to talk to you about and get your ideas on how we could do that. So anyway, before we start, if you have any questions, please use that little q&a Button at the bottom, you can ask your questions, and we'll give you answers. We're also doing a little something special with this one, we're going to be asking some polls, some questions and polls to get your feedback. So be on the lookout for some of those. We also have a little chat Button, if you want to just leave some comments, you're more than welcome to. And now Zack, you can you can have your your time.
Zach Malloch 1:12
Thank you for allowing me that. So yeah, this, this session will be a little bit different. We're going to be asking for more interaction from you guys with the chat for a large part of it. And we're introducing Julia, kind of officially This is the first session that she's really participating in, you've probably seen her face a couple of times before. But Julia is our technical writer, and she's the newest member of the Vermont systems edu team. And she's going to be where, as Brett kind of mentioned, we're starting this project to revamp help or to improve the way that you guys use the help resources. And she's going to be a key player in that with her awareness of grammar and writing rules and all sorts of good stuff like that. How are you today, Julia?
Julia Shefcheck 1:57
I'm well, Zach. Thank you for having me. Hi, everyone. Happy to be here.
Zach Malloch 2:02
Very important part of the team already. So we wanted to start by posing a couple of questions to you. Julia, did you have one of those ready?
Julia Shefcheck 2:13
Sure. I wanted to start with do you use Vermont systems self help? And what I wanted to focus on right now is, if you do, why generally do you use it? And what types of self help do you typically turn to? We'll focus in a bit on if you don't use the self help and why. But for now, I just wanted you to think about if you do, why do you use it? And what kind? So just give you a little bit to get that out there.
Zach Malloch 2:41
Yeah, and I just saw David's comment. I just turned my volume up a little bit. Hopefully that helps a bit. But yeah, so if you guys could add or just give a little bit of a quick response, just a couple of words or sentences into chat, if you don't mind. But yeah, do you use Vermont system self help? And if so, which, which types do you use? And why do you use them? And we'll just give a minute or two for people to Type in a couple of things. And Brett, did you have a dance prepared to keep people entertained? Okay. So we see, using some chat and knowledge base, using support tickets, I see that Eddie has actually started a Slack server for RecTrac rec chat RecTrac User Group. I heard that being talked about last week. And that'll be a topic of conversation. And I'm very curious about that myself. knowledgebase articles step by step instructions. Also the chat try searching the knowledge base, first knowledge base and a lot of chat, search and knowledge base chat knowledge base. So I think we're getting some trends here, Julia. Yeah, new knowledge base in the past, but I don't usually find what I need. So that's that's good feedback. Katie. That's one of the things we're interested in chat cases, Knowledge Base RecChat. Very good. Try not to use chat, because that skips the line. Well, you know, a lot of times a chat if it is for something really quick and fast. Like that's, that's why it's there. So maybe you can avoid even getting in the line sometimes. So, I guess then, we wanted to get a little bit more into well, I guess I'll launch one of the polls first. And let's go ahead and launch this first one. All right. So for what, which of the reasons do you usually use self help? So if you guys could answer that we've got 42 People in the session. I know not everybody here is a customer but you can answer multiple ways if you want to. There you go. troubleshooting already an early leader, learning and development of the software, followed by verifying, understanding, staff training and specific scenarios, keep swapping back and forth. All right, well, that's some good information coming in there. Troubleshooting seems to be the number one reason that we're trying to use the help. Yeah, and I see Sandy's talking about the knowledge base. And it would be nice if there is an easier way to split it between 3.1 and 10.3, or earlier. And that's definitely something that we're looking into. So I'll go ahead and in this poll, and display the results survey, you can kind of see what the everything came back. And we're, of course going to be collecting these results and using them as we continue on and move forward with our process. And another piece that was interesting, as we we heard most of the self help options kind of mentioned, as we were getting the responses from chat, but let me just formalize this part here. So which of the resources do you most commonly use? So we have the inline help, including the topic box that you can access directly from the application, we've got the knowledge base, we've got dynamic case history. So if you log into the support portal, you can actually see cases that other people in your organization have submitted and how they have been resolved. And of course, we have the RecTrac lab. And that, of course, also has our virtual symposium archives for the subscribers of the virtual symposium. Knowledge Base, definitely getting the largest not a lot of dynamic case history review. So that's an interesting one, maybe one from the catch, or one from chat. Frank's actually in a going exactly the question I was going to ask, you didn't know that we had the dynamic case history review. And actually, that's a really great thing to kind of launch off from this. So we're going to do a little bit of an overview of these options. And we'll go ahead and in the poll and share those results. So not everybody is going to have access to the dynamic case review, I believe that you have to be a manager on your account or a web manager, you have to have your account specifically flagged to allow you to access that. But if you're curious about it, if you think you should be a manager or web manager, then that can be a really quick support case, just to update that possibly even a chat case to just take a look. So there's our responses, definitely a lot of weight towards the the knowledge base, followed by inline help and in RecTrac lab. So let's look at those real quick. So I'm going to share my Screen and Bret and Julia, anything that comes up at any point that you want to interject or ask about or clarify, please do so you guys can see my RecTrac archive at this point. All right. So this is the support portal actually back out. So if we're just going to vermontsystems.com, that's wrong system does zoom, let's just go to our site. Then if we go to support, we have our options here, we're actually just going to Click on support, and then that goes to support.vermontsystems.com. And you would then be prompted with a login at this point. I already logged in, and we have our support page, I have the ability to edit things because I'm do part of the management of this area. But we can get into case management, your knowledge base in RecChat, it kind of starts with the knowledge base. But case management, if you are listed as a manager, then this will show you all of your cases, basically that have been provided through your organization. We also see what our current release level is. But you can get through your various different cases here. Once again, you do need that Toggle or flag to make yourself a web manager I believe in dynamics. So that would be a support case to open for that. So if any of you go in there, and you Click on the Support title of Toggle and you go to the case management, then theoretically you would have some options there. Knowledge Base, we also, this one seems to be the most popular, I think this is the one that most people are familiar with. So you can just do a search and Type in a word or a phrase or an error message and get some results. Or we can jump into specific areas of the knowledge base. We have some various things kind of grouped. So we have all of these videos. So these we do have kind of broken down. One of the things I think will end up being a little bit better is if we like in this case, it's all of our 2018 symposium video recordings and they're just right here. So maybe that's kind of convenient that we can just Click to all of these things. angles, but maybe we'd also want to see one. But you know, it's just specifically, it's a knowledge base about the fees video. And it's it's also tied into other information about fees. So it's its own unique and separate knowledge base there. So then that's a knowledge base, we can also just do a regular search. So let's just say 6019. That's a really common WebTrac error when your messengers aren't talking to each other. So there's our 10.3, webspy, there's 10.3 webspy, there's more 10.3 stuff, we have tried to flag everything with whether it is 10.3 or 3.1. But unfortunately, you guys have already noted that one of the limitations of this platform is we can't, we don't have just like x, we're kind of lacking on the filters to drop down things. And part of the evaluation is evaluating the platform and deciding whether that's something we can use. Yeah, so Frank said, he can see their support cases that he mentioned, see other users tickets besides ours, I think if you have that web manager thing, then that means you can see any cases submitted from your organization, for maybe obvious reasons, privacy concerns, you won't be able to see cases from other organizations. But if there's something really useful, then we have a process of basically finding those to turn them into knowledgebase articles that would then take away that privacy threatening details and information. So knowledge base support portal, the RecChat archives are also right in here. So every time we post or have a rec chat, we record that rec chat. Last week, we had all of our virtual symposium preview stuff. So those are all available here. And most likely, some of these would also eventually move over to the knowledge base piece. So you have one search area, and it can find basically everything at least that's part of the thought process. We also have our Inline help. So I think everybody is fairly familiar with that as well. I was having trouble logging in before, but I rebooted. So hopefully, that's resolved. Yes. All right. So if we're on the Support Portal, or the Support tab here, this is all built into RecTrac, we can launch the customer support portal. So this will go to that site, I was just at support. And then we Click on support to get into it. So a little shortcut there, we can search the inap help. This Toggle determines whether the little contextual "i"s are turned on. And apparently mine likes to just keep going once I Click on it, that's interesting. And then we can get to the RecTrac lab right from here. So let's just look at the inline help real quickly. So if I launch any program, you see up here at the top, I've got a little "i" That'll bring up in line help. If I have a highlighted household, and I get to change it. So I'm now in household management. Because I have that in line help turned on, I have this little contextual "i" over every Field and gives me a little description of what those yields are very useful if we're in like activity management or pest management. And if I Click on any of these "i"s, then that's going to open up the page. So I can get directly to the the inline help. And then this is the full documentation for everything on that household management Screen. And it'll tell you everything about it. One of the things that I like to kind of point out here that maybe not a lot of people do as far as I see. But if we Click on table of contents, I obviously don't have my indexer running. But we do have this topic Doc's area. So this is just a quick link to get to all of our topic Doc's in the inline help, and they're all lined up, and just kind of easily referenced. And then we get some videos down at the bottom. Admittedly, some of these videos are starting to get a little bit older. But that's part of why we have the RecTrac Lab and the virtual symposiums in the like. So inline help, gets to a lot of other different things and also works contextually on most of your screens to let you know, kind of why you would have to visit a Field, it's a really good place to refresh your memory with those sorts of things. We already talked a little bit about chat. So if we're in the support portal, let's see where did I put that. So there's our support portal, we have this chat area, so I could start use some of our quick links right here. We have like our FastTrac videos. So these are elements or these are videos that are supposed to be like under five minutes or so very focused topics. And you can get to those right from chat. And you can of course, start chatting and actually talk to somebody and ask a quick question. And they can either queue that up as a case or hopefully answer a question. And yeah, so that's those are some most of the main options. Let me see if I'm missing anything, Brett or Julia, do you have? Have I missed anything yet?
Bret Alarcon 14:54
Well, there's a question that came in. Does the inline help get updated with program level updates or Do we need to update it separately?
Zach Malloch 15:03
Or? Well, Julia, actually, do you want to answer that question? You've been working on that very process recently?
Julia Shefcheck 15:10
Yes. Just so I'm clear. I want to hear the question again, trying to see it here.
Zach Malloch 15:16
So does that help get updated with program level updates for RecTrac? Or do you need to? Do we need to update it separately?
Julia Shefcheck 15:25
Okay. By program level update, what are you asking there?
Zach Malloch 15:30
So moving from RecTrac, 3.1, point oh, seven to 3.1 point 10.08 ticks, for example.
Julia Shefcheck 15:42
That help, ideally is updated along with the new releases, but it does, it is a separate process, if that makes sense.
Zach Malloch 15:52
I think from the customer perspective, it's, it's, um, all you have to do is run the update, and any updates to the help will be applied? Yes, it's part of the database at the moment
Julia Shefcheck 16:04
you as a customer do not have to do anything to see the updated help. It is data in the system. So in the application, so when the help is updated, you would be able to see it. If that is just
Zach Malloch 16:20
like any other Field, like if we add a new Field or a new Button somewhere on a Screen and RecTrac. We try to make sure that the help comes with that new Button, or if we realize that there's an error and help, we'll update that. They're all database updates, though. So that one executable that updates your RecTrac version also updates the help if there are updates for it. But good question, Jamie. Yeah, and so Leah has a question about whether the inline help is updated. And is we actually the reason that Julia came along is because our former technical writer, Richard Sparrow departed earlier this year. And he was previously in charge of doing the inline help updates. And so now Julia is taking over that position, as well as helping us out on the on the edu side. And so some of the help has been, I mean, this has been kind of a long term, long standing thing that some of the help hasn't been updated, or is maybe missing some details, or I'm thinking touch Point Of Sale, there's not really great write ups for touch Point Of Sale Button types right now. So these are all things that we're needing to tackle and start getting into, and starting to, you know, as best we can get to the point of best practices and not releasing things before the documentation is done. But we have a very eager development team that really wants to get all of these new features out to all of our customers. And sometimes they don't like to wait for that. So it's a bit of a challenge. But we're we're certainly tackling it as we move through. So, but yeah, the inline help. And that's actually part of a question. It's going to be one of the last polls that we asked here. Asking about, if inline help makes the most sense? Or would it make more sense to, to do something else with it to make it my more of a universal thing like a separate webpage? Maybe you access it from RecTrac. But then you go somewhere else? And it's not in the database. It's not dependent on program level updates to update the inline help, we could update it in real time for people? Possibly. All right, well, I feel like I was just talking a lot for some of that conversation. But I think that gets us kind of to the next step. And I really appreciate everybody's involvement. And so that's actually coming. I see Michelle's point, and this is the next phase, the next phase of the questions here. So Brett, do you see you have our Word document open? I was wondering if you wanted to ask number three.
Bret Alarcon 19:02
I think I can pull up the polls. Number three is
Zach Malloch 19:08
actually here. I'll just send you a quick chat that has the text in there. Okay. Send it directly to you.
Bret Alarcon 19:19
If you do not use VSI self help. What prevents you from using it?
Zach Malloch 19:24
Yeah. So Michelle said that, you know, sometimes it's hard to find the response in the chat and sometimes get backed up a little bit. So when you try using self help, what prevents you from being successful from that? Is it maybe you don't know how to do the search? Maybe it's complicated. We have some guesses, but we're hoping that maybe there's some spontaneous suggestions that we're not aware of yet.
Bret Alarcon 19:55
But it's the sum up if I scroll up, people using like the knowledgebase having problems getting through the knowledgebase filtering that 10.3 from 3.1 answers seem to be a popular answer.
Zach Malloch 20:11
Okay. Next thing of 10.3 and 3.1, that seems like one of the most common things that comes together. Yeah, I see Karen's talking about some of the topic Doc's a lot of them are still using the old UI, and they haven't been updated with new screenshots for the Next Gen. better options for searching the knowledge base. It's like you're looking for more Boolean Type stuff. You actually can use and or, or types things when doing those searches. I feel like there might even be possibly a search or a topic related to Oh, yeah, I'm still sharing my Screen, right? So yes, on the knowledge base piece, if you actually Click on this and go to knowledge base, then up at the top, it tells you what the knowledge base is. And it tells you that you can use Boolean operations. So if you did RecTrac and 3.1, then it should only include responses that have both of those phrases in there, both RecTrac and 3.1. And it should ignore 10.3 stuff. So not ideal. But we do have a Click here for more information. And then that brings us to more of just a general article about what Boolean search operations are. So you do have that as a function, or at least an extra area that you can jump into potentially, I do not believe you need to do caps. I see that question from Frank. And Katie says, I typed in what I want to search, but it doesn't bring up what I need. And so that's another thing that we're trying to evaluate about this platform as see if we can start to capture the the actual terms that you're using to search. So that if we see that you're typing in, I don't know, class management, and all of our stuff is in activity management. And maybe that's why we're not seeing or not finding it. But we don't really know that that's the phrase that you're trying to find right now. So that's one of the things that we're also looking to improve. See, in case management can't find what you're looking for, haven't looked into the knowledge base didn't know is there. So that's good. And I mean, just exposing some of this information. Yeah. Brandon has a specific question about wondering why case management wasn't helpful. I think what you're doing is just kind of contrasting the case management versus the knowledge base. And yeah, the knowledge base is definitely where we're trying to develop more of a repository of information they're searching to find out. So Michelle, saying that when she searches that chooses a broad topic and trying a few different ways to narrow down what is needed, but don't usually find what I need. Yes, specific instances are always the ideal, but always very hard to get when you're on the spot for that. Interest. Interesting, Angela saying there's some navigation issues with
Bret Alarcon 23:04
Yes, I've actually yeah, Angela, I, I understand exactly what you're saying. I, I completely agree. Like if you Click something and you're on page six, and then you go back, you're back to page one, you're not back to page six. And that's been a big, pretty big annoyance of mine, when you use another knowledge base, so
Zach Malloch 23:23
completely agree there. Okay, so let me just launch this, this will kind of codify some of the pieces. So what are some of the most common reasons that you may be stopped using the Vermont Systems help or when you're using it, you have trouble finding it?
Yeah, and I think that this also kind of leads us to a suspicion that we've had. And it's pretty obvious, I think, when we really start to think about it, but you can configure RecTrac in so many different ways to do so many different things that it is. Most of the time, when you're looking for something, you're you might be doing it for the first time like that, and sometimes needs somebody to guide you through it until they can interpret what your question is to figure out what then the solution would be to that. And it is a monumental task, trying to figure out how to kind of split the difference between making something that's effective for as many people as possible, but then also getting people to that really specific solution that they need just for themselves. But yeah, it seems like the most prevalent one is that it's incomplete that maybe you can find a little bit of information but it's not a full solution to take you all the way over the finish line. Okay, so we'll just take, I think we're, we're seeing what the trend is here. So I'm gonna go ahead and in that poll, and then the last one And before we get to the community side thing is asking a little bit more about. So there's a new topic, you realize you need to do something else. Maybe it's something you haven't done before? And how would you go about learning that new topic. So maybe it's not a particular error you're running into, it's not an out of balance issue, it's not a problem with the system, you just realize you want the system to do something new that you haven't done before I see topic, Doc's coming out, that's kind of the ideal, those are designed to ideally take you from soup to nuts all the way through, from not having something implemented at all through all of the steps to get it implemented. So I'm glad to see that those are there. And of course, you know, chat asking our staff, and then the inline help is coming in third place. And actually, it's this is also an ideal thing. So calling support is, I'm glad to see that kind of the last one on the list. That when you're trying to find something out, you at least try the other places first. Because we can always schedule training with you. But support isn't the ideal place for new training.
Yeah, so Nicola, saying that there's some actually, one limitation is a compatibility issue. Some of our older videos, still we're using Adobe Flash, and that's no longer supported. So that's going to be an issue. Oh, calling in Frank here calling in is definitely an option, how I was just talking about, like when you're training to use and to learn a new topic. Usually, that would be a training call, or something that you'd quote with the implementation side of the team rather than a support question to get an answer for. All right, but yeah, some really good results there. And I'm glad to hear that. And then I guess, we're already running. Message. I'm curious what that last bit there means Frank. But I'll share these results just so people can kind of see what the response was from everybody else. It's interesting to see what other people are doing. And then our last piece is talking about some of the things that we're going to investigate. So Eddie mentioned that he had launched a Slack channel. So I guess I could have made this a little bit more specific. But curious if what sort of appetite there is for this during the virtual symposium, it seemed like chat kind of blew up a bit with people being interested in kind of self guided community resources. And so this is largely without Vermont Systems direct involvement, at least not a day to day direct involvement, you wouldn't go here to start a support case. And you wouldn't go here specifically. To have somebody from from Vermont Systems answer your question. It's more to kind of bounce around with their, their peers, from other departments and ask, well, has anybody done visit processing with dropins? On an access control station? How does that work? What suggestions would you have or thinking about doing it? So it seems like there's some pretty likely people that would use it, and you know, it's kind of a self adopted Type of thing. And then the second part asking about support material being behind the support portal. The benefit from that is we can limit things you can say, well, I don't want my front desk staff to be able to access topic docs about how to set up activities. I would like that information that was be potentially dangerous for them to have that it seems like the the trend here is certainly asking for more open access so that you don't have to worry about a support login. So that's interesting. And that'll be useful for us to take in and digest. Well, so we're getting towards the end of the session, as we mentioned, I feel like I've completely dominated this. So I'll give it back to Julia and Brett, is there anything else that you guys want to ask or suggest or anything at all?
Julia Shefcheck 29:13
I wanted to ask, get some feedback on how you view the topic documents and how helpful they are to you in terms of level of detail. I know from from looking at them and working on them that they're very robust in terms of offering a lot of detail with how to walk through a process. Just generally the level of detail how helpful are they to you? Would a quicker overview sometimes be helpful? Do you feel like there's any key pieces missing from a talk topic document that would help you tie it together for what you're trying to achieve from a business standpoint? So I just wanted your your take On on the topic dock specifically.
Zach Malloch 30:04
Yeah, so how useful are the topic docs? Are they too detailed? Great, in my opinion, particularly for larger topics. So response from Jamie. This is an example of one topic dock for global sales, obviously a pretty big one. Lots of things happen in global sales, but we get our navigation to various areas. And we of course, are cross referencing a lot of things so we can get to other areas of the document. Best when starting from square one for a new process. Some are outdated. I agree with that. Yeah, so seems like, I guess there's one last thing I would ask, would anybody be willing for us to contact you directly for potentially a more in depth conversation? If so, maybe just leave a message in the chat like, yes, I'd be willing to. And we can go back through and pull that. Awesome. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you, Jeanette. Thanks, Casey. Sandy, awesome, very helpful people here. That's why we love doing all this stuff. Yeah, awesome. Tom, tons of responses coming in. So we'll be able to mine this very usefully, and pick your brains a little bit more specifically, potentially. Yeah,
Bret Alarcon 31:25
that's pretty much what I was gonna say. If any of you would like to like to work with us. And so we could pick your brain. I mean, you guys are the ones that are using us on our side. We just make sure it's set up, we make sure you know, it's working. And it's not really us that are using a day to day. So you guys, you guys are like the best resource that we have to understand how you're using it. And what you would like to see be changed so you could use it better and how it would make your lives easier. So you guys, again, our greatest resource for this, this change. So we would love to hear from you.
Zach Malloch 32:05
Awesome. Yeah. And yeah, so Michelle asked if I come up with specific details when things don't work. Can I send that over to you? Yes, absolutely. So I think everybody has my email zachm@Vermontsystems.com. Bret is breta@vermontsystems.com. And Julia is actually right under her face there. Julias@vermontsystems.com. So, yeah, we'll do that. So I think that we'll go ahead and in the conversation here, I appreciate all of the feedback from this little bit of a different, more interactive rec chat and less of us just telling you things and more of you giving us your feedback. I really liked that. So thank you all very much. Any closing thoughts, Brett or Julia?
Bret Alarcon 32:57
Not any closing thoughts?
Zach Malloch 32:59
Excited about the whole prospect?
Bret Alarcon 33:02
Likes to get the ball rolling.
Julia Shefcheck 33:04
Yeah, thank you. I look forward to working with you to improve the health as well. So I appreciate your feedback.
Zach Malloch 33:10
Very excited about this. Yeah, thanks, all of you for attending, and your willingness to share your thoughts and opinions. And we'll talk to you all soon. And have a great weekend. Bye bye.
Julia Shefcheck 33:21
Thank you.