Likelihood to Recommend If a company doesn't want to make their knowledge base public-facing, you lose a lot of the value of using MindTouch in a closed environment. MindTouch is not ideal for extremely structured content management scenarios that are strong DITA advocates. Companies that require localization might not be good fits either.
Read full review This is great for cold calling and starting clients from scratch. A lot of entry is required to build a customer profile, but if you are diligent in entering this information, then it can be extremely useful, and you will thank yourself down the road for having an organized database with as many or few details stored. It is a little more challenging for existing customers who have a wealth of information on their files because the transfer of information can be quite tedious.
Read full review Pros MindTouch helps to easily organize our help articles to ensure that our end user is receiving the proper information. The MindTouch platform is extremely easy to navigate which reduces the turnaround time for our team to publish new material. The editor tools supplied through MindTouch make styling our documentation a breeze. The contextual help tool allows our customers to consume documentation based on the page they are viewing in our platform. Read full review Allows us to make changes quickly and with relative ease Can be flexible enough to use among several teams who do very different work Salesforce in general provides SO much training that anyone on the team can skill up and help maintain the system Read full review Cons When we do have a support issue, we frequently need to go through multiple people, contacts, ways of explaining things, etc,. before someone on their end actually understands our problem. It's rare that the first person we talk to understands the big picture or appreciates our use case. The draft functionality is a promising start but lacks some key features that cause us regular frustration. For example, you can only create one draft of a page at a time. This is fine if changes come to you in perfect sequential order, but it makes it impossible for us to update a live page while a draft exists. More specifically, if we're working on updating content on a page for a new feature being released next month, but then we notice a typo today, we can't fix the typo in production without first deleting the draft or doing some hacky workaround of temporarily copying/pasting the source HTML of the draft page and saving it someplace else. Existence of, or integration with, true source control would be a huge win, but it's something currently lacking in the product. MindTouch's content reuse feature is helpful in the right situations, but it's not robust enough to scale well for lots of content. Version history of page changes is not 100% reliable. Sometimes items don't show up at all or there is a delay before the diff is visible. Also, creating a draft does not register at all in the page version history. In-site search is poor, unless you know the *exact* title of what you're looking for. We tell our customers to use Google, not the MindTouch search. Google is excellent at searching our MindTouch site. Read full review Incredibly complex to set up and configure. Multiple points of potential failure. Things Desk.com did out-of-the-box require customized code and components in Service Cloud. Front-facing community is extremely difficult to configure and comes with many limitations. No help is provided by Salesforce without expensive Premiere Support plans. Expensive! Hidden costs and development costs are going to make Service Cloud far more expensive than almost any other Help Desk provider out there. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We've put lots and lots of content into the MindTouch system, of course, so that makes it harder to opt out, but we're also very pleased with their rate of development and weekly pushing of improvements, as well as their response and solutions to our questions and input All in all, a winning combination.
Read full review Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.
Read full review Usability The site is responsive across multiple devices and screens. It has a clear path to contact support. The articles are searchable. Site users do have trouble navigating the site and finding what they need. That may be due to the architecture of the site, but it'd be nice if MindTouch offered more solutions are this. Our content is organized by product line. And many of those product lines have overlapping training content, so we have extensive duplicate content.
Read full review I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Salesforce has a more than 99% uptime rate and Salesforce Service Cloud is no exception. I have never had any issues experiencing outages or service degradation when it comes to using the Service Cloud product (that I can remember). Always reliable and easy to use, I would recommend this product as your go-to for helpdesk, service desk, incident management, call center, and other business process needs.
Read full review Performance MindTouch is a hosted site, so as a heavy user there are times when I notice that pages are slow to load, or something happens like Amazon Web Services crashing the entire east coast for a few hours, that you do notice even if it isn't actually the fault of the MT tool itself. It's the risk of using a hosted tool, but the benefits are pretty amazing and outweigh these performance issues.
Read full review There are issues with page load performance and database performance for sure, but we are a very complex setup with a lot of automation and processing for 2000+ users so this is not surprising. We are also global, so the issue with distance from the regional servers is a problem.
Read full review Support Rating It's good. Pretty solid. We got a lot of input to get up and running, but did a lot of the setup and customization work ourselves, because of our high standards. We've gotten good response and results on specific projects related to customization and our CSM is also pretty responsive. Overall, I think that the jobs of CSMs and support folks would be easier if the product weren't wonky in some ways. They seem to have to do more "workarounds" for basic functionality that should just work out of the box
Read full review It depends on what support package you buy from Salesforce. That can be good or bad. It's highly flexible to your needs pricing wise. If you have devs on staff then don't buy support. If you don't, then sfdc offers support for a cost.
Read full review Online Training Written documentation and videos are very good and have helped on numerous occasions when I've had to look up how to accomplish a certain task. The reason I have not given a full score is mainly because there have been some inaccuracies in the documentation because updates to the MindTouch framework have slightly changed the way things work. But this is usually the same type of challenges I face when making documentation for the software solution we develop. So all in all I'm very satisfied with both the personal webinars and the online documentation MindTouch provides for their service.
Read full review Implementation Rating Just know that there is so much more involved than adding your content. There are so many pieces to launching your site -- especially if you are moving from another platform. If you are not a person who typically works in the "website" realm, do your homework, ask your web people, engineers, etc., because there's a lot to do that you won't know about until you are unexpectedly smacked in the face with it. Learn from my mistakes! We are very happy now, but it was a long road getting to launch day for us
Read full review We are still working through issues with the implementation. Things are also always changing so the original implementation required many changes
Read full review Alternatives Considered I will be brief. DealerTeam is built upon
Salesforce and we try to support native apps. We used
Desk.com first for basic Help Ticket management. The product did not satisfy how our customers were looking for information. We upgraded to Service Cloud with Knowledge Base and spent one year writing content and developing our support agency. Again, our customers were upset about submitting help tickets and waiting for answers. They wanted access to self-help while working with a customer. Today we continue to use Service Cloud with MindTouch integration and have found complete success. There is simply no other solution I know of that is a flexible and easy to use as MindTouch when it come to providing customer success and product support
Read full review Salesforce service cloud is more configurable than Zendesk and
Freshdesk . It has its own inbuilt AI chatbot also which further improves service agent efficiency. Salesforce is more integration agnostic and has pre-built connectors with multiple 3rd party systems. However, in terms of pricing it is priced at a premium compared to the other solutions
Read full review Scalability We tried to migrate to MindTouch for 5 months and failed, remained with
Zendesk Read full review Return on Investment Our operational efficiently has improved significantly. Prior to Mindtouch, we managing duplicate content in two separate authoring solutions. Delivering content predictably and consistently was difficult and stressful for writers. In Mindtouch, we were able to optimize our content (remove redundancies) giving us more time to test, review, and improve content quality. Traffic to our knowledge center is increasing monthly. Internally, SMEs and customer-facing teams are recognizing the value Mindtouch brings through self-service knowledge. These SMEs want to contribute more to content, either as contributing writers or collaborators with tech writers. Read full review Because this is a cloud service, the security, implementation framework and feature list is very mature and you don't have to develop these during implementation. The larger the implementation programme the better the licensing arrangements Free developer toolkit for proof of concepts or showcasing features Limited to annual subscription model Read full review ScreenShots Salesforce Service Cloud Screenshots