The Art of the Job Aid





Author: Matt Irving

Published:7/1/2021

Quality assurance made easy

Job aids are awesome. They provide employees with short, easily digestible guides that help employees perform at their absolute best. The greatest job aids are written with the task owner in mind and are free from the bias of senior management. Often times, those drafting job aids create them based on how they think a task should be performed, rather than how it is performed in practice. For example, the Vice President of Engineering may think it takes developers 5 steps and 5 minutes to provision another instance of an application. While the developers carrying out the task on a daily basis KNOW that task involves 15 steps and takes well over an hour.

Software that creates and stores job aids are ideal

Using a CRM, like Super Easy CRM, you'll be able to store your job aids in the cloud. Here you won't run into the versioning issues that may arise when attempting to store dynamic documents on shared storage platforms like DropBox. Take a look at the video below to see how easily a job aid can be created when you have the right tools.

Create the best job aids for your team.

Job aids are great for call scripting!

Call center representatives have a tough job. Independent of the industry they are in, they typically are dealing with people who are angry, sad or a dangerous combination of both. To make matters worse, many are often juggling different scripts and have to follow specific protocols that may vary widly from client to client. Simply providing sticky notes or paper print outs for call center representatives to reference is a recipe for disaster. Having to fumble through a mountain of papers or sticky notes while a customer is screaming at you about a missing item will diminish the mental health of an employee QUICKLY. In addition, you are more likely to lose a customer if your call center represenatives are unable to assist customers properly.

As the old addage goes: it is much cheaper to keep a customer than it is to acquire a new one!

To keep your call center team sane and your customers happy, why wouldn't you create easily accessible digital call scripts? You can create job aids for certain products or services that can be queried by an agent that will tell them exactly what they need to say. Gone are the days where agents have to place callers on long holds while they consult with a colleague or supervisor. CRM tools like job aids empower employees to be fully autonomous.

Troubleshooting becomes super easy!

Unlike the Windows Troubleshooter, your troubleshooting suggestions will actually help. When things break, people become upset, this is inevitable. However, when you properly document how to fix things frustration is greatly reduced for both the customer and the employee. Speaking of frustration, trying to resolve tech issues over the phone is one of the most difficult things any individual can do. Not only are tech issues complex in nature with many different root causes, often times the impacted customer has a hard time even describing what the problem is. Since the agent and the customer are both going in blind it's essential to have some point of reference to assist with a resolution.


Troubleshooting customer problems with a job aid.

Enter the job aid! It includes all the necessary steps for troubleshooting along with the possible root causes.

One job aid for troublshooting a web application might read like this:

  1. Verify with engineering if there are any outages
  2. Ask the customer to clear their cache.
  3. Ask the customer to access the application in Incognito mode.
  4. Ask the customer to flush their DNS cache.
  5. Ask the customer to access a different browser.
  6. Create a ticket for the engineering department.

Walking through the above steps may resolve the customer's issues and they'll love your company or at the very least, assist the engineering department in resolving the problem.


The right job aid can mean the difference between success and disaster for your customer. Employees stand to benefit a great deal from having a centralized, easy-to-access repository of information specific for their roles. Whether you are troubleshooting or simply trying to remember what you need to say to your platinum subscribers, a carefully crafted job will guide you towards a successful resolution.