What's the purpose/goal of your KB?

The main goal is to share promote knowledge-sharing. We often see that users, team members, and teams don't know how to share their knowledge. This causes issues: A) newcomers are starting their jobs in our Company. People are usually busy and do not have the right amount of capacity to allocate to the newcomer. At the same time, newcomers don't have a place to look and study by themselves. It all gets expensive in the end because the time that newcomer needs to get to speed is longer than it could be. B) Knowledge sharing is crucial for the sustainability of the team's performance. It happened and still happens that some senior-skilled person leaves the company and with him goes away a big part of the team’s knowledge. This causes major issues when some critical project/task/incident arises. Knowledge is gone and managing the situation takes a lot more time. Therefore, yet again, it costs a lot of money until the team knowledge is stabilized.

The other goal is to have two types of the knowledge base.

• Internal: We have a large amount of internally-used content: Developers documentation, Support documentation, Process documentation, and other business units documentation, such as Marketing that is using knowledgebase to document their projects, guides, etc.
• Public: HR documentation for the employees (articles, benefits, news), IT end-users documentation to eliminate a number of requests/incidents, Other business units’ end-user documentation (BI, Analytics, Marketing).

What solutions did you approach before you decided to go with Helpjuice?

Confluence, Evernote, Sharepoint

Why did you decide to use Helpjuice?

Our decision was made after analysis and users testing. We didn't need state of art solution with dozens of functions and integrations because we didn't use it very much in the previous Confluence solution. It might happen that we will need some of those features in the future, but at the same time, I believe that Helpjuice will evolve continuously and offer more and more functions to their customers. After the analysis of the actual content was done, we thought about how to substitute some of the functions not present in Helpjuice and came up with a solution that was immediately applicable. E.g. Confluence Meeting Notes function was replaced by using MS OneNote. The rest of the content was vastly easy, structured articles. We then analyzed the possibility and ease of migration of the content. We used Helpjuice for some migration but as we have a really large content base, we decided to do the rest on our own because we found out that the migration is fairly easy.

The price of the Helpjuice naturally played a big part because Knowledge base solutions are not on the top of the budget priority list. Therefore, in order to speed the whole process up and get the approval as soon as possible, it was great to find out that Helpjuice is very reasonably priced even for the unlimited license pool. It made things easier and the decision by the senior management was made fast

What's your favorite Helpjuice feature?

1. The editor: Straight forward, an easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor with some advanced features (embedded PDF, video preview) Note: I would welcome the same functionality for O365 files (Excel, Word, PPT). I also like the possibility to insert existing articles into the article, publish one existing article in more categories (eliminates the content duplicities). Moreover, if you like to tweak the content, even more, you can still use HTML editor and write the code directly.

2. Translations: We currently do not use it in a waste amount but I'm sure we will in the future. The machine translation is above average good and it is a great idea to have several language versions of the same article in one place. Switching the language of the frontend portal automatically switches the language versions of the articles. This is very handy and makes the management of the multi-language content very easy.

What problem are/were you looking to solve with Helpjuice?

We have been using an obsolete Confluence solution with a limited number of licenses. The main purpose of Confluence in our company was to document our processes, store products documentation, how-to articles, guidelines for newcomers, etc.

As our company grows we started to run into the issue with a lack of licenses available. The connected issue was, that even for read rights, we needed to consume licenses and therefore the content became more and more difficult to make accessible to all the stakeholders. As we are cooperating with many external subjects we didn't want to make the content public by default and therefore we ran into these issues.

When we were looking for the solution, we tried, apart from the others, also our internal Sharepoint but we found it extremely difficult in terms of user experience, and building content, especially for non-IT related business units that do not have strong technical skills. We decided to search elsewhere. The easiest way was to migrate to a new, cloud-based Confluence or to go for Evernote but the price of these solutions was way too high in comparison to what functions we actually needed. And so, when we found Helpjuice, we decided to give it a chance. Helpjuice seems to be quite straightforward, easy to use and navigate. It also allows us to have unlimited access.

What kind of an impact has Helpjuice had?

So far we see 10% of tickets decrease thanks to using the self-service knowledgebase articles and promoting the shift-left approach (end users will be able to solve more and more of their issues on their own).

What we actually did measure is, that we managed to migrate several business units to Helpjuice which helped us to save around 20% of the current Confluence license pool. That allowed us some breathing space and we are continuously promoting Helpjuice within the company in order to onboard more and more business units. The units that are already using Helpjuice – Marketing department are overall happy with the solution.