Helpjuice vs. Salesforce Service Cloud

Helpjuice is an excellent platform when you’re looking to modernize the way you create documentation. Many companies, especially larger corporations, are stuck in the past, utilizing PDFs and share drives to house and access procedures. With Helpjuice, we now have a centralized web-based platform that provides everything from analytic functions to standard templates, user-specific features, and more. My team specifically chose Helpjuice during the pandemic, when all the tech writers from my company (including myself) were moved into a single team. We needed to find a platform that would allow us to align our publishing standards while also moving us forward in the way we publish procedures. That platform was ultimately Helpjuice. Helpjuice certainly offers a variety of features, but one of the few drawbacks is that it does not incorporate or seem to integrate with any specific ticketing tool. While this isn’t an issue for me or my team, as we are required to use a specific tool internally, I can imagine that someone looking for a complete package with multi-step workflows and an intake process would not find Helpjuice adequate.

Incentivized

I think Service Cloud is best suited for medium to large operations that require both proactive and reactive service. It’s a great fit for post-sales support. However, I wouldn’t recommend it for very small companies because it can be quite costly, and many of the features may go unused. Salesforce also performs best when you have a capable team managing it, so it’s important to consider your organization’s size and readiness before starting. Once you do, I recommend exploring other parts of the Salesforce ecosystem—Service Cloud works even better when integrated with Sales Cloud, since it allows better visibility across teams.

Incentivized

• We were looking for a publishing feature where there would be some required oversight.
• We have really enjoyed the AI Tool of Wizardshot as it has helped reduce the time spent writing articles.
• The analytic dashboard to see who has contributed what and which articles are the most clicked on is wonderful

Incentivized

• Email to case is an interesting piece of it. The threading is very strong, sometimes too strong, but it does very well at handling the incoming emails.
• The omnichannel routing, using skill-based routing is really effective.
• Pathing. So making the workflow and helping the team understand what it is that they're trying to do, what they have to accomplish, those step-by-step pieces. That's really helpful.

Incentivized

• Article feedback disappears when resolved, would like to see a integration with Jira which we now use to track feedback changes.
• Analytics for the AI search would be appreciated. Currently we have no idea how many people are actually using this feature.
• A way to train the AI search bot. Currently there is no way to up/down vote answers or indicate how accurate or helpful an answer is.

Incentivized

• We had a principle initially to try and use Omni as much as we can from the user experience perspective, but have found that fairly restrictive. It was very difficult to actually get the right customer experience and customer engagement going. So we're actually on a journey at the moment to replace all of our Omni with Lightning web components that gives us that flexibility. That's probably one area where we've had some challenges in terms of how we've used the product out of the box.

Incentivized

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.

HelpJuice is really amazing as a starter knowledge base vendor. They have great customer service and the ability to customize your website is endless. However, it is difficult to scale up.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Working on an application that caters to customer needs requires a platform that acts as a mediator between the actual person and the client. This mediator handles the customer and resolves many of their doubts, helps them map through the entire process, and automates the processes. Such a platform is Salesforce Service Cloud. For queries that cannot be serviced by the platform, it creates a separate ServiceNow ticket for us, and it is assigned.

Incentivized

The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce

Incentivized

Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.

Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.

Incentivized

Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.

Incentivized

I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations

Incentivized

Prior to using Helpjuice, I was using Microsoft Publisher to create all the training materials and manuals for multiple divisions within my company. It was awful. It would lag whenever I opened larger manuals, it operated like software from the late 90s, it was not intuitive, from a design perspective, and after migrating to a MacBook Pro as my work computer, I discovered that the program was NEVER created for Mac OS, requiring me to run Windows on my MacBook whenever I had to update any procedures that hadn’t yet migrated to Helpjuice. What a nightmare.

Incentivized

We selected this product because we already had some competencies in Salesforce. We own a Salesforce partner with expertise in this area, and on top of that, Salesforce purchased it — it was originally called Velocity. When Salesforce decided to acquire it, that finalized the decision for us.

Incentivized

The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports

Incentivized

• As I mentioned, my productivity in terms of working around issues, asking for help, etc. is greatly reduced on a DAILY basis.
• I spend as much time finding bugs and filing tickets as I do writing content, and this was especially true at the beginning.
• The Doc Center looks nice, so you'd never know the pain behind it.

• We have cut our service team in half over the past 5 years due to the efficiency of the tool
• The amount of direct inquiries to our technical team is less than 10% compared to the number support tickets that get entered in the system for them to work in a more organized manner
• Responses are 100% more timely because tickets can be responded to by any individual in the queue or on the team, as opposed to direct emails to just one person

Incentivized