Bullhorn Reduces Support Demands by Using the MadCap Authoring and Management System to Provide Customers with Knowledge Articles via Salesforce^® and Multiple Documentation Sites

In North America alone, the staffing industry puts 3 million people to work each week, and the process of finding top talent, connecting them to the right job, quickly, and at scale is incredibly complex. Bullhorn, Inc. helps staffing firms cut this complexity by automating workflows with its recruitment software as a service (SaaS) platform. Today, more than 10,000 customers in the staffing industry—from startups to the world’s largest enterprises—rely on Bullhorn to streamline their efforts, so they can focus on putting people to work.

To help staffing professionals make the most of its SaaS solutions for customer relationship management, applicant tracking system and operations, Bullhorn maintains multiple documentation sites: Salesforce^® communities for their flagship products, a knowledge base for the Bullhorn support team and partners, and six stand-alone websites for the remaining products they develop.

Today, Bullhorn relies on the MadCap Authoring and Management System (AMS) from MadCap Software to deliver its documentation. MadCap AMS offers a complete solution supporting the entire content development lifecycle and features MadCap Flare for single-source authoring and publishing; MadCap Central for cloud-based content collaboration and analysis; and MadCap Connect for Salesforce^® for publishing MadCap Flare content directly into Salesforce^®.

Keeping Close to the Customer

Bullhorn relies on Salesforce^® to manage its relationships with customers, so it has been a natural extension to share product documentation with these users via Salesforce^® Community Cloud. For years, the company used Google Docs to collaborate on creating this content. Then the team would employ a mix of tools to publish one version to the Salesforce^® community and another to Bullhorn’s support knowledge base. However, as Bullhorn’s platform continued to expand, managing separate knowledge articles became unsustainable.

“We were manually updating each article, and about the tenth time that we had to change 100-plus articles due to a name change, it became clear we needed to take our documentation out of Google Docs and all the different tools we were using,” recalled Ryan Nicholson, director of content and training at Bullhorn. “We had to move it to a single-source tool that would let us do authoring and updates in one place.”

An evaluation of products on the market led Bullhorn to MadCap Flare not only because of its extensive functionality, but also because access to the underlying XML code would give the team greater flexibility in customizing its documentation websites.

“If we went with another company, we’d have to use their integrations,” Ryan explained. “The extensible nature of Flare meant we had the option to either build our own custom integrations and automations into Flare or buy integrations and plugins available from MadCap Software. That was very appealing.”

Two additional products that Bullhorn decided to invest in were MadCap Central to support cloud-based collaboration across teams and MadCap Connect for Salesforce^®, which would free Bullhorn from having to build its own integration between Salesforce^® and MadCap Flare.

Another factor in choosing MadCap Software was the large community that has formed around the company and its products.

“We were really looking to work with a vendor that had a large, interactive user base,” Ryan said. “With MadCap Software, there’s a large community of customers that we could connect with. There are Slack groups and a well-populated message board. It was evident that the MadCap Software community was more mature than others.”

Delivering Documentation Directly to Salesforce^®

Today, Bullhorn relies on MadCap Flare to deliver 700-plus knowledge articles for its flagship products, including their Applicant Tracking & CRM product, to various customer communities via Salesforce^® Community Cloud and to a MadCap Flare-based knowledge base used by Bullhorn’s support team and partners. The company also maintains six additional documentation sites created with MadCap Flare to support other products that Bullhorn develops or acquires.

The content team first uses MadCap Flare to create knowledge articles for the knowledge base that include information about the products, along with guidelines on how to support them. Next, taking advantage of conditional outputs, the team creates versions for customers that remove the internal guidance. Then using MadCap Connect for Salesforce^®, the team publishes the knowledge articles to multiple communities maintained with Salesforce^® Community Cloud.

“All of our data resides in Salesforce^®, and by putting our Flare content in Salesforce^® Community Cloud, we can organize the articles and put them in front of different users based on the products they use,” Ryan noted.

In the past, adding a knowledge article to Salesforce^® Community Cloud took approximately one hour to complete because the team had to manually copy and paste the article, enter a category and other data fields, and tune the content format for Salesforce^® specific HTML compatibility. MadCap Connect for Salesforce^® automates the processes for adding the article and completing the fields, which enables Bullhorn to cut the project time by about 30%.

“The ability to publish knowledge articles into our Salesforce^® communities 30% faster with Flare and MadCap Connect for Salesforce^® is significant when you consider that we have over 700 articles,” Ryan observed. “Now that it's an automated process, we’ve been able to create multiple communities.”

Bullhorn has also been able to eliminate redundant work in Salesforce^®, which does not provide a way to move knowledge articles from the sandbox into production and instead requires each article to be copied and pasted. By contrast, the combination of MadCap Flare and MadCap Connect for Salesforce^® allows the team to publish the same articles to either the sandbox or the production site.

“Moving an article from the sandbox to production in Salesforce^® used to mean doing everything twice, and when we updated all 700-plus articles, it took our developers probably 80 hours of work,” Ryan recalled. “Now with Flare and MadCap Connect for Salesforce^®, we can test an article in the sandbox, and if we like it, we just publish it straight to production. The Salesforce^® developers are thrilled because we no longer need their help.”

Optimizing Team Efficiency

Bullhorn has recognized additional efficiencies from using MadCap Flare. Notably, because the company reuses content for different products, the team takes advantage of the parent and child process in MadCap Flare to facilitate content reuse and ensure consistency.

“In the past, everything was in one site, but people were struggling to find what they were looking for,” Ryan explained. “Now with the parent and child process in Flare, it’s easy to maintain multiple documentation sites. We can simply export content from one project into the others, and we don’t even have to think about checking to see if we've updated on all the various sites. It’s a huge time saver for us.”

Meanwhile, the use of templates with MadCap Flare has helped to speed the creation of new documentation websites.

“Using Flare, we’ve built a templatized site, and we pull that whenever we're going to build a new knowledge base. Then, once we have the content organized in Flare, it takes maybe an hour to work with the logos, make sure we like the table of contents, and push it out there,” Ryan noted. “With Flare in place, we’ve been able to go from two documentation sites to eight in about a year.”

Finally, MadCap Flare’s integration with GitHub lets team members take advantage of source control in the environment with which they are most comfortable

“Flare’s GitHub integration lets developers that work in GitHub handle source control within the tool without having to use an external resource,” Ryan explained. “At the same time, employees that are not developers can continue working within Flare, and the source control will be handled behind the scenes.”

MadCap Central for Collaboration

Online collaboration among Bullhorn’s authors and subject matter experts (SMEs) has always been crucial to developing the company’s knowledge articles. Using MadCap Central, the team has continued to streamline the process of contributing, reviewing and editing content in the cloud while taking advantage of the advanced authoring capabilities in MadCap Flare.

“With MadCap Central, we can let SMEs make changes, and they don’t have to learn anything new because the experience is similar to Google Docs,” Ryan noted. “It’s very efficient because we can work asynchronously, and my authors don’t have to compare different document versions. Once we’ve reviewed the SMEs’ changes in Central, we simply press a button and push those changes into Flare. We’ve cut the average review time from three hours to 30 minutes or less.”

The combination of MadCap Flare and MadCap Central also has made it easier for Bullhorn to bring on contractors to create documentation for newly-acquired product lines.

“One of the companies that we recently acquired didn’t have documentation, so we went out to the MadCap community and hired a contractor, who was able to work directly in Flare and Central and produce the content in about three weeks,” Ryan said. “That’s something we wouldn't have been able to do with our old system.”

Beyond collaboration, Bullhorn takes advantage of MadCap Central to easily build and analyze content, as well as analyze end-users’ experiences with the documentation sites.

“I love MadCap Central because I can build a dashboard of all the different projects, look at what people are doing, and home in on things that could create a poor customer experience that the author needs to focus on,” Ryan explained. “The search analytics for our end-users is also extremely handy because we can see what our customers are looking for. Central makes it very easy.”

Optimizing the User Experience

The search experience is an area where Bullhorn has invested extensively with the company’s knowledge base for the support team and partners where the team can take full advantage of MadCap Flare’s functionality. One widely used feature is micro content, which is used to pull out information from articles on new product updates, things to be aware of, phone numbers, and points of contact to provide quick answers to some of users’ most common questions.

“The micro content in Flare is fantastic. It allows us to do announcements and get short pieces of information out without confusing our end-users, and it has helped immensely with deflecting questions and tickets, and just generally sharing information,” Ryan said.

The Bullhorn team also uses snippets in MadCap Flare to create standardized, color-coded call-outs, such as “Warning,” “Nice to know,” and “Talk to Our Manager.”

“Using snippets in Flare makes it a lot easier for my staff to consistently use the same color-coded call-outs, which has created standardization and provided a way to visually draw readers’ eyes to information,” Ryan said. “We’ve also used simple JavaScript to create a feedback pop-up that lets us tie users’ comments back to our own ticketing system so we can track what changes or updates we need to make.”

Finally, Bullhorn lets end users choose between top navigation and side navigation on an as-needed basis. For example, more advanced users tend to prefer top navigation while users unfamiliar with the system or a feature often find side navigation helpful.

“The ability to offer both top navigation and side navigation with Flare has been helpful in getting our new staff onboarded,” Ryan noted.

Reducing Demands on Support

Because customers and employees, alike, can more readily find the information they need, Bullhorn has been able to reduce demands on the support team. Not only are there fewer customer support tickets; the company has seen first-call resolution and average handle times go down since users don't need to stay on calls as long.

More recently, Bullhorn introduced a chatbot, which relies on micro content from MadCap Flare, to find and recommend articles to users before they reach a support person.

“The chatbot we created is handling a good amount of traffic that would otherwise become support calls, and we wouldn't have that functionality or the content for that chatbot to work if we didn't have MadCap Flare,” Ryan observed.

Based on the success of Bullhorn’s documentation websites, the content and training team has added four people to expand its reach.

“We’ve seen a lot more interest in my team because we can help other teams onboard more efficiently, and we're communicating more effectively as an organization,” Ryan said. “I don’t know exactly where we’ll be in the next five years, but with the solutions from MadCap Software, I’m confident that we’re prepared for the future.”