When you're working in the business to business (B2B) industry, knowledge is vital not only to you but your partners and clients as well. And when there are a lot of other products or service providers in your field available to your B2B customers, your service and customer support needs to be top-notch. One top-level provider we had the pleasure of working for is EasyVista for whom we implemented an XWiki-based Knowledge Base.
As Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) specialists, the company develops a range of software packages that are aimed at organizations of all sizes. They cover the entire life cycle of IT assets: incident management, problems, events, changes, put into production, availability, continuity of service and service levels, fleet management and configuration, automatic inventory, and many more. With offices in France, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the United States, and Canada, EasyVista has more than 800 clients that activate in banking, insurance, industry, the service sector, governments, outsourcing, and consulting.
Back in 2014, the EasyVista team was looking for a tool that could be implemented internally in order to avoid numerous email exchanges and reduce silos within the company. Due to the high number of projects, many documents were sent back and forward by email and it was difficult to find vital information in due time. This brought the need to centralize information in a bi-lingual Knowledge Base solution comprised of 3 wikis: two for internal use and one shared with the public.
While preparing for the video testimonial above, we also interviewed the EasyVista team about their knowledge base solution and the journey with XWiki.
Question: What was the business problem and difficulties you had? What was some previous situation associated with them?
Answer: EasyVista is an ITSM software vendor with a customer base distributed between SaaS and on-premise customers. Our solutions are implemented all over the world. One of our key values has always been Innovation. Our product documentation used to be robohelp.chm pages generated upon product release and made available as part of the product setup. But this was an issue for a lot of reasons. The document was only available through the product installation, it generated a bottleneck because it needed to be ready and translated before we could release the product, the updates could only be published by releasing a new version and the list could go on.
Q: How did it help solve the previous situation, what advantages did the product or service have?
A: 10 years ago, we evaluated an Open Source solution. We learned the value of SaaS the hard way when our physical computer hosting Wikimedia crashed and we suddenly found out the backup software had stopped functioning and wasn’t properly managed by our internal IT. Thus a managed solution with a single point of contact for the service was something we thought was mandatory. When searching for a solution we found XWiki.
Q: How has your company's life changed? What benefits did the XWiki solution bring, how did impact the teamwork or the service to your clients?
A: Currently, we have public documentation available to everyone in the world 24x7 in two languages (French and English): wiki.easyvista.com. We do have on average 600 visits per day on the documentation from all across the globe. This peaks when we do product releases because all the release documentation is also published on the wiki. Our monthly customer newsletter also includes links to the public wiki. Documentation is published in real-time and updated on a regular basis. On average 65% of all the pages are updated every year.
The main benefit is agility: our documentation is built during the development phase, before the release, and is published and maintained on the fly.
A side benefit is that Google referencing of the wiki is very good. While customers typically use the help menus in our products to find the relevant product documentation, a significant part of the wiki users get there through direct Google search.
"Thanks to XWiki, our clients benefit from up-to-date documentation of our products, everywhere in the world." Philippe Franck, Product Management Director at EasyVista
The customer experience should be the driving force of everything you do, and that begins with customer service. When you don’t have all your customer support knowledge in one centralized place, your customers are much more likely to experience some trust-eroding pain points: wasted time, conflicting information, an unorganized process, and a bad taste in their mouth.
With a public knowledge base, you can provide customers access to content on how best to use your products, allowing them to resolve minor issues on their own, leaving your team with more time to tackle complex issues. Investing in an internal knowledge base platform will empower your employees to provide the best possible quality of service to the customers who allow you to do what you do. Which would work better for you?
