Scribe User Spotlight: Hayden Kerr, SyncEzy

"Simplicity and speed are the two major things that spoke to me." — Hayden Kerr, SyncEzy Technical Manager.

We sat down with Hayden Kerr, technical manager at SyncEzy to talk all about how he's used Scribe to change the game for himself, his team and his customers.

What is SyncEzy?

In their own words...

SyncEzy is a B2B integration provider who, in plain English, connects business software together in an intelligent way. We work with everyone from trades to professional services and save them boatloads of manual data entry and admin work through their integrations. We specialize in providing deep integrations to ensure businesses can get all the data they need, in the app they're using, at the right time.

Finally, we're proud of our customer support team and our sales team (using a collaborative sales approach), who both work to ensure our customers get the solution and help they need.

How Hayden at SyncEzy uses Scribe

Hayden's using Scribe to help customers work with his complex CMS customizations. He's such a fan of Scribe that he's gotten his team and customers on board. In fact, two of his customers have incorporated Scribe into their workflows.

He's able to turn even the most complicated work into easy, visual education.

He's using Scribe for process mapping, workflow documentation and even coding documentation, so that customers know the triggers, automations and outcomes.  

And when things go wrong? His customers are able to Scribe what they did to show what isn't happening. Hayden's able to work with them to make sure it does.

Scribe is part of Hayden's suite of tools that enable him to educate his customers on customizations. He's using Scribe along whiteboards and videos — so his customers can learn however they learn best.

His favorite features are GIFs (and who doesn't love a good GIF!) and folders. And he can't wait to try Pages to take his docs to the next level.

Want to know what Hayden's life would look like without Scribe? We'll let him tell you:

"It would be a lot of cutting and pasting, you know, I'd use like open source tools like share X, take screen copy and... pasting. And then I'll be typing and it'll be putting an annotation over the top and then have to consider for Word to PDF and put up on a webpage. It's like... no. Just want it done. So that's what [life] would be without it. But luckily, I have it set. Please don't take it away from me."

Don't worry Hayden, we won't. 😉

Watch Hayden's interview

Hayden has taken Scribe and made it his own. Learn more about:

• How he found Scribe.
• The tools he uses Scribe with.
• The workflows he's created for a totally unique experience.

Watch Hayden's interview or read the transcript below!

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Lauren @ Scribe: Hi, everyone. I'm Lauren Funaro, content editor here at Scribe. And then with my friend Hayden Kerr technical manager at SyncEzy. And also a power user with Scribe. It's a nice to see you hate it.

Hayden Kerr: Thank you very much for the time.

Lauren: Thank you. Could you tell me a bit about yourself and what you do at SyncEzy?

Hayden: Sure. So we are a business system integration company. We work really deep integrations that we try to scale with our customers.

We work in the Construction industry, trades and services. So security, electrical, heating and cooling companies, and also in healthcare quite a bit as well. So my role is one of implementation technical installations, design — a lot of the security Compliance that we do in the business.

I know just about how people get things done enough business. So look after our own internal CRM etc. And that provides a lot of different bits of software that I'm using. Much of them web-based to get our jobs done internally — but with our customer as well.‍

Lauren: So you're pretty busy, it sounds like.

Hayden: During my day? Haha yeah! And I like to have a bit of time off at the end as well.

Lauren: That's good. Well, we appreciate you very much for taking the time since it sounds like you have so much to do. So I'm going to take you back a bit. Let's go back to the old days when you first experience Scribe. What was your reaction when you first opened the tool?

Hayden: Time-saving and simplicity. It's just everything recorded from the first get-go. I used some other platforms that just didn't — [they] stalled or didn't record correctly.

But this one just had a really good seamless approach to where you're recording what I'm doing on screen. And then when I use the app-based or the windows based one, it just really took another level if I was doing something that was outside of a web browser.

"It just really took another level if I was doing something that was outside of a web browser."

So a lot of times that might be an insight like SQL or in PowerBI or something else outside of a web browser, and that really helps with the process.

Yeah, simplicity was probably the main one. But then also the time saved. I could get it done. And then it would come back later on and I could just edit it and update it if that wasn't the right amount of data. So I'd get it straight out to someone they'd be like, "this is awesome. Thank you so much. There goes the whole workflow."

And then, yeah, it might it pretty easy. So simplicity and speed are the two major things that spoke to me.

Lauren: That's awesome. What tools are you using Scribe with?

Hayden: We generally embed them with a platform called Zoho Learn. So, we're a Zoho advanced partner and we do a lot of customer implementations where we'll do custom designs for a CRM system. Whether it's a Construction management company, hospital group, any of those kinds of solutions, where, we're developing something that you can look at a CRM and say that's not the way you want to use a CRM or we might get that because we can customize it so much.

So, a lot of even the way a work flow is triggered and the way it actually works, we go into a completely and so I'll use Scribe as a combination. You know, I'll:

• Use Miro for whiteboarding.
• I'll put the Scribe into Miro.
• And then I'll review the Miro board on screen and put some notes around it.
• And then we'll actually go into the steps of the workflow.

So I'm trying to use the tools they have to both show people where they can get documentation but also show the workflow of how something works.

And I'll probably use that more for, in a way, coding documentation. Not so much about what the actual code is, but the process that the code does, like:

• What are the triggers?
• What are the automations?
• What's the outcome for it?

And then I'll do a little video at the end and that might be on Miro all was something else but there's a link to it at the bottom and people just have a video over which is more me speaking about it just because we've got so many different kinds of industries.

I try to do a bit of a scatter got approach on the why a document because I could pass it off to a… receptionist at a hospital, or I could pass it off to an owner of a business. He thinks differently and they're just gonna try and type the different ways we do documentation to understand what we've done.

Lauren: This is such a cool example of the ways that Scribe can supplement different tools and can work in tandem with the tools that you might have already used or solutions that you only had to really improve the process of training and supporting others.

You mentioned some individuals that you might work with. Could you elaborate a bit on who it is you're using Scribe with?

Hayden: Sure. So we look after Australia's largest not-for-profit hospital group. They've got 50,000 staff. They've got way too many divisions to really count on. But we've got lots of different implementations inside their hospitals

One, we look out for the private division. We're essentially the people that manage all of the doctors, all the specialists. So these are high-earning doctors that create a lot of revenue for the hospital and we help manage that compensation process through that.

So the documentation that we've done there is all about what flows and about how to do it.

One of the projects we finished off end of last year was for a customization — again a CRM — but we made for a drug and alcohol support and counseling enter. And these had backing from state government. It was a really probably a visible pace in the market. It just had a lot of different people looking at it from stakeholder perspective. And so the documentation for that was, it had to be clear what it was that we were doing … because we had more of a defined timeframe, we build a lot of our stuff, a lot of our integrations and our customizations in a very Agile methodology.

This one was a bit different. I have to have it done by a date. So in tandem with creating the code or creating the workflows, I was also doing documentation at that time… but then we'll use it internally as well. So, you know, one of the other days I had to, you know, forcibly tell everyone at work to encrypt the hard drives, it's just because we're going through a SOC II Compliance and then like how do we do this?

And like while they're on windows — I'll just do windows things. I'll use the Desktop app and did that workflow that worked fine. And then with a customer the other day, it was about adding tables into the Zoho Analytics platform, how to do it. I was like if I do a video, they'll get lost because I'll get lost in the weeds myself on the nuts and bolts. And I'll just do Scribe, send it out to them. I'm done

"If I do a video, they'll get lost because I'll get lost in the weeds myself on the nuts and bolts. And I'll just do Scribe, send it out to them. I'm done."

The best thing is without one of our customers, actually two of our customers, they've taken on using Scribe internally in their own business as well. Because we embed the Scribes either on a Miro board that we've shared with them or on a learning platform which is like an internal wiki site for one of our software platforms.

We put the Scribe there and we embed it and then I'll have the video there as well if it's not really something that needs to process map or a workflow like a Miro board. So in that essence, it sits there:

The video and the content's on Vimeo and the documentation from you guys at Scribe is on there as well. It's embedded. But on Miro it's on their side as well. And it means that I can go back and change it and I don't actually have to have access to their platform anymore.

So it's just good for consistency of information into why they use it. But the way they started to use it was exactly the same that way we do: process mapping and documentation on how to do things — and also the why of a lot of things.

"The way [our customers] started to use [Scribe] was exactly the same way that we do: process mapping and documentation on how to do things."

So, yeah. So, you know, using it for us has been good. But then seeing our customers use it has probably been even better, because I'll share with Scribe and that was copied into their own Scribe platform and it's like "oh you're taking my work, that's not very nice," Haha, but they do it and we share it, and that's a good way to do things and document the process.

Even the way that something is not working. So we've also seen it with customers that they'll record the why they want it to work. But it says it broke here because they didn't maybe have access to video, or they weren't comfortable talking through a video on screen. But if I have a web-based plugin — which Scribe does that — can actually show where they intended to go to, but it broke and [they can] say that "it was meant to go this way, but it went that way. So please fix for me." There are so many different ways that many different customers have picked it on.‍

Lauren: Makes me think of what we've seen a lot with users where you'll have a single user who may be found Scribe and got incredibly interested in it and then became an evangelist for their team. It sounds like it might have been doing that and some of your customers are as well. When you describe Scribe — introduce it to someone — what do you say?

Hayden: I send it to them first. I don't really tell them first. I just go, here you go.

So I think with one of them, one of our customers that we had to set up, they were really a young business. You know really simple in that processes, but they were also technically… that weren't super technically competent. So it's just rough, you know, how to log into a system like you send them the Scribe, so I can log in so they can get the rest of the content that's in there.

But you have to send them this first and you go to the software's how-to guides and it was a bit convoluted, all these different routes just wanted it seamless and I'll send it to them and they'll be like "That's so easy. Thank you."

And it was just, that was it. I don't have to tell them about it because they see in action what I've recorded on screen. So at the same time as I'll be recording, the Scribe will probably be recording on screen as well. And the benefit with Scribe is I can remove some steps that I've gone and clicked out of and come back or combine steps to make a GIF of that process. And so you do it all those times and you send that to them and show them.

They say, "you recorded that at the same time and did a video and that was all on one screen? And I was like "yep!"

So again, time saved and just simplicity and the way that it works. So yeah, I don't have to tell them about it. I just send them a Scribe and they'll ask about it anyway.

Lauren: You happen to have a Scribe that you would like to share here?

Hayden: Probably do. I mean, it's a simple one. It's the one I should say the other day. Sorry, us chick mentioned just before I'll share that on screen, you want to share it with you?

Lauren: Yeah, let's do it.

Hayden: Yeah. Okay. Cool.

Yep. So this one was for a customer… that the IT manager manages the CRM system and he had to be able to add some other fields to a table source So, I went through that process with him.

So, basically going onto the site, going through. Also the UI on the URL rerouted automatically (again I could take that out but didn't really have a need to.)

And then it goes down — you guys do all the setup, add the other fields. I put some commentary around what he wanted to do with it. And then I was a bit clear about some of the parts — apart from my spelling I do apologize there.

And then, you know, I was thinking about the stage history and finding all the fields. How often do you wanna sync it? So I'll send that through. And it was just a really simple process that he's come back to and viewed a couple of times.

But again, it was just very direct and wasn't for a big audience. It has the very targeted specific requirements that he had.

And it facilitated that because if I send him to… the documentation is not going to have these field names because those field names and table names are custom in the system and no documentation publicly would have that.

So again, it's custom documentation but it also presents him a framework for next time. To go "Oh, You know, Hayden said jobs stage history next time I could take assets and sync those as well."

So it provides a bit of branching that he can do from that point in time. So, and you know, as I'm building it I could:

• Remove some images.
• I can combine some images.
• I can add some more text, or...
• I could also move the text or the annotation to different areas or have also then go in and say did I didn't like that image.

The latest I'll just take a snapshot and drop it back in and it works. So yeah, it's probably one that just sort of came to mind as I was doing it actually for a customer. So yeah, I'll stop sharing now. So you've got that back?

Lauren: So much for sharing that. I love seeing Scribe in action.

And when I think about the unique use case that you've really created for yourselves as a team, it makes me think about how versatile the tool is and how everybody has different needs — but they're all relatively the same thing. You're training someone. You're showing someone how something is done and you're making that relatively easier and getting your time back so that you can do the work you might have needed to do.‍

Hayden: Yeah. And you know I've been in it on for twenty years and I am probably the worst typer — it's just horrible. So actually having something that records everything I'm doing on screen just saves me a bunch of time but it makes what I'm trying to get across to the customer and to our clients and internally just very easy.

And it's... less friction for me is how it's gonna win as a software. If there's friction, I'll just like dump it and move on.

But Scribe hasn't been that. I've actually been using it more. And as our customers start to use it that has been good — if they shared stuff back with us. Like I said before about, you know, having an issue or something as a process that they thought it would go through.

" If there's friction, I'll just like dump it and move on. But Scribe hasn't been that. I've actually been using it more."

And our team internally are also getting used to me sending those as well as [me telling them] "I would like it to do this."

And so, you know, in a way of: if I send it to our Dev team, I'll describe on screen the triggers that I want to happen. I say, "from here I would like you to write the script to automate A, B and C.

And so if I can get it to that point that they know exactly where that's going to be from a UI perspective. And then I can take what they code. And then it falls into the next steps. And so, when it gets to here and you've got C and do these things.

So again, many use cases and many ways to use it. And I'll keep using it more and more. It's gonna get more of a team internally on it. So that's — they're too busy typing things out so I don't understand it. Maybe I'll save them time somehow.

Lauren: So now that we know how great your life is with Scribe, what do you think your life would be like without Scribe?

Hayden: My keyboard would be across the other side of the room like honestly — or I'd be using voice to text or something like that or I'd just do a lot of videos.

But then… if people don't like watching videos because they don't — there's the people that like to read things. But you can give them a bit of both in it. So I can put a link in the documentation to a video. I can embed a video or I can put it on a page with a video and Scribe. And then it's their choice. It's about how they consume the content.

"I can put a link in the documentation to a video. I can embed a video or I can put it on a page with a video and Scribe. And then it's their choice. It's about how they consume the content."

And we've all got too much choice these days, but some of it's a good choice to have. So one of these is actually having both of those things, you know, a Page to… yeah to save that time.

So if it was without Scribe… it would be a lot of cutting and pasting, you know, I'd use like open source tools like share X, take screen copy and that'll be pasting. And then I'll be typing and it'll be putting an annotation over the top and then have to consider for Word to PDF and put up on a webpage. It's like... no. Just want it done. So that's what it would be without it. But luckily, I have it set. Please don't take it away from me.

Lauren: I don't plan to don't you worry. What would you say your favorite feature has been?

Hayden: The GIF that's combining multiple steps together. So especially when you've got a really long-winded Scribe and you've done all the multiple steps and you got one that was really quite detailed.

But all it was like a click or there's a process happening on screen as long as you're clicking in those. I think that's one of my favorite little bits.

Always loved GIFS from — I sent it to customers before Scribe, but they're little GIF recordings about something moving on screen because you could embed that in an email really easy. It wasn't a large file size. It wasn't you know, didn't have to be hosted on a web platform like each people well, Vimeo, so to save time as well.

And one of those open source tools that share X, I could just literally use a few buttons on the keyboard and it's recording a little window and drag that over. Do it that way. I'm not spending probably… that little GIF. Hmm, just trying to think of other ones. Some of the new features — Pages I haven't used as much. I've definitely been using the folder structure to sort out different workflows based on customers. But yeah, I'll probably say the GIF one is my favorite feature.

Lauren: I love that feature. And honestly, the way that you describe using Scribe, I think that you would get a lot of use from Pages because you're adding videos, you're adding text, you're able to include the various scribes together. So I look forward to hearing your opinion on Pages once you dig into it.

Hayden: Absolutely. Yeah. I think if I create the paper because the Page — if I embed that some way that, that's a good place where all those Scribes exist. Otherwise, I would have to sort them on the customer's own platform. So again, that's too much work. So if a Page is easier for me, I'll probably do it that way.

Lauren: We're all about less work and less time.

Alright. So I have one more question. No pressure. But yeah, if you were to describe Scribe in one word, top of your head, what would that would be?

Hayden. Process.

Lauren: Process!

Hayden: Process for, I need anything for… no, process. Wow. Process is that process that's so cool, but it does, it records process of everything that I need and a lot of the things that our customers have to do. My team, I have to do it's all process related. And if the process is not there, then they won't get that to that next step of where it would it be like that didn't work?

So, you know, you want things to work. So process I think is a really important would even though it could be boring. People don't like process but no, what get things done. So I customers are happy. I sign off on it. So happy with that.

Lauren: I'm happy with it.

I wanna thank you so much Hayden for meeting with me and chatting through this and even showcasing one of your Scribe with me. It's been such a pleasure. And I hope you have a great rest of your day. I look forward to talking to you soon. Thank.

Hayden: Thank you very much appreciate the time.