Video and webinar writing

(Yes, we storyboard, shoot and edit video, in addition to writing the scripts. See our video section.)

Why is webinar writing and video script writing such a unique challenge? It’s because we communicate much differently in a recorded video/webinar than we do face-to-face or in a live presentation. The challenge of the webinar writing: It must be succinct, interesting enough to maintain our pathetically short attention spans, and spiked with relevant grabbers. Also critical is to ensure that these spoken grabbers are duplicated as on-screen text.

We wrote the voice-over copy below for a webinar which demonstrated the step-by-step functionality of the BMC Remedy Service Desk, a high-tech dashboard.

Webinar writing for BMC Remedy Service Desk (a high-tech dashboard)

By Mark Woodruff

Slide 1 – INTRODUCTION

As a service desk professional, you want to make sure that your team is able to respond quickly and efficiently to conditions that disrupt critical services. By automating incident and problem management processes according to IT Infrastructure Library best practices, you can do just that.  You can enable your service desk to act as a single point of contact for user requests, user-submitted incidents, and IT operations — and speed the resolution of end-user issues.

BMC Software offers a comprehensive incident and problem process management solution to help you meet your goals. This solution includes the industry-leading BMC Remedy Service Desk application, the BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database (or CMDB), and BMC Remedy Knowledge Management.

Align IT to your Business

Slide 2 – INTRODUCTION (CONT.)

BMC Remedy Service Desk provides the single point of contact between IT — or any service provider — and its users.  Together with the BMC Atrium CMDB and BMC Remedy Knowledge Management, it provides truly seamless integration among ITIL processes (such as incident management and problem management), and allows for the sharing of important data across the enterprise. In fact, BMC Remedy Service Desk was built to support ITIL best-practice workflows out of the box.

A Unified Architecture That Automates, Integrates and Optimizes ITIL Processes

Slide 3 – OVERVIEW

BMC Remedy Service Desk enables service desk staff to resolve incidents quickly and easily, using scripts, templates, and incident matching. In addition, it ensures that details about services level agreements — or SLAs — are available directly from their incident management consoles.

Having an incident management tool that is fully integrated with problem management and knowledge management — and one that shares the out-of-the-box ITIL process workflow capability — makes service desk teams far more efficient and effective in ensuring that business-critical services are restored quickly and remain available.

The Service Desk Single Point of Contact between IT and the Business

Slide 4 – OVERVIEW (CONT.)

The goal of the BMC Remedy Service Desk is to increase the availability of your critical services by speeding the resolution of incidents through the automated use of ITIL best practices. It reduces call volume and call times, while also improving the productivity of your service desk staff and users. Using this fully integrated solution, you can proactively manage problems, as well as effectively reduce or eliminate recurring incidents.

Resolve faster and Reduce Re-occurrence

Slide 5 – PRODUCT DEMONSTRATION

Let’s begin by taking a look at a typical situation from a service desk technician’s perspective.

Here we have a technician sitting at her desk receiving calls from users around the company. As you can see, she currently has the incident management console open in BMC Remedy Service Desk.  From this console, she can see the incidents that are assigned to her. In this particular view, there are several incidents that are red, indicating that she hasn’t met her SLAs.  The green incidents, on the other hand, indicate that she has some time left before an SLA is missed.

Slide 6 – DEALING WITH EVERYDAY ISSUES

The technician takes a call from a user who has forgotten his e-mail password — a  common help desk incident. Using the BMC Remedy Service Desk application, the technician accesses a template to create, populate, and resolve the ticket with a few key strokes. This is a good example of how templates allow your service desk technicians to work quickly and expedite the more tedious, common incidents.

Slide 7 – DEALING WITH COMPLEX ISSUES

Now, let’s take a look at a more difficult help desk issue.

The technician receives another call, this time about an expense reporting system problem. Again, she uses a template accelerator to automatically complete as much of the ticket as possible. However, in this case, the template does not lead to a resolution, so the technician must seek another solution.

First, she checks the SLA to see how much time she has to resolve this ticket. In this case, she has eight hours. Next, she uses the scripting capabilities of the system to find out what questions she should ask the user. (Different scripts can be set up for different support groups.) The technician selects a script, obtains answers to the questions, and saves the data.

Slide 8 – SEARCHING FOR AN ANSWER

Next, the technician uses the incident matching functionality available in BMC Remedy Service Desk to quickly search across the system for a possible answer. From this screen, she can check other incidents, see if there are any problem investigations, and check the known-error database for possible workarounds. The technician does find a potential workaround.

During this process, the technician also notices that there were quite a few incidents in the queue around expense reporting problems. Rather than spending time creating duplicate incidents, she decides it’s best to be proactive and notify the users that there seems to be an issue with the expense system — so she creates a broadcast message. This message should reduce the likelihood that other similar incidents will be assigned to other technicians — causing an unnecessary duplication of her work. After she finishes and exits from the incident matching screen, the technician selects a task entitled, “Create Broadcast from Incident,” and creates a message describing the problem — along with the known workaround. She then makes the broadcast message viewable to all users. The message should reduce the workload on the service desk —  and improve customer satisfaction.

Slide 9 – CHECK THE KNOWLEDGE BASE

The next step in the technician’s progress is to check the knowledge base in the BMC Remedy Knowledge Management application to see if there are any other possible solutions to the incident.  As you can see, she finds some very useful information that helps her resolve the issue.

The technician is now ready to resolve this incident, using the new workaround she found in the knowledge base. She uses the process flow status bar at the top of the screen to move to the next stage, following well-defined ITIL best-practice process flows.  Each time she moves to the next stage, she will be prompted for any missing information.

In this case, she needs to enter the resolution.

Slide 10 – OPEN A PROBLEM RECORD

Also, since this is only a temporary workaround, she decides to open a problem record for the incident and escalate it to the problem management team to find a more permanent solution. This team can perform root cause analysis, determine the cause of the problem, fix it permanently, and keep the incident from occurring again.   As you can see, problem management has its own process flow and its own set of accelerators, which help expedite the process and reduce the time that staff has to spend working their service desk software.

Slide 11 – SAVE, CREATE A PROBLEM TICKET

After the technician finishes with the problem scenario, she saves it, thus creating a problem ticket (which will be passed to the Problem Management team for resolution).  However, before moving on to a new incident, she must ensure that she has followed her company’s processes for resolving this incident.  She uses the process flow bar at the top of the screen to ensure that she moves to the next step in that process. The process flow bar ensures that everyone follows a particular organization’s defined procedures accurately and in the correct order.

In this case, the technician’s next step is closure. Once again, she is prompted for any missing data to ensure that the information collected is sufficient enough to report on later, as well as to make sure the data is useful enough to solve similar issues that might occur.

Slide 12 – THE INCIDENT IS CLOSED

Now, the incident is closed.  The user has a temporary workaround, and is able to continue with his work (with minimal delay).  The problem ticket is open, and ultimately, the Problem Management team will provide a more permanent solution to the user — and put mechanisms in place to avoid the repetition of the same incident.

Slide 13 – INCIDENT REPORTING ACCESSIBILITY

BMC Remedy Service Desk is not only a great tool for your service desk staff, but it is also a great way for your users to create requests themselves rather than having to call the service desk.

As you can see here, this user is logging into the Service Request Management system  – the service request catalog system – to enter an incident himself, rather than calling the service desk. As he logs in, he can see all the services to which he is entitled.  He can browse his existing open requests to see statuses on them. He also can see the Broadcast area, which shows information about the expense reporting system problem that the technician published earlier. At this point, the user could simply log off — since he knows that someone is working on the problem already — or he can create another incident by clicking on the Expense Reporting problem service.  The user can also choose other services based on his entitlements  – request such as facilities, HR, Telecomm, etc.

Slide 14 – PRODUCT HIGHLIGHTS

A good consolidated service desk solution ensures that both service desk personnel — as well as end users — have the data they need, when they need it, easily and quickly. That’s why BMC Remedy Service Desk provides an easy-to-use interface that streamlines the process and simplifies navigation within the service desk application.

For managers and other service desk personnel, BMC Remedy Service Desk also offers very easy-to-use reports that provide the important data necessary to make accurate and informed decisions, such as this report depicting Incident Volume by Priority and Status.  Because of the rich data captured by the system, managers and other analysts can get the data they need.

Slide 15 – THE BENEFITS OF BMC REMEDY SERVICE DESK

Your service desk is essential to keeping your business running smoothly and maintaining a competitive edge. You must not only effectively streamline your incident management and problem management processes, but also reduce costs and expedite service while maintaining quality service levels.

BMC Remedy Service Desk can cost-effectively improve the number of incidents that can be handled, improve resolution times, and prevent future incidents from reoccurring – all while improving IT staff efficiency.

Part of an integrated and industry-defining service management suite, BMC Remedy Service Desk is fully integrated into the configuration management database and provides embedded best practices that pave the way for your organization to achieve Business Service Management.

Slide 16 – CONCLUSION
To learn more about BMC Remedy Service Desk, call your BMC Software account representative, or visit us online at www.bmc.com.

BMC Software … activating business, with the power of IT.

Looking for creative and effective voice-over writing or webinar writing services? Contact me to discuss your challenge.