MindTouch for 1-to-many support and documentation
Updated February 12, 2016
MindTouch for 1-to-many support and documentation
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
TCS
Overall Satisfaction with MindTouch
We use MindTouch for both customer-facing and internal documentation. I was the team lead in implementing it as our help authoring tool (and something of an intranet as well). At the time, I was a technical writer, though I've since moved to the UX team. Our tech writer is responsible for creating and maintaining content. We maintain the help center as its own site, accessible by our users, but it is also used to populate our contextual help (which Engineering is responsible for implementing). The content is consumed by our users and our internal employees. MindTouch helps us update and maintain our documentation, and deliver it to the people who need to see it. It helps our users and team members help themselves, deflecting calls to support and helping one person with knowledge reach many people at the same time.
- MindTouch Support is amazing. They've rarely taken more than a day to respond to my requests for help, and often will call to talk me through issues that are too complicated to solve over email.
- MindTouch's case deflection feature is great. When someone creates a support case with us, they are first shown a list of articles in our help center that are relevant to the topic at hand.
- MindTouch articles are easy to update. They provide a nice GUI editor; no special skills are required.
- I recall MindTouch not looking that great out of the box. That said, we implemented it 3 years ago, so a lot may have changed since then.
- PDF generation was a bit of a pain point, although they worked with us to get it up to meeting our needs.
- I'm not a huge fan of the F1 contextual help offering. We ended up building our own.
- While I don't have numbers, I do feel like MindTouch helped us prevent support cases where customers were looking for answers to simple questions. This frees up our support team's time for the harder questions.
- It has let our internal teams create their own knowledge bases, thus freeing up the veterans from answering the same questions over and over for the new people.
- It is a 1-to-many solution. This lets us solve a lot more customers' problems with a lot less repeated effort.
- MadCap and robohelp
We compared MindTouch to both MadCap Flare and Adobe RoboHelp. In my opinion, MindTouch was far and away the easier product to use. Flare might be better for a single writer supporting a product, but we wanted to open it up so other team members could also contribute. This just didn't seem feasible with either of the other products.
MindTouch Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Yes - We pay for premium support and find it worthwhile because (at least when I was the main contact) it allowed us to have individual 1 hour sessions with higher level support team members. It also provided us with a much quicker initial response time. All in all, it seemed to be a good buy.
Yes - Yes, it was. They added it to their list of bugs, and made a note that I had reported it so they could contact me when they fixed it. When it was fixed roughly two weeks later, they gave me a call to make sure I knew it was resolved and then asked me to verify that it was working as expected.
We had some issues with the way the PDF generator was working. We had been told in the sales process that it would work one way, but then it ended up having some restrictions which made this impossible. Everyone on their side was great about it. The sales rep owned up to his part in the issue, support went out of their way to get us a quick resolution, engineering actually made some changes that helped us get where we needed to be, and customer experience was their to hold our hands the whole way through. All in all, a very impressive support experience that turned a negative into a positive.