More than 200 customers in 40 countries, including some of the best-known brands around the world, rely on Mirakl to power their online B2B and B2C e-commerce marketplaces. To simplify these customers’ use of its solution, Mirakl replaced its wiki-based documentation with a modern documentation web portal using MadCap Flare. Mirakl’s customers and employees can find information and get answers to their questions faster using the interactive documentation portal.
When considering solutions to migrate their wiki solution to, MirakI had four key goals that they wanted to accomplish:
- Create a modern documentation web portal that more closely aligns with Mirakl’s corporate website and application look and feel.
- Reduce demands on the support team by providing an intuitive, searchable, easy-to-use documentation portal for customers.
- Streamline the delivery of content for different user roles through content reuse and single-sourcing to keep pace with the agile product development at Mirakl.
- Facilitate collaboration with both technical and business-oriented team members within Mirakl.
Creating Consistency Across the MirakI Brand
As a rapidly growing, high-tech start-up, Mirakl originally relied on wiki technology widely adopted by its engineers to create and publish both its internal and external documentation. The problem was the wiki offered major limitations. Employees and customers found the content difficult to navigate, and especially time-consuming to produce multiple versions of content for different users.
“Because our wiki solution could not provide the capabilities we wanted, we tested 25 tools over the course of four months to identify one that could,” noted Nicolas Philippe, a technical communicator at Mirakl. “Through our evaluation, we determined that Flare would be the right tool for us and for the whole company. Flare had the main features we needed, and it provided quality at a good price.”
Through Flare, Mirakl could now single-source their documentation and use conditions to meet different user profile needs. They are now able to write content once and reuse that same piece of content in several locations. “This was really important for us,” Nicolas recalled. “We also wanted a look and feel that would align more closely with our corporate website and application.” This ensured consistency across the brand, providing a more cohesive experience for customers when bouncing from MirakI’s corporate website to their online documentation portal.
Intuitive Documentation Portal Results in Ticket Deflection Increase
Since delivering Mirakl’s MadCap Flare-based documentation portal, the support team has reported receiving fewer support tickets about features in the Mirakl e-commerce marketplace solution because they found quickly in the documentation portal. Additionally, both the support and sales teams find that they can answer many questions quickly by sending customers links to relevant topics.
“Before, when we used the wiki, even people internally were reluctant to go to the documentation. Now teams are reading the documentation and giving us feedback without us even asking for it,” Nicolas observes. “We’re finding that our Flare-based portal is used for everything, both externally and internally. That’s a really nice achievement for us since it’s the main reference on how to use our solution.”
GitHub Integration Fosters Agile Collaboration
In addition, Mirakl’s technical writers create all technical content by sharing information with the company’s developers and technical experts. To facilitate this effort, the team takes advantage of MadCap Flare’s integration with GitHub to store the project and published output. The integration also enables Mirakl to publish updates within minutes of them being added to MadCap Flare.
“Our Flare-based documentation server gets the published output from GitHub and displays it to customers every five minutes. If we make a change or publish, five minutes later it will be available to customers,” Nicolas observes. “We take an agile approach with our e-commerce marketplace solution where we release a new version every two to three days. Flare and the integration with GitHub enable us to be really flexible and deliver our documentation at the same time, and sometimes prior to some features.”
Mirakl’s technical writers also collaborate with the company’s client success and marketing team members who develop videos on the more business-focused aspects of running an e-commerce marketplace.
Four Takeaways from Our Latest Customer Success Story: Mirakl -- Global E-Commerce Marketplace Platform Leader “Our client success team creates informational videos, which they host on Vimeo,” Nicolas explains. “We can simply use the Vimeo link to embed the video in Flare, so users can view it without even leaving the documentation page.”
To read the full MirakI success story and others like it, visit our Customer Success Stories section on our site here.