What can you learn from our latest customer success story from Sisense, the leader in business intelligence for complex data? The short answer: plenty. The team at Sisense had five primary objectives when evaluating a new solution to author and manage their documentation:
- Increase efficiency and content consistency through topic-based single-source publishing
- Facilitate the ability to produce multiple documentation versions to support different product releases and the company’s OEMs
- Strengthen collaboration among Sisense’s technical writers
- Create more intuitive, visually appealing web and print documentation to help users easily find the information they need
- Deliver superior customer service by allowing users to self-serve and find the information they need when and where they need it
Let’s review each step-by-step.
Consistency is the Key to Efficiency
In the past, Sisense delivered its software documentation via a WordPress website. However, this approach had several limitations. Most notable was an inability to produce and maintain different versions of content, resorting in duplication of a single piece of documentation. Copying and pasting content from area to area across your website can seem like an easy solution in the beginning but, try making a single change to the same piece of content two years down the road. Talk about time-consuming!
Shortly after onboarding, the Sisense technical writing team soon began understanding the true benefit to MadCap Flare’s topic-based, single-source publishing. That is where the second biggest benefit came along…
A Single Project Can Deliver Multiple Outputs
Seamlessly, the team was now able to produce various versions of documentation for each of their four product releases, along with downloadable PDFs and Microsoft Word files—all created from one Flare project.
“Being able to publish different versions of our content to multiple outputs from a single source with Flare has been the biggest benefit for us. Because we’re much more efficient, the amount of accurate, quality content we produce now is much greater.”
GIDEON BEHRENSMEYER
Technical Writer | Sisense
Having a single-source publishing platform not only provided Sisense more bandwidth to utilize knowledge across various platforms and audiences but, also provide users with a more personalized experience.
Source Control Facilitates Collaboration
Then came the third benefit, with Flare’s GitHub integration multiple writers can easily work on the same project at any given time. If a user is about to overwrite another author’s work, it will notify you, making it very convenient for a multi-writer team to be working on the same project at once.
You’ll never have to save multiple variations of files or deal with the back and forth edits again!
Multimedia for the Win
Next, to provide a more visual, interactive experience for customers visiting its documentation portal, Sisense technical writers took advantage of embedded multimedia in Flare. With WordPress, embedding images and videos can be a difficult process. Flare lets you embed a video in multiple areas using a simple tag and the best part is it’s easy to do! As a result, Behrensmeyer says, “We’re easily embedding over 70 videos on the site right now.”
“Since using Flare for our documentation portal, we’ve gotten a lot of compliments from customers that having multiple website versions is a huge plus.”
GIDEON BEHRENSMEYER
Technical Writer | Sisense
Better Documentation Delivers Superior Customer Service
Lastly, as a result of the redesigned documentation website, Sisense has been able to empower both internal and external users to get the information they need, when they need it. To top it off, their customer service team can now dedicate more time to responding to customers and addressing larger technical or bug-related issues in a timely manner.
Want to read the full story? Check out the full customer success story here.
