A Helpful Online Help Center
Updated October 07, 2016

A Helpful Online Help Center

Lisa Fontaine | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

MindTouch Responsive

Overall Satisfaction with MindTouch

MindTouch powers our online help center, which has become the most leveraged tool by internal teams and external customers for training and self-help resources. The content is created by a handful of people in our company, including our instructional designer, customer support leads, and me. MindTouch has made our online help center an invaluable addition to our company's assets. It is not only used by customers, but also internally by everyone from the executive team down.
  • Logical hierarchy for content structure makes organizing an abundance of information easy.
  • The ability to use tags and even manually set specific content to display at the top of search results makes it easy for users to find exactly what they are looking for.
  • Updating information in draft form is helpful when new software releases are pending. In addition, the revision history feature has been helpful for us when we've needed to access previous versions of an article.
  • Some other features we value are the ability to set articles to private, being able to easily move content around in the site, and the content re-use option that automatically updates information in areas where the article has been duplicated when the original has changed.
  • I think our only issue with MindTouch was that it was not explained up front that we would need a developer to add any customization to our site in the way of branding, graphics, formatting, fonts, etc.
  • Positive: We have reduced the number of calls to our customer support team.
  • Positive: We now have a single source for online training and self-help resources where new users to our software can get educated on how to use the system.
  • Positive: We are able to easily update instructions in help articles to keep information current.
Although a good product, WordPress lacks a lot of the features that make MindTouch the best solution for online self-help. We were looking for a system that was easy to build and manage but also one that knocked it out of the park when it came to an effective and positive user experience. MindTouch did this for us.
MindTouch is the perfect solution for companies who have hardware or software and need to offer online self-help resources and training for customers. Based on my personal experience, I would say that the company should also have a UX/UI person and in-house developers, or have the resources to hire a developer and designer to customize their site.

Using MindTouch

100 - The system is used by everyone from executives to employees in training, marketing, sales, onboarding, customer support, and product development.
5 - The main support of the system comes from the training department, but we also have contributers in customer support.
  • New customers who need training and product use instructions.
  • Existing customers seeking self-help on our products.
  • Internal teams who need instructions on using product features.
  • Publish product release notes.
  • Promote new product features and releases.
  • Used in the customer journey from initial sale through onboarding process to ongoing support.
  • Community forum for our customers to ask questions and find answers from other users.
Overall, we are extremely happy with the product and customer support. Beyond that, we've invested a lot of time and money into our site, and to move to a different platform wouldn't make sense for us.

Evaluating MindTouch and Competitors

Yes - We had a home-grown help center that was cumbersome to post to, impossible to find information on, and a labyrinth for customers to use.
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
We had an enormous amount of material that we needed to transfer over to a system that had a logical structure and was easy to use. In the sales process, we were impressed by the functionality and features of the system.
We would have a front-end developer present to go over the large and small needs of developing a website. We had expected to have two non-technical people put our "custom" site together with full branding, customer support tickets, online chat, etc., which was not reasonable.

MindTouch Implementation

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.
Change management was a minor issue with the implementation - Because there were so many moving parts to our MindTouch site, we had to do some internal training for how to access information. We also had a hard start date for everything, because we had our online support tickets and chat connected to MindTouch and needed to do a single switch from the old system to the new.
  • Broken redirect links from the old system to the new due to one of our products not being able to run on the operating system of MindTouch.
  • Most of the implementation issues that I can recall were on our end and had nothing to do with MindTouch.

MindTouch Support

I think the support overall is good. They are quick to respond to requests and very interested in helping. We have, however, had issues come up that they have not been able to help us fix -- even at a tier 2 level. Thank goodness we had a developer on contract who was able to fix what we needed.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
Difficult to get immediate help
No - Our contract does not permit us to call into support. We can email questions and then wait for a rep to call us back.
Yes - I don't even remember exactly what it was, but I do remember reporting it all the way to the CEO. We found a work-around for the issue, so I honestly don't know if they ever fixed it.
We had a bit of a slow start using the system due to the immense amount of content that needed to be weeded out and structured for the MindTouch platform. By the time we were ready to start adding content, we had forgotten what was taught in the trainings and we had so many questions. At that point, our onboarding coach invited us to the MindTouch office for a day of personal training with some of the experts. They re-taught us how to use the system and even helped us get started on our own site by plugging in some content based on the IA we had designed.

Using MindTouch

I think for the most part, the system is easy to use. BUT, if you want any customization, you need a developer. Period.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Lots to learn
  • The content hierarchy feature is amazing.
  • Easy to add images and make them look good.
  • We especially like being able to move content around while maintaining a URL history that automatically redirects.
  • Adding custom graphics.
  • Adding custom functions or UX.
  • Adding customization of fonts, style, etc.