Four Takeaways from Our Latest Customer Success Story: Senior Sistemas – Brazil’s Leading Payroll Processing Provider

More than 7,000 corporations and government agencies rely on Brazilian software developer Senior Sistemas to optimize their processes and business models. To support these clients, the company uses MadCap Flare to deliver a documentation portal that sees 13 million page views annually. The portal also integrates with an IBM Watson-based chatbot that has answered 75,000-plus questions and reduced the company’s time spent on client support by 2,400 hours in just six months.

Prior to migrating over to MadCap Flare, Senior Sistemas had four key goals in mind, including:

• Consolidating their documentation from three departments into a single knowledgebase, and using single-sourcing to easily offer documentation, online Help, and training materials in a range of outputs.
• Enhancing their users’ experience by making it easier to navigate documentation and find the information they need.
• Minimizing the time clients need to talk with the support team to answer questions about Brazil’s eSocial compliance by integrating real-time chatbot functionality with Flare-based documentation.
• Facilitating the translation of Senior Sistemas documentation from the original Portuguese to Spanish and English to support clients in Mexico and India.

Developing Standardization Across Multiple Departments

For years, Senior Sistemas maintained an enormous quantity of diverse information, which was mainly produced by three different areas of the company: Knowledge Management, the Corporate University, and the Service Optimization department. Oftentimes, “we had three areas building the same content using different tools, and frequently we had the same lack of information” recalled Luciana Alvear Voigt, Knowledge Management Consultant at Senior Sistemas. This created inefficiencies and disconnect not only within their teams but, it made it difficult for their clients to find the information they needed.

The company’s solution was to build a knowledge base where the three departments would collaborate on defining a unified business process that could meet the needs of each team’s client needs. Because the Knowledge Management department was already using MadCap Flare, the teams saw how its single-sourcing functionality could support these needs. They decided to standardize on Flare across their business units as the only solution for creating documentation.

Flare allowed them to “start generating several different outputs that would attend to the demands of the three departments at the same time: publishing their WebHelp version in the documentation portal, generating PDF files for the Corporate University, and keeping the internal knowledge base for the Service Optimization area up to date,” Luciana describes.

Content Consistency Combined with a Powerful Chatbot Strengthened Their User Experience

Senior Sistemas now manages approximately 100 different projects in Flare. There is the HTML5-based documentation portal, which includes user manuals and release notes in PDF formats for each of the 17 solutions; the knowledge base; and training materials in PDF formats for the last three versions of each solution. The company also provides HTML5-based, interactive Help content for its HCM solution to help customers comply with the many changes in bookkeeping records. Additionally, Senior Sistemas uses MadCap Flare to build tutorials for internal use, as well as mobile content.

“Content reuse is a must in order to maintain all of the outputs constantly actualized,” Luciana observes. “Flare is easy to use, brings a lot of helpful resources for the technical writer to create outstanding content, and provides a great variety of output options for final delivery.” Today, their technical writing teams rely heavily on Flare features to make their job easier; conditional text and snippets assist with content reuse, enabling them to ensure the consistency of content and increase their productivity.

Furthermore, Senior Sistemas rolled out the SARA chatbot it had created using IBM Watson and integrated it with the MadCap Flare-based HCM knowledgebase. This allows clients to go online and use the chat option to answer their eSocial questions. The integration process was simplified by the fact that MadCap Flare is based on the industry-standard XML language.

“In fact, in the first six months alone, SARA answered more than 75,000 questions, with higher than 80% accuracy, reducing our service agents’ time spent on level zero support by more than 2,400 hours.” Luciana added, “Our clients were pleased with SARA because they received the information they needed very quickly, and the support team was able to dedicate their time to resolve more difficult situations for our clients, leaving the common questions to be answered using our Flare-based documentation.”

Translation Using MadCap Capture and MadCap Lingo

Today, the Senior Sistemas’ solutions continue to support a growing number of clients in other countries, most notably Mexico and India. To support these users, the company translates its original Portuguese-language documents into Spanish and English using the MadCap Lingo advanced computer-assisted translation (CAT) solution.

For several years, Senior Sistemas had used Microsoft Word documents for its localization. However, the technical writing team realized that they needed a more effective tool for translating not just the documentation but also the software. “Using Word for localization was very difficult. There were no single sourcing or translation memories,” Luciana recalled. “Now completing translations with MadCap Lingo is so much easier, especially with the translation memories that allow us to reuse previously translated terms.”

Moreover, the MadCap Capture screen capture and image editing tool, which the technical writing team uses for graphics in its MadCap Flare-based documentation, has also helped facilitate translation. “With MadCap Lingo, it’s very easy to translate our figures and images created in MadCap Capture. You just import it, translate it, and then you have the new image with the correct language,” Luciana explains.

To read the full Senior Sistemas success story and others like it, visit our Customer Success Stories section on our site here.