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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Verint Knowledge Management
Score 9.1 out of 10
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Verint Knowledge Management aim to help agents find and share the information needed to answer both customer inquiries and questions they may have themselves. The solution helps ensure the answers agents access are consistent, up to date, and easily accessible.
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.
Verint KMS is great for organizing content by categories for different teams and by different topics. It is easy to search and the Related Content makes moving from one piece of content to the next relevant piece quite easy. On the authoring side, the ability to schedule publishing or expiration is very handy. It is also really easy to make edits and have content ready and published for readers quickly. Verint's KMS isn't well suited if your users wish to be able to organize their favourited content or if you need a wide-range of options on the authoring end of things.
The tools to submit and manage user feedback are very effective - they help us respond quickly and interconnect the feedback to the applicable content.
The end user experience is clean and feels familiar, making it optimal to support a group of people who generally have never experienced a KM application before.
Our audience responds well to our ability to insert images, GIFs, videos, PDFs, and more into our content.
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.
The authoring side could be improved with additional options for fonts and easier formatting for table content. I have issues with trying to add colour to one portion of a table and not the other, so I have to resort to creating in Word first and then copying over to Verint. There is also no option to create steps in one row and the next step in the next row. I end up just adding 1., 2., etc. manually.
Many users would like to be able to organize their bookmarks into folders and the system doesn't allow this. Many have taken to creating bookmark folders in Microsoft Edge instead.
There were a few bugs that went on for a few months that made the initial launch of the KMS more difficult for the users and on the authoring side. The issues were with how the search results came up and what displayed for related content. It wasn't the best first impression for our agents using the system while on calls and made it more difficult. The issues were fixed after a few months of use.
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.
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.
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 and development teams for Knowledge are exceptional. They are attentive and truly care about the experience of their customers and their goals
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
All of these tools were very useful and practical. For our decision, it came down to understanding our core audience - we determined our average associate was largely unfamiliar with call center and office work in their prior work experience, and as such they would not have previously worked in a KM application before. To help adoption, we sought the solution with the simplest and most familiar interface, and based on internal focus group feedback, that was Verint KM Pro.
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.
Content is easier to keep up to date and publish on an urgent basis.
Some users love the system, while others still find it difficult to find the information they need and miss the former guides we used. I think this is a result of the system issues that persisted for a few months after launch and will hopefully improve with time.
Users love being able to submit feedback and it makes it easier for errors, missing information and out of date information to be caught and fixed.
