MindTouch is a customer experience management platform with content management and help authoring capabilities. Formerly known as MediaWiki, it is optimized for building knowledge bases for customer self-service and agent assistance purposes.
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PG Forsta HX Platform
Score 9.0 out of 10
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The PG Forsta HX platform, the technology and research solution formed from the Forsta solution based on the combined (through merger) technology of Dapresy, Confirmit, and FocusVision, and later by the acquisition of Press Ganey in 2022, is a customer experience management solution featuring both forms and text analysis to understand the Voice of the Customer.
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.
They have done a good job at helping us maintain the integrity of the project while transitioning to a completely new platform. Our Voice of the Customer program happens to consist of multiple surveys within one "master" so I guess logistically it could be considered complex
Confirmit has a fairly shallow learning curve allowing someone with no experience to be able to create a simple survey with not much time invested in training.
Confirmit also has the flexibility to be used in very advanced ways. Whether modifying the display/page content's layout or modifying input types with jQuery, it is incredibly adaptable.
Confirmit (with v. 18) now collects data in a true SQL database which is far more robust and easy to administrate than some other methods of data storage.
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.
Ensure correct data collection. This is Confirmit's main goal, and which sometimes fails to succeed.
Integrated data back-up service. It would be great if we could look at the data from a couple days previous.
Interactive layout creator. Current layout creator is really "squared" as we say, it needs more flexibility with all the incoming technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3.
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.
From my point of view Confirmit has been a key tool in our organization. Without it we can't deliver what we do at this moment. Confirmit has proved that is a reliable, stable and easy to use tool. The few issues we found (as far as I know) were sent to Confirmit support team and fix them. Patching the product has been done faster and without large downtime of the product
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.
Confirmit is a very technical tool, it takes time for someone to get used to the interface, even when it could definitely be more intuitive or user friendly, this is part of Confirmit's strenghts that makes it one of the most robust data collection technologies out there.
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.
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
The support team is responsive and I can tell that they are actually trying to help get to the heart of the issues before making us try every possible solution available. They ask the right questions and test things before coming back to us with proposals. I like the support team at Confirmit.
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.
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
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
Forsta has a strong product functionality and performance. Integration capabilities are fantastic and it has strong customer focus. Pre-existing relationships also helped in cracking this deal. People at Forsta are helpful and customer centric. Although cost is not highly competitive but it comes close to value for money. Competitors have quite a few functionalities but there are additional charges levied for them.
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.
I love Confirmit, the only negative is that my experience using any other program is always terrible in comparison.
I had Confirmit rep come into the office and was disapointed that they didn't have much informaton on how to use it as a researcher in marking research, perhaps employing more internal marketing researchers would help that.
