Ceridian Relies on MadCap Software to Reduce Demands on Support by Delivering Modern Web Help Sites, Tutorials and Knowledge Bases for its Cloud HCM Platform

Ceridian HCM Holding Inc. is one of the world’s leading human capital management (HCM) software providers. For more than a decade, its flagship cloud HCM platform, Dayforce, has provided functionality for human resources, payroll, benefits, workforce management, and talent management. Now some 5,700-plus organizations use Dayforce to optimize the management of their entire employment lifecycle—from attracting candidates to engaging, paying, deploying, and developing employees.

To help customers take advantage of the Dayforce platform’s comprehensive functionality, Ceridian delivers a range of Help sites, knowledge centers, and tutorials using MadCap Flare for single-source authoring and publishing and MadCap Central for content analytics.

Supporting Business Growth and Improving Customer Experiences with MadCap Flare

A long-time customer of MadCap Software, Ceridian has grown its use of MadCap Flare over time to support the expansion of its Powerpay platform and supporting services. The company originally migrated from Adobe^® to MadCap Software to provide Help systems for two products. Today, Ceridian has several technical communications teams using MadCap Software to deliver more than 50 projects, including Help websites, knowledge bases and tutorials.

“We started using MadCap Flare for a couple of our products, including Powerpay, and we saw how much more flexibility we had with all of our conditions,” recalls Dafna Shore, knowledge content developer principal, learning and performance at Ceridian. “Since then, MadCap Software has introduced so many features that have allowed us to bring information to our customers and support teams in new ways.

Expanding from Help to Interactive eLearning Tutorials

Most recently, Ceridian has taken advantage of the eLearning features in MadCap Flare to provide customers with interactive tutorials that complement the Help websites. The move supports the company’s broader initiative to enable and encourage self-service by helping customers learn how to navigate new processes in the software.

For example, one new tutorial created with MadCap Flare walks customers step-by-step through the process of setting up multi-factor authentication, which is now required for logging into the Powerpay payroll system.

“We know what our customers need to do; the challenge is how to get that information to them in a way that flows naturally. The eLearning features in Flare have allowed us to add tutorials for workflows, and that's been huge,” Dafna says. “We have been blown away by the number of hits that we’ve been getting for the tutorials created with Flare. We just put them out and didn’t even advertise them. They've been a great success.”

Creating Modern Content Experiences

Even as Ceridian branches out with tutorials, the technical communications teams are adding new functionality to produce modern, intuitive Help websites for customers. Notably, the teams now combine the search and micro content functionality in MadCap Flare to create “Quick Steps” that direct end users to the information they need.

“Some of the articles and Help pages provide a lot of information. With Flare’s micro content, we can produce search responses that give end-users just the highlights or Quick Steps on how to get something done,” Dafna observes. “This has given us so much flexibility to get customers the right information faster and ultimately for them to self-serve, which helps deflect calls from service and support.”

Ceridian also embeds videos produced using Vidyard video tools directly into MadCap Flare-based Help to assist end-users. Additionally, because Ceridian offers cloud-based applications designed for computers, as well as mobile applications, Ceridian also delivers its Help as interactive HTML5 websites with responsive displays that adjust to users’ screens.

“The responsive design functionality in Flare makes it so much easier to support our mobile apps,” Dafna says. “It’s wonderful.”

Understanding Content Usage via Feedback and Analytics

To continue enhancing Ceridian’s product-related content, the company’s knowledge teams rely on two technologies from MadCap Software: the feedback button in MadCap Flare and analytics functionality in MadCap Central.

“One of the other nice things we've added to a lot of our sites are feedback buttons in the toolbars, powered by Flare,” Dafna notes. This allows users to provide us feedback on the articles they're reading, and that's been really helpful.”

Meanwhile, Ceridian uses MadCap Central to analyze how MadCap Flare-based content is being used. One of the most beneficial insights is understanding if customers are using different terms from those used by the company. Armed with this information, the knowledge teams can add synonyms to the search functionality, which direct users to the information they need.

“Over the last couple years, we've done a lot of work on our Flare-based Help systems, and we're seeing a huge uptake in hits from our users,” Dafna explains. “But what's really great is that, using MadCap Central’s analytics, we can see what users are searching for and what their questions are, to make sure we have really good, robust material to answer those questions.”

Single-Sourcing Streamlines Content Delivery to Multiple Audiences

Ceridian not only produces content for multiple products; for some solutions; the company also provides different versions for various internal and external audiences. These include Help and tutorials for customers’ end-users and administrators and knowledge bases for Ceridian’s support teams. In many cases, the MadCap Flare-based knowledge bases have replaced earlier versions created with Microsoft SharePoint .

“Between our internal and external users, there can be a big difference in technical expertise. Using Flare, we can maintain one gold copy of the documentation and use single-sourcing, snippets and conditional tags to publish various versions for different groups,” Dafna explains. “Now with Flare our service and support teams have access to the same knowledge and user experiences as our customers, including micro content, search capabilities, videos, and other multimedia. It’s been huge.”

Facilitating Content Collaboration

Just as Ceridian has encouraged customers to move toward self-service, the company has also empowered internal technical teams to contribute information to the knowledge bases using MadCap Flare.

“We had a challenge where many employees had knowledge in their heads or written down,” Dafna recalls. “Since we’ve gotten them to use Flare, everyone has gained access to the same information. It’s all up to date, and knowledge isn’t lost if someone forgets or leaves the company. It’s so much more powerful than what we had before.”

In addition to updating the knowledge bases, Ceridian increasingly relies on subject matter experts (SMEs) to contribute Help and other technical content in MadCap Flare.

“Even though it’s very powerful, a lot of Flare is really intuitive,” Dafna observes. “Once we set up a project some SMEs are authoring content directly in Flare. This has been especially helpful for technical information.”

To facilitate content collaboration and version control, Ceridian takes advantage of Microsoft Team Foundation (TFS) integration with MadCap Flare.

“We have multiple authors within a project, and some of our projects literally have thousands and thousands of articles or topics,” Dafna explains. “We’ve been using Flare and Microsoft TFS for years to help our authors and other contributors to collaborate.”

Using Templates to Speed Content Delivery

As a provider of cloud-based HCM solutions, Ceridian needs to quickly deliver information as soon as new products or features are introduced. To help speed the process, the knowledge team has created templates using the cascading style sheets (CSS) functionality in MadCap Flare. These templates incorporate the company's style guide, coloring, and branding, among other features.

“We've had teams come to us with an idea of what they want. We can give them a prototype in a couple hours and then teach the team and get them up and running within days,” Dafna says. “It has been really fast using CSS and our Flare-based templates.”

Ceridian continues to explore additional ways to deliver product-related information that empowers customers to be self-sufficient and enables internal service and support teams to address customer questions faster.

“MadCap Central and Flare have proven how powerful, flexible and easy they are to use,” Dafna says. “We’ve continued to expand our use and add more licenses based on how quickly we can ramp up users.”