"We tried so many products and we ultimately settled on Helpjuice because it was super easy to use, scaled very well, and had tremendous customer support. - Bill Griscom, Technology Director"
With our knowledge base, we were looking to provide a simple and streamlined way for people of all walks of life to access our solutions. We needed something that could be easily viewed on all sorts of devices, including Chromebooks, smart phones, and iPads. We implemented this solution in the middle of the pandemic because we recognized the needed to get support to our stakeholders as quickly as possible and in a form that was digestible, all while they worked from home in the newest and most unpredictable circumstances of their lives.
It was incredibly painful to create Google Docs and just send them to people when an issue sprung up. We needed one consolidated place to house all of our knowledge about a wide breadth of products in a way that anyone could walk through the process to solve their own problems. Over time, we expect people to visit the site on their own, but to start we just wanted to provide a mechanism to deliver solutions to our constituents just in time, when they needed it most, without recreating the wheel every time and taking away valuable hours from the support team, which they needed to be spending repairing devices and solving more complex problems to serve our faculty and students.
What didn't we try? We tried posting content to our website. We tried using Google Drive folders. We tried bundling it into our helpdesk system. We even tried posting it to our LMS, Schoology. Everything we tried was met with an obstacle, whether it was because a person would need to log in or because it wasn't intuitive. We needed a solution that would help all of our stakeholders, from parents to staff, so the experience needed to be consistent and simple.
We also ran pilots of a wide range of knowledge base systems and none of them could offer the combo of things that Helpjuice offered: simple, intuitive, fairly priced, flexible, and strong support. Some of the systems that we piloted were Freshdesk, HelpCrunch, and HelpSite. They all had their pros, but no one delivered like Helpjuice for an all around positive experience that was effective for us as administrators and for our range of end-users.
We tried so many products and we ultimately settled on Helpjuice because it was super easy to use, scaled very well, and had tremendous customer support. Even in our trial phase, we were helped with customization, something that is normally only implemented after a product is purchased. We wanted to know how the site would look and feel in advance of the purchase and Helpjuice made sure of that before we took the plunge.
The other things that stood out were things that made our lives easier, such as Google authentication for logging in. We liked that it was easy to implement a custom name and SSL certificate. The overall flexibility of the product, from using the accordion feature, to creating custom categories with a wide array of custom but included icons, made our life as non-designers so much easier. In the end, it wasn't even a question whether or not this was the right product. It was a matter of how quickly can we begin to add substantial content so we can get it off the ground.
My favorite Helpjuice feature is the ability to post articles in multiple categories. If you use a website or a product that limits you to one category, a regular user will try to find the topic based on what they perceive the issue to be. Instead, this allows us to cover our bases by placing it in multiple spots.
Additionally, I love that we can so easily post videos without needing to involve another video service, such as YouTube. This is amazing!
The accordion feature is also awesome because it makes the article less daunting. Users don't see a wall of text - instead, they see only the parts of the process they need to see at the time.
As a school district, we support over 50 applications and digital content systems, as well as over 4,000 devices. With a diverse audience of students, parents, faculty, and staff, it has become increasingly more difficult to provide timely information to our key stakeholders outside of a support ticket. We were looking for a solution that would allow us to provide digital resources to help our audience both proactively and when we identified a tremendous need in one particular area.
It was also critical for us to have a one-stop shop to serve as a launch pad into our ticketing system or to learn about specific information for issues tied to either a device or an application. That solution needed to be easy to navigate, provide a way to serve videos and documents, as well as have a robust search tool. On top of that, we were looking for something that would feel like it was part of the organization, so customization without a heavy HTML burden was high on our list of requirements.
We saved at least 10 hours of work per week by being able to reference Helpjuice to all of our stakeholders. It decreased the amount of time we were spending typing directions and sending out emails to key groups because we were able to direct them to our help site so they could find the most relevant article. Additionally, many of our users would realize, "Oh, I know they helped me with this before, so I'll just check out the help site and see if I can find it first."
We reduced parent inquires by 50% when we started the program. Teachers would tell families to visit the site so they could start a ticket, but many times when they landed on the site, they would find the answer to their question. It created such a positive communication between families and the district, allowing them to help themselves and allowing us to focus on non-administrative work to solve more true technology issues.
