Click to Play

 

The content of a lot of training and support materials is visual and therefore challenging to convey using text-based email. As a result, companies such as On Demand Analysis, a software analytics and development firm, are using Pixetell video capture software as a way to communicate and collaborate in a more meaningful way. 

"We use Pixetell for sales and tech support, and it's made a quantum change in our effectiveness. The abilities to personalize demos, reuse content and minimize online meetings have tremendous benefits. We save time and increase customer satisfaction – especially on tricky technical communications," said Rachel Dyer, VP of Implementation at On Demand Analysis. "Plus using Pixetell is seen as cutting edge and gives the company instant credibility with prospects. When companies see what we are selling, we get their interest more quickly."

How many times have you seen that dialog box that appears on your computer screen after a program crashes? It asks the same question every time: Send error report? Most of us decline the report. But Daniel Helland of SeaPort Airlines can’t do that when there’s something amiss with his company’s airline reservation system. He needs to find out what wrong and get it fixed right away. Now, he’s using Pixetell® to keep the system running smoothly.

Helland is customer service manager for SeaPort Airlines, a West Coast based airline with about 90 flights a day primarily in the Pacific Northwest. In his position, he is responsible for overseeing the airline’s computerized reservation system. Previously, when he received an error report, it triggered a sometimes difficult process of trying to explain to the company’s Thailand-based IT team what the specific problem was. Then he discovered Pixetell.

"With Pixetell, I generate the error report, save it to my desktop, make a screen recording of it, show them where the error is, and they take it from there," Helland says. "I don’t have to explain it, I just show it."

Helland has also used Pixetell for tutorial/training videos, an application he expects to use more often because of Pixetell’s effectiveness as a training tool. "I absolutely love it," he says of Pixetell. "It’s just fantastic!"

Joe Shuchat loves sports. So he created a product that allows teams and coaches to track every significant factor in their athletes’ lives, from nutrition to workout schedules to their GPAs. Pixetell® screen recording and visual messaging software is now an integral part of Shuchat’s team.

His web site called The Winning Identity is catching on with college sports programs. Shuchat’s concept was built at Dalhousie University under the guidance of Dr. Carolyn Savoy, a national championship winner at the University of Tennessee. Since its creation several other colleges are lining up to test Winning Identity’s player information management concept.

But Winning Identity is a new and somewhat complex product. As Shuchat was preparing to roll it out to a wider market, he needed a clear way to communicate to his clients how to use each page of his player-tracking web site. "I tried five products and picked Pixetell. It was far and away the easiest to use," Shuchat says.

Pixetell gave Shuchat the ability to easily create an effective tutorial for each page of his web site. Pixetell offered something more: a secure way to communicate with his clients, who consider Winning Identity’s information about their players a major competitive edge in the college sports arena.

"We love Pixetell and how easy it is to use," he says. "The editing features are intuitive and the quality of the video is great. It’s a fun product, too! I recommend Pixetell for anyone looking for cool, unique medium to get a message across."

 

Click to Play

 

Jim Huntzicker, Head of the Division of Management at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, teaches a class in which two-thirds of the 30 students are distance learning students who only rarely visit the campus. Huntzicker needs to be able to connect with these students in non-classroom ways. He uses Pixetell messages to connect with distance learning students in order to summarize materials that will be covered in class or to review materials students have already been assigned.  Pixetell allows him to give clear, concise instruction and feedback which students can review on their schedule.

Explaining the need for and impact of budget reductions is one of the more difficult tasks a school superintendent must handle. Clarity and consistency of message are critical elements to making the process work. But it’s not always easy to communicate effectively to the various audiences affected by budget cuts when the issue is so potentially volatile.

Luther Heller turned to Pixetell® to help him communicate his budget reduction plan to parents, teachers, students, the board and his community in general. Heller is the Superintendent of Schools in Montevideo, MN, a 1,400-student school district. Heller has had to communicate negative news before and is sensitive to the care required when doing so.

"To get the information out to everyone, I had been doing PowerPoint presentations and posting them on our website," he says. "Then I saw a presentation that another school superintendent had made to explain budget reductions. I thought, ‘This may be a better way to get the information out.’"

Dr. Heller used Pixetell to make a screen recording of his PowerPoint presentation while adding his commentary. "I explained in detail what we were doing to reduce spending as I presented the material" he says. "I found it was very easy to use—I adopted it quickly."

Dr. Heller emailed the Pixetell to key parties and posted it on the web site. Using the view counter feature, he could tell how rapidly it was being reviewed. He also received positive feedback from people who viewed it and reported that it was an effective means for getting his message out. "It’s always nice to get that kind of feedback" he says.

 

Click to Play

 

For Jayson King, owner of Salt Lake City-based Landform Design Group, precise communication is an essential part of his business. The landscape architect wants to be confident that his employees, subcontractors and clients all understand the elements of a particular design. King has found that communicating such information with a Pixetell video capture works extremely effectively.

"This is a very precise tool. When I'm going over plans with someone, explaining the design elements to them, Pixetell allows me to walk them through the initial design, or if there's a design change, to explain it quite clearly to them," King says. "Now, rather than having to schedule a meeting to discuss things like that, I just send a Pixetell. Saves me time and money in the long run."

King uses Pixetells as a coordination tool with subcontractors to quickly send them updates on plans. He says when he makes a  Pixetell screencast, it averages three to five minutes in length—a small time commitment compared to the hours he no longer spends in meetings.

 

Click to Play

 

Dr. Jeffrey Buckman, founder of Vascular Diagnostic Laboratories, uses Pixetells of X-rays, lab results and medications he has prescribed for patients to communicate with other physicians and to give to patients so they will have a record of their health status. In one instance, a Pixetell helped save a patient's life. In the fall of 2009, a patient came to him complaining of swelling in her. The patient showed no symptoms of anything as serious as a blood clot and was not in pain. Dr. Buckman ordered a diagnostic test that showed that a large clot had broken loose from the patient’s leg and had traveled to the lungs, a potentially life-threatening situation. He sent the patient to the emergency room for a CAT scan to confirm his diagnosis.

But the patient's lack of symptoms misled the ER staff. They decided against the surgery. Upon learning of the decision, Dr. Buckman quickly created a Pixetell in which he showed a screencast he made of the diagnostic test. Using the voice function with the screencast, he discussed the image, pointing out the clot. Thus enlightened, the ER staff performed the recommended surgery, helping to save the patient’s life.

 

Click to Play

 

Charmaine Spadoni is a highly successful representative for BeautiControl, a beauty and health products vendor. As her business grew, video conferencing no longer met her communications needs. Today, her communications solution of choice is Pixetell—a screencast with high impact. She says that Pixetell offers her the clarity, convenience and flexibility to finally deliver her messages the way she always wanted to. "Pixetell is so perfect for what we need," she says. "Whether it be inviting a client to an event to giving her a quick overview or to solidifying an appointment—it’s perfect. It's the only system I've found that can handle it all, from a three-minute message to a two-hour tutorial."

 

Click to Play

 

Pixetell helps Mark Friel get more work done each day.  The vice president of Pacific Real Estate Partners in Portland, OR, says Pixetell video capture software has replaced the telephone for many of his transactional communications.

"Sending someone a Pixetell is, in many cases, much better than a phone conversation," he says. "When I need to reference something specific on a document, plan or drawing, it is much easier and clearer to do it with a Pixetell. Being able to capture the cursor movements makes it easy to show someone what you want done."

Friel frequently needs to communicate the same information to several participants in a transaction. Again, Pixetell offers the ideal solution. "Instead of making five phone calls and telling each person essentially the same thing, I send them all a single Pixetell. Everyone gets the same message, and I’ve saved time and money." He also uses it to give remote property tours and updates.

Friel says he generally makes and sends five to 10 Pixetells a week, mostly short screencast recordings of something on his computer, with his commentary accompanying the screencast. "It's a powerful tool," he says. "I'm a big proponent of the product."

As an early adopter of the product, he says it's given him a competitive edge in the real estate market.

"I must admit I was a little upset when one of my competitors asked me about Pixetell," he says. "But I know you can't keep something this good a secret for long."

 

Click to Play

 

Pixetell user Brian Greig of Vancouver, B.C., sells construction equipment throughout North America. He recently closed a sale by sending a Pixetell to a customer in Nova Scotia. With Pixetell, Greig was able to completely inform the customer about the excavator, pointing out important features that are difficult to communicate by telephone or email. In a single message, he showed the item from various angles, accompanying the photos with his commentary. "The transaction turned out well," he says. "The customer was comfortable enough to buy the excavator from over 3,000 miles away, because he felt that he knew everything about the. And, when the machine was delivered, there were no surprises."

OEC Business Interiors is a Chicago office solutions firm with $55 million in annual revenue. As a growing firm it evolves its business processes to accommodate growth and gain efficiencies. These changes often require training in support of switching to a new process. Pixetell® now supports that training.

OEC updates its staff phone list every month and used to issue a new hard copy of the list to each employee. Soon they had several phone lists in their inbox, only one of which was current. "With today’s technology, it didn’t make sense that a static hard copy be our primary method of distribution" says marketing manager Jerry Schiro. "It limited accessibility and wasted paper."

So OEC moved the phone list into its email system, where it could be easily updated as numbers changed. One problem: How to explain the new system to OEC’s 110 employees? Enter Pixetell.

"Moving the list to Outlook required explaining a lot of steps to employees," Schiro says. "Where is the list? How do I access it? How do I use it through my Blackberry? All these things were difficult to explain in an email or text document. But with Pixetell, we could simply walk them through the process, showing them the steps while explaining it."

The Pixetell went out to the workforce, and people got the message. "It was a big win for us," Schiro says. Now, OEC uses Pixetell for a growing range of communications including:

• Tutorials for training sales personnel
• Explaining changes in designs to clients and staff
• Sales/Marketing communications

Rather than replacing email, Pixetell has enriched email. "I hate those long email exchanges, where the message can get muddled. Now, I use email to send my Pixetells. It’s not a replacement for email, it’s an enhancement. And it’s an easy process to assimilate into your business. There’s very little learning curve to Pixetell."

When you need to explain something to a wide audience in a clear, multi-media fashion, nothing beats the quality, ease of use and flexibility of Pixetell®. Just ask Julie Raysbrook.

When Julie met the man she would eventually marry, she had no idea how much her life would be changed. Mark Raysbrook, Julie learned, had cystic fibrosis, a complex disease with no known cure that makes life a daily challenge. As she shared these challenges with Mark, Julie decided to help families that were in a similar situation due to CF.

As a nursing student, with accounting experience, Julie directed her skills and personal experiences towards alleviating the financial burden imposed on families by CF. She created a nonprofit, Disability Advocates for Cystic Fibrosis, to provide free services to those seeking Social Security benefits and tax deductions related to CF.

Many expensive drugs, special foods and ongoing visits to medical experts can be deducted from one’s taxes. But the deductions are difficult to claim without help from an expert like Julie who understands the IRS tax laws that govern them. She wanted to create a video tutorial for the cystic fibrosis community web site’s resources section. To describe steps in receiving those deductions for a web site tutorial, Julie, with the help of two others involved in the CF community, harnessed the explanatory power of Pixetell.

"I tried other solutions, but Pixetell was the best one. It was very easy to use and did a great job recording my screen." With the voice and mouse pointer features, Julie was able to walk her audience through her demonstration in a clear, step-by-step manner. You can see Julie’s tax deduction Pixetell here.

Francille Jarreau works as a day trader from her home in rural Mississippi. Her experience in this fast-paced occupation has drawn students to her who she trains in the art of day trading. "My students are traders I have run across during my many years of trading and study of the markets," she explains. Most of them require long-distance training.

Pixetell® has completely transformed her training process. "I love this product," she says. "I don’t think I could live without it now! Before Pixetell I used a program to snapshot a picture of my screen and place it into my type-written documents. Somewhat effective but not nearly as useful or easy as doing a talking video picture," she says.

"I use Pixetell several times a day to describe what is going on with the markets as they trade. I take a video of what I want to show and email it to my students. I had no trouble using Pixetell on the first try and was fascinated by its ease of use. It is perfect for my business."

Ease of use—clarity—multiple functionality—all these Pixetell features have made Francille a more effective trainer. "Pixetell saves a lot of typing, which as we all know can be misconstrued according to the readers ability to comprehend. A picture is worth a 1,000 words, and a video saves typing 1,000 words to try and get your message across."

Ellen Jackson, owner/manager of Kay’s Corner Office in Northern California, describes herself as "a general all-around virtual executive assistant and marketing entrepreneur." From her home-based business, she performs a variety of tasks for companies ranging from start-ups to large foreign contractors. These firms use her to create their marketing materials, newsletters, videos, training materials, manuals, and to provide customer and staff support. Pixetell® is her newest efficiency tool.

"I make training videos. I’m a writer. I do search engine optimization consulting and contracting. I do virtual assistance and marketing. You name it, I do it." And she loves Pixetell and the way it has made creating training videos so much easier. I’ve tried all the others, and none will make a video as easily as this one," she says. "I can use it for everything, and every day I find another use for Pixetell."

"For my training videos there really is nothing better out there," she says. "It’s easy to use. It lets you make a longer video than other software, and the editing part is a breeze. Controls are straightforward and you don't have to maneuver through several screens to achieve your goals."

Videos are sent to the recipient via a link in an email. Clicking on the link plays the video through the recipient’s standard web browser. "It is an amazing system that is easy for the video maker and for the person receiving the video. The help tutorials are clear. And there is great customer support if there is a question."

In corporate training, key goals are audience comprehension and retention of subject matter. Scott Iverson, national sales trainer for spa-maker Watkins Manufacturing uses Pixetell® as a means to achieve those goals. Iverson does lots of trainings with employees and retailers around the U.S. This often requires travel, or meeting with groups who come to his location. Pixetell helps him make these meetings more productive.

"One way I use Pixetell is to send a message to a retailer, in advance of a group training," he says. "I’ll explain the PowerPoint for the presentation and other highlights so they have a chance to proof the material we’ll be using for the training." This gives Iverson a chance to revise session content ahead of time so that each audience is getting exactly what they need from him.

Iverson also makes Pixetell screen recordings of key segments of longer training sessions so that participants can review them to enhance retention of the material. In addition, he’ll quickly capture an idea or a strategy and share it with his training team; a Pixetell message captures more accurately what he’s trying to convey. "Pixetell shortens that time from having a thought to creating a message to share the thought. You capture your idea quickly and send it immediately."

"It is so easy for our sellers to access the content—they just click on the link. It’s nice that the Pixetells are hosted for us. Another dimension is that you can combine the visual with the voice and screen capture to make a more descriptive message," he says. With Pixetell, the information is conveyed clearly the first time allowing Scott to increase retention in his target audience.