Brazil’s Leading Payroll Processing Provider, Senior Sistemas, Cuts Time Spent on Client Support by 2,400 Hours in Six Months via Integration of IBM Watson-Based Chatbot and MadCap Flare

More than 7,000 corporations and government agencies rely on Brazilian software house 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, as well as a chatbot integrated with a Flare-based knowledge base that answered 75,000-plus questions with over 80% accuracy in the first six months alone.

From global brands to local organizations, more than 7,000 corporations and government agencies rely on Brazilian software house Senior Sistemas to optimize their processes and business models, drive innovation and productivity, and simplify decision-making. The largest of its 17 solutions, Human Capital Management (HCM), is responsible for processing 6 million payrolls monthly—nearly 20% of Brazil’s total payroll processing.

To help clients optimize their use of Senior Sistemas’ solutions, the company provides a modern web-based documentation portal, which has had more than 13 million pages viewed and received 1 million content searches in one year. The Senior Sistemas team relies on the single-source publishing capabilities of MadCap Flare to deliver their documentation portal, an internal knowledge base, PDF manuals and guides, and training materials. Additionally, the company uses MadCap Lingo to translate content from Portuguese to Spanish and English.

More recently, Senior Sistemas integrated SARA, the Senior Automated Responsive Agent chatbot it built with IBM Watson, into the MadCap Flare-based HCM knowledge base to automatically answer users’ questions. In the first six months alone, SARA answered 75,000-plus questions with more than 80% accuracy, effectively freeing up 2,400 hours of the support team’s time.

Bringing Consensus to Processes

For years, Senior Sistemas maintained an enormous quantity of diverse information, which was mainly developed by three different areas of the company: Knowledge Management, the Corporate University, and the Service Optimization department. Each department built technical documentation, but each of these groups had a different understanding of the processes.

“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. “Not only was this very unproductive for our teams; it was difficult for our clients to find the information they needed.”

The company’s solution was to build a knowledge base where the three departments collaborated on defining a unique business process. At the same time, the teams recognized that each department had its own clients, and that certain information should only be viewed by some groups of users, and other content was only for internal use by employees.

Because the Knowledge Management department already was using MadCap Flare, the teams saw how its single-sourcing functionality could support these needs, and they decided to standardize on Flare across business units as the only tool for documentation.

“One of the most important benefits of Flare is that, once we had a unified business process documented in Flare, we could start generating several different outputs that would attend to the demands of the three departments at the same time: publishing our 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 explained. “Flare was the secret weapon in our crusade, because the only way to achieve the results we needed was with this fantastic single-sourcing resource.”

Content Reuse and Consistency with MadCap Flare

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. Additionally, Senior Sistemas uses MadCap Flare to build tutorials for internal use, as well as mobile content.

“Content re-use 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.”

The technical writing team relies extensively on features, such as conditional text and snippets, to reuse content, which enables them to ensure the consistency of content and increase their productivity. The efficiencies are becoming more important as Senior Sistemas moves to deliver more of its solutions as software as a service (SaaS).

“With the move to SaaS, documentation needs to be updated and published on a daily basis. This is only possible thanks to the great features in Flare that guarantees both the integrity of the content and the ease of use,” Luciana notes. “With Flare, we’re able to ensure that our information is standardized and that the content is always updated in time to be deployed together with the software, whether weekly or daily.”

Today, Senior Sistemas uses MadCap Flare in combination with VisualSVN, the Apache Subversion based version control for Microsoft Windows to help synchronize the team’s efforts. Additionally, the technical writing team is evaluating MadCap Central to facilitate collaboration.

“MadCap Central, as a secure cloud-based authoring and collaboration solution, is excellent for larger teams of writers,” Luciana notes. It also brings project management and workflow resources, which are essential for efficient management.”

Beyond the software, the MadCap Software technical support team and online user community also help the technical writing team in creating and delivering their documentation.

“MadCap’s technical support is very friendly and always offers assistance and good solutions for any technical challenge we’ve faced, Luciana says. “It’s also great to connect with the online community and to have available forums with experts’ opinions.”

Translation Using MadCap Capture and MadCap Lingo

Senior Sistemas’ solutions are used by a growing number of clients in other countries, most notably Mexico and India where Human Capital Management has been adopted. 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, as HCM, it’s most widely adopted product, gained more users in India and Mexico, 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 was 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.”

The MadCap Capture screen capture and image editing tool, which the technical writing team uses for graphics in its MadCap Flare-based documentation, also facilitates 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.

Navigating eSocial Compliance Complexity via the SARA Chatbot

More recently, to help customers comply with Brazil’s System of Digital Bookkeeping of Fiscal/Tax, Social Security and Labor Obligations (eSocial), Senior Sistemas has rolled out HCM eSocial. The government law is aimed at keeping integrated records among the fiscal, social security, and labor obligations of all private and public companies in Brazil by unifying employers’ transmission of employment- and work-related data to various federal government institutions.

“eSocial represents an enormous challenge for Brazilian employers due to the many changes in bookkeeping records that this new law established,” Luciana notes. “The rules of this program have changed several times, bringing more controls and complexity to the information required, and the functionality to handle all these requirements is implemented daily in our Human Capital Management system.”

The complexity of complying with eSocial led to nearly a 200% increase in customer support tickets at Senior Sistemas. As a result, the company’s service agents found themselves repeating the same answers to different audiences, and the volume of requests started to impact the quality and speed of the support team’s responses.

“Even though the knowledge base was accurate and available online 24x7, we understood that our clients were not able to help themselves using our documentation alone due to the complexity of eSocial,” Luciana recalled. “So, we had to help our clients find the information they needed in a way that would scale.”

Senior Sistemas’ answer to the problem was to take the SARA chatbot it had created using IBM Watson and integrate it with the MadCap Flare-based HCM knowledge base. This would allow 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.

“Thanks to the integration of our Flare-based knowledge base with SARA, our chatbot was able to find the precise information to answer our clients’ questions. In this way, SARA became our level zero support attendant for eSocial matters,” Luciana said. “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.”

Creating a Better Experience for Customers, Sales and Support

The MadCap Flare-based documentation portal has also served as a popular resource for Senior Sistemas’ clients, sales reps, and support team. In one year, the portal had more than 13 million page views, and it received more than 1 million content searches.

“The online content, available 24x7 and with a great search engine, allows all of our network to benefit from the up-to-date, modern HTML5-based web documentation portal that we deliver using Flare,” Luciana observes. “Clients love it because they can access it in real time, from anywhere, and we have been able to reduce their implementation costs. Our sales team is also very pleased because they can show very rich technical documentation, which is very attractive for new and existing customers. Meanwhile, our support team not only appreciates the reduced support tickets; they also use the documentation portal to easily find precise information that they can refer to for our clients. ”

Luciana adds, “Senior Sistemas has been MadCap Software’s client for a long time, and continues to be an important partner for maintaining our high-quality technical content available for our network.”