“The first thing knowledge workers need is easy access to information through a single interface. One search should get them all the information in a company, no matter where it resides or what format it is in,” says Susan Feldman research VP, content technologies, IDC.

To help solve this problem, we’ve got five real-life examples of Knowledge Management success for you to sink your teeth into.

1. Toyota

Toyota is a company that rules the roost at Knowledge Management.
Toyota is a multinational automotive manufacturer with headquarters in Aichi, Japan. The company has more than 300,000 employees who are based around the world, and it is the tenth-largest global company in terms of revenue.

Toyota distinguishes between explicit and tacit knowledge: explicit knowledge is data, instructions, and procedures that can be captured in words and numbers. Tacit knowledge is gained by experience, resides in the minds of experts, and is harder to transmit to others.
In order to share tacit knowledge internally, Toyota uses a Job Instruction (JI) document – which has its roots in WWII.

During the war, large numbers of women workers were recruited to build guns and other weapons for Japanese soldiers. It was essential for their products to be very reliable. Toyota came up with the JI Document to standardise production, improve safety, and ensure quality.

Today, Toyota has hundreds of JI documents in use to make a single car.

A JI document must contain 3 elements:

• Important steps – the sequential order of steps to complete a task
• Key points – any extra information regarding how to save time, or avoid mistakes
• Reasons – the line of reasoning behind the key points, such as what the result of errors would be

Every factory employee follows these JI documents to complete their part in the production line. The Toyota Production System (TPS) is internationally recognised as giving Toyota its competitive advantage, since it enables Toyota factories to produce a continuous flow of products that adapts to meet demand.

When launching a new factory, Toyota rigorously promotes knowledge transfer. The company sends two-three hundred new employees to work in an existing factory. There, they work side by side with the more experienced employees on the assembly line, and study the production system.

After initial training on the job, the newer employees are transferred back to the new factory. They are accompanied by one-two hundred highly experienced employees who work alongside them, and ensure that Toyota’s finely-tuned production system is implanted into the new site.

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Our next example is a company mostly everyone with any work experience in a modern office will have heard about: you’ll probably know them best for the office printer.

Xerox Holdings Corporation is a 100-year old business based in the US. It sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Even though the company’s headquarters are in Connecticut, Xerox’s biggest concentration of employees is in Rochester, New York.

Xerox had a big problem with Knowledge Management in its organisation. There was a lack of communication between service engineers in particular, whose job it was to fix equipment issues for customers in the field. Although the engineers were coming up with highly effective and valuable solutions to equipment issues, these solutions were not being shared among its 24,000-strong customer service team.

None of the engineers’ solutions were documented in the training manuals, product documentation, or vendor updates. Engineers only had the scope to share their solutions with other members of their local office, which was limited to half a dozen employees. Essentially, they were frequently reinventing the wheel, and it was hindering productivity.

In response to this roadblock, Xerox developed its own Knowledge Management solution called Eureka. Eureka was a professionally-accredited system of knowledge-sharing where engineers could document their solutions. The system allowed service engineers to attach their name to articles, which boosted their reputation among their peers, and encouraged more employees to take the time to share their knowledge.

Eureka has prevented more than 300,000 redundant solutions being implemented, and boasts up to 80% participation from service engineers.

Here’s an example of when Xerox saved $40,000 in one swoop due to Eureka. Facing the prospect of having to replace a customer’s expensive colour copy machine, a Brazil-based employee checked Eureka. He found the correct solution from an engineer in Canada: which was that the problem could be solved by replacing a 90-cent part, instead of an entire $40,000 copier.

As of 2016, Eureka had saved the company more than $100 million in service costs.

3. Forest Products

The Forest Products Company encountered a situation where it risked significant knowledge loss. An experienced and senior manager was suddenly leaving the business for health reasons, with no one who would be left in the company with the same knowledge and skills.

The employee handed in their two-week’s notice, and the company realised they were going to be left with a serious knowledge deficit in the area of delinquency and bad debt management.

Forest Products decided to launch a project plan that would aim to capture the expertise of their departing manager. Over a period of six weeks, two “knowledge harvesters” collected all knowledge about the financial collection process from the manager, and conducted several follow-up interviews after he had officially left the company.

When they had fully recorded the departing manager’s knowledge, employees came up with a new, single source of information. This source would enable anyone to learn how to manage delinquent accounts, and respond to bad debt events such as bankruptcy and collection.

The company eventually produced an interactive software tool that could capture and share key decisions relating to this area, automating many of the processes that would have previously required the intervention of a person.

Though it cost the company $33,000 to develop this project, it ultimately delivered a value of $150,000 overall. Not only could Forest Products continue to manage bad debts, they found it unnecessary to replace the departing manager.

Over three years, the company reaped a value of $334,000 from this single Knowledge Management project.

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4. Geisinger Medical Group

Knowledge Management also has the potential to literally save lives – particularly when it is used to improve operations in the sphere of healthcare.

Just take this next example from Geisinger Medical Group, which is based in Pennsylvania, and employs more than 2,000 healthcare professionals. GMG is central Pennsylvania’s only Level I Trauma Center, providing round-the-clock complex critical care for patients who have sustained life-threatening injuries.

Using Knowledge Management, the Group has substantially lowered costs, improved patient health outcomes, and recruited and retained more doctors who are top of their field.

The initiative began when Geisinger’s head of surgery and his team wanted to improve bypass operations. The team outlined 20 standard steps that a surgeon would need to go through in order to perform a successful bypass.
The team refined these 20 steps to remove as much chance and variability from the procedure as possible. They even went so far as to define the specific drugs and dosages that surgeons should use. Eventually, they ended up with a 40-step checklist for every surgeon to follow.

At first, the other surgeons rejected the new 40-step checklist, which they found to be as an instance of “cookbook medicine”, not befitting to their level of training and experience. However, after one or two doctors began following the checklist, it became wildly popular with the entire group of surgeons.

After the first 200 operations were conducted following the checklist (comprising some 8,000 steps), the Group saw a 99.95% compliance rate from surgeons. Patients are now experiencing fewer complications, and going home sooner, as a result of the new initiative.

The checklist resulted in per-patient savings of roughly $2,000, less bleeding, and less intubation in the operating rooms.

Also Read:  Guide to Improve Healthcare Process

5. The Gerdau Group

Our final example is another manufacturing company. The Gerdau Group is the biggest producer of long steel operating in the Americas, and it is also the thirteenth-biggest steelmaker in the world. Gerdau Group reported revenues of US$ 20 billion in 2008.

The company has grown quickly, operating 45 steel plants that span 14 countries, which include the US, Canada, Brazil, and Chile.

Many of the Gerdau Group’s new factories were facing the challenge of improving their operational efficiency. Unfortunately, they had no way to access the existing process knowledge of the other, more established, sites.
To solve this problem, Gerdau Group implemented communities of practice, which are groups of workers that transcend location, and possess differing levels of skill. Members of these communities of practice could share their knowledge with one another using an online forum.

Here’s one instance to illustrate how the communities improved operations. Chile-based employees were unsure about a procedure – whether to turn off the furnace during shutdowns in production. They were able to post their questions to others in the forum. In this instance, their question was:

“Is it economically favorable to turn off the furnace when there are shutdowns in the production line for short periods of time (less than 8 hours)?”

After a thirteen-day long debate between members of four separate factories based in Brazil, Chile and US, workers concluded that it was best to keep the furnace burning at a temperature of roughly 13300F. This was because it would cost more in fuel consumption to reheat the furnace after it was turned off, rather than to keep it running at a lower temperature.
Even more importantly, previous experiences in other plants showed other reasons for this best practice. For example, frequently changing the temperature of the furnace damaged the refractory bricks that comprised the internal walls.

Fluctuating temperatures shorten the wall-life of the furnaces by 25%, and would result in losses of US$ 25,000 per furnace.

In response to these findings, Gerdau implemented 50 sites that were operating with the new shutdown period. They saved more fuel, and ensured that furnaces would see a longer lifespan.

Final Remarks

Like the Holy Grail, mastering Knowledge Management in your business is appealing but elusive, and has remained an intriguing mystery for a long time.

We might not have found the Holy Grail of Knowledge Management just yet, but we’re on the right trail. These real-life examples have illustrated how better Knowledge Management can make businesses in different industries more efficient, and save substantial sums of money.

It can prevent employees from coming up with redundant solutions, minimise costly defects on the production line, and save valuable expertise from being lost.

As world-renowned entrepreneur Bill Gates said in Business at the Speed of Thought, “Knowledge management is nothing more than managing information flow, getting the right information to the people who need it so that they can act on it quickly.”

The post 5 real-life examples of Knowledge Management success you can learn from appeared first on Document360.

You may well have heard of Markdown, but it’s okay if you haven’t.
The typical way that users first might encounter Markdown is through formatting text on internet message boards. You might have encountered it used on GitHub in readme files, at the very least. A professional use for Markdown is to write technical documentation.
Technical writers have a dazzling array of options for producing their documentation. That’s why many writers opt for Markdown – it’s easy to use, and adaptable between different platforms (at least, in theory).

Table of Contents

1. What is Markdown?

You might be wondering, what the heck is Markdown anyway?
Markdown is a lightweight markup language. It allows you to style a digital text document using typical formatting techniques: for example, headings, emphasis, lists, images, and links. Markdown files are stored as .md or .markdown. Also, Markdown can be optionally converted into XHTML or HTML to display nicely in a browser.

Some of the many uses of Markdown are readme files, writing messages in online discussion forums, creating rich text using a plain text editor, emails, and technical documentation. Popular sites that use Markdown include GitHub, Trello, Reddit, SourceForge, and StackExchange, among many others.

You, too, may want to use Markdown for formatting your documentation. It can be hosted by Static Site Generators such as Hugo which are linked with a text editor, or you can use an end-to-end proprietary solution to produce your Markdown files.

This light-weight markup language is a compromise between restrictive WYSIWYG editors, and formatting content directly in HTML. Writers can have as much control over the presentation of their information without resorting to full HTML tagging. At the same time, Markdown parsers also support dropping in blocks of HTML code that add to Markdown’s limited syntax, in case you want to achieve a more complex design 

2. The back end of Markdown

There’s a little more to Markdown than meets the eye. This section helps you understand what’s going on under the hood, in between formatting your Markdown files and the final rendered output for the web.

You don’t necessarily need to know what’s going on behind the scenes, unless you use a combination of tools like a text editor and static site generator, but sometimes it’s good to know!

This process is a mixture of learning the Markdown syntax, and then understanding how that file is then rendered.

1. Create your Markdown file using a text editor or specialised Markdown application
2. Open your Markdown file in a specialised Markdown application
3. Convert your Markdown file to an HTML document using the Markdown application and parser
4. View your HTML file in a web browser

Alternatively, there are resources out there (like Pandoc) which can convert your Markdown files into other formats, including DOCX, PDF, RTF, ODT, or EPUB. For example, you can convert your Markdown files into an ebook, with each Markdown file functioning as an individual chapter.

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3. History of Markdown

Markdown was developed by John Gruber in collaboration with Aaron Schwartz in 2004, so it’s got a little bit of history. Gruber was tired of how complicated it was to format his web content using the standard HTML. That’s why he came up with Markdown.
“The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.” – John Gruber

Before Markdown, all that was available was other markup languages like HTML and LaTeX. Markdown arose as a lightweight markup language for web writers, many of whom are also developers. That makes Markdown an especially good solution for technical documentation that also requires collaboration with development teams.

Back to the history. Conflicts soon arose concerning Markdown, which suffered from a lack of standardisation for the syntax. There was no
Markdown specification, and Gruber remained unwilling to extend the syntax. People ended up developing their own, independent, implementations (also known as “flavours”). This led to problems converting Markdown from one system to another. For example, it’s more difficult than it should be to convert a GitHub wiki to docbook using Pandoc, due to incompatible syntax deviations.

Unlike HTML, there is no internet standard for Markdown syntax. So, CommonMark was born as an unofficial initiative established to standardise all the different “flavours” of Markdown. CommonMark is a standard, unambiguous syntax specification for Markdown, alongside a suite of comprehensive tests that validate implementations of Markdown against the specification.

That very short summary brings us up to today.

4. Markdown Flavours

As we just mentioned, the unstandardised nature of Markdown has given rise to a number of popular “flavours” – essentially, extensions of the original Markdown syntax. The reason for this is to add extra functionality not available in the original syntax, such as tables, references, and syntax highlighting.

Some flavours of Markdown have become very commonly used, such as the GitHub flavour, which is called GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM). It includes extra features such as tables, programming language selection, and syntax colouring.

Taking into account the Markdown flavours, your Markdown files may not always be compatible with different editors if they don’t support the extra syntax used. This lack of consistency among implementations of Markdown is one of the main issues that people have with it.

Here’s a list of the most common flavours of Markdown available today.

5. Why Learn Markdown?

Despite having some issues, Markdown is used by many people. You don’t even have to be a developer to pick up the basics. The advantage of Markdown is that once you know how it works, it’s very easy to write. It’s intuitively easy to pick up because it’s based on email formatting conventions that many people have been exposed to already.

Markdown offers a smoother workflow than traditional publishing systems. Unlike in a normal writing User Interface, such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs, you don’t have to stop writing to select formatting buttons. Formatting is included in-line with your text, and it looks like the effect it’s intended to create. In other words, a list looks like a list, and **emphasis** looks like emphasis.

You can also easily read Markdown in its raw state, unlike for example raw HTML, which is full of tags. The Markdown syntax flows perfectly with the rest of your writing, and it’s intuitively clear what the syntax means.

Markdown files are portable, and can be opened in any editor compatible with Markdown, in case you want to change applications. Although in practice, this may not be as simple, it’s a good option to have. Markdown is platform-independent, which means you can create Markdown files in any text editor. It’s useful across many different websites and applications.

It’s a reusable skill. Markdown is versatile, so you learn it once, and you can use it for lots of different activities. You can use Markdown to take notes, create content for a website, or produce print-ready documents.

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6. Basics of Markdown

It’s worth learning the basic Markdown syntax outlined by John Gruber, which is supported by the majority of Markdown applications. You’re likely to find the syntax of Markdown relatively intuitive to pick up. It’s also possible to write directly in HTML in any Markdown file, if you prefer.

You can get started right now with Markdown in the browser using a tool such as Dillinger.

Headings

All Markdown files should contain headers. You need a level 1 header for the title of your Markdown file, and at least level 2 headers for the subheadings within the body text. Headings make your text more readable and help to break up the topics.

In Markdown, headings are formatted with hashes (#) in front of the line containing your heading. You can use up to six hashes, with the number of hashes corresponding to a heading level.

Your text will look like this:
# Heading level 1
## Heading level 2
### Heading level 3
#### Heading level 4
##### Heading level 5
###### Heading level 6

Paragraphs

When writing your Markdown body text, you’ll likely want to split your information up into paragraphs (with a noticeable gap between each paragraph).

Paragraphs are divided by a blank line (a line containing no characters) between consecutive paragraphs.

Your text will look like this:
Paragraph 1

Paragraph 2

Line breaks

Sometimes, you’ll want to split your information up by inserting a new line, with less space than you’d get from formatting as a paragraph. This is called a line break.

To insert a line break into your Markdown file, finish your line with at least two spaces and press return. This will render a new line for your text.

Your text will look like this:
Line 1
Line 2

Emphasis

When writing your content in Markdown, you might want to place a bit more emphasis on certain words or phrases. The first way you can emphasise your text is in italics.

You can make your text italic by wrapping your text with one asterisk on each side (alternatively, you can use underscores in place of the asterisks). Once your application detects the second asterisk, your formatting for this element is considered “closed”.
Your text will look like this:
*This text is italic*
_This text is also italic_

Bold formatting provides a slightly heavier emphasis than italics, but it works in exactly the same way. This time, use two asterisks to wrap the text you want to make bold (alternatively, you can use underscores in place of asterisks).
Your text will look like this:
**This text is bold**
__This text is also bold__

If you really want to make a point, you can make your text simultaneously bold and italic to give it even more weight! To make your text bold and italic, use three asterisks (or three underscores) to wrap your word or phrase.
Your text will look like this:
***This text is italic and bold.***
___This text is also italic and bold___

Links (inline)

Sometimes we want to link to external websites when writing Markdown content. There’s a simple way to do this using two sets of brackets.
To format an inline link in Markdown, you use square brackets to wrap your link text. Place the square-bracket wrapped link text alongside parentheses containing your URL (make sure you don’t include a space between the link text and the link).
Your text will look like this:

[This is link text](This is a link URL)
If you want to add title to your link, insert your alt text next to the link inside quotation marks
Your text will look like this:
[This is link text](This is a link URL “This is a title”)

Note that if you want to link to a local file, within the same server as your other Markdown files, you can format your link with a forward slash followed by the relative URL.
Your text will look like this:
[This is link text](/This is a relative URL “This is a title”)

Images

A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say. Inserting an image into your Markdown file is similar to the formatting for links.

Begin your image formatting with an exclamation mark. Next, use square brackets to wrap your image alt text, next to parentheses containing the URL for your image. Ensure there are no spaces between the exclamation mark, square brackets, or parentheses.

Your text will look like this:
When your Markdown file is rendered to HTML, the image will be embedded directly into the body text.

Lists

Unordered lists
Sometimes, you may want to format your content in lists to make it easier to read.

The first option is to use an unordered list, where each item on your list is preceded by a bullet point. Markdown allows you to format your lists with a number of different symbols: asterisks (*), hyphens (-) or plus signs (+).

It’s up to you to choose which symbol you prefer. The result you get is the same.
Here is an example list:
* This is a list item
* This is a list item
* This is a list item
* This is a list item

Ordered lists

Other times, you may want to present your information sequentially in ordered lists (1, 2, 3, and so on). Format your ordered lists by preceding each list item with a number, followed by a full stop and then a space.

In Markdown, it doesn’t matter which numbers you use to format your list, as the list will always render as 1, 2, 3, and so on.
Your text will look like this:
1. This is a list item
2. This is a list item
3. This is a list item
4. This is a list item

Blockquotes

Sometimes in Markdown, we will want to reference an external source using quotation marks. This is called a blockquote. You represent any blockquote by preceding the first line of the block quote with a greater-than sign or angle bracket (>). Gruber recommends inserting the angle bracket before every line of your blockquote.

Your text will look like this:
> This is a blockquote
> This is a blockquote
> This is a blockquote

7. Intermediate Markdown

Now you’ve got to grips with basic Markdown, you might want to attempt some slightly more advanced formatting.

Horizontal rules

A horizontal rule is a useful little element that you can use to visually split up blocks of text within your Markdown file. A horizontal rule is represented by three or more hyphens (-), asterisks (*), or underscores (_). Whichever symbol you use renders the same output.

Your text will look like this:
—

Code blocks and snippets

Code snippets
Often when we’re writing in Markdown, we need to reference snippets of code as examples. This is particularly common in technical documentation. Markdown allows you to format code snippets using backticks (`) that wrap your code snippet. The first backtick “opens” the snippet, and the second backtick “closes” it.

Your text will look like this:
`This is a code snippet`
Code blocks
Formatting code blocks is useful when you have a bigger chunk of code to include in your Markdown file. Format your code blocks by indenting every line of your code block using one tab, or four spaces.
This is a code block
This is a code block
This is a code block
Remember, some extensions of Markdown, such as GitHub Flavored Markdown, support programming language selection and syntax colouring. Original Markdown does not support these styles.

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Reference-style links

There may come a time in your Markdown writing career that you want to include reference-style links. Instead of inserting your URL inline alongside your link text, the link is listed elsewhere in the Markdown file (usually below the paragraph containing the link, or at the end of the document). Formatting your links in this way makes your Markdown content easier to read.
Format your reference-style links by enclosing your link text in square brackets, followed by your label in another set of square brackets. The label acts as an anchor.
Your text should look like this:
[This is link text][This is a label]
You format the second part of the link (placed at the end of the paragraph, or bottom of the file) using three attributes.
1. Your label in square brackets, followed by a colon and at least one space
2. Your link URL
3. An optional link title, enclosed in either double quotes, single quotes, or parentheses
Your text will look like this:
[This is a label]: This is an URL “This is a link title”
Most people will list their links in the order they are referenced within the file.

Escaping

Often in Markdown, you will need to include characters in your text (for example, and asterisk) that may be part of the Markdown syntax. You need to “escape” these characters so your Markdown application doesn’t read these characters as formatting.
You escape characters in Markdown using a backslash before the character, with no space in between.
Your text should look like this:
\*
You can escape any of these characters:
\ backslash
` backtick
* asterisk
_ underscore
{} curly braces
[] square brackets
() parentheses
# hash symbol
+ plus sign
– minus sign (hyphen)
. dot
! exclamation mark
Lists within blockquotes
Sometimes, you might want to insert a blockquote into your Markdown that contains another element, such as an unordered list. You need to nest your list formatting inside your blockquote formatting.
Format your blockquote using a greater-than sign (>) followed by a space, including a sign before every line of your block quote. Add your list formatting (*) just after your greater-than signs.
Your text should look like this:
> This is a blockquote
> * This is a list item within a blockquote
> * This is a list item within a blockquote
> * This is a list item within a blockquote

HTML

You can insert HTML elements directly into your Markdown file. For example, you may want to include a button. Insert your HTML exactly as you would in any other HTML document.
Your text should look like this:
<button>This is a button</button>
This formatting also works for your other Markdown syntax, such as emphasis. Instead of **This element is bold**, you could format it in HTML as <bold>This element is bold</bold>.

8. Markdown Editors

Markdown is supported by a variety of different systems, from text editors combined with Static Site Generators to dedicated Markdown web applications.
Some editors come built in with basic Markdown capabilities, even if they were not specifically designed for Markdown. Others are designed to extend the Markdown syntax, such as Ghost.
There are Markdown editors for different operating systems (MacOS, Linux, or Windows), or alternatively you can use a web-based application.
Here’s a compilation of some of the most popular Markdown editors organised by system:

MacOS

• MacDown
• iA Writer
• Ulysses
• Joplin

Windows

• iA Writer
• ghostwriter
• Markdown Monster
• Joplin

Linux

• ReText
• ghostwriter
• Joplin

iOS/Android

• iA Writer
• Ulysses
• Joplin

Web

• Blot.im – platform for blogging
• Smallvictori.es – platform that makes a website using DropBox
• StackEdit – in-browser Markdown editor that supports different Markdown flavours
• Dillinger – browser-based Markdown editor
• Ghost – browser-based blogging platform

Static Site Generators

• Jekyll
• Hugo
• Docusaurus
  We’d also like to put forward our own Document360 knowledge base software, which offers a Markdown editor for formatting your documentation.

Final Remarks

There are many possibilities for your work in Markdown, beginning with simple note-taking, to blogging and progressing right through to professional technical documentation.
By learning the basics of Markdown, you are opening yourself up to smoother formatting and publishing. The number of applications supporting Markdown is only increasing, making it a very good choice for your documentation.
Why not trial Document360, which comes with an in-built Markdown editor, for your documentation 

Downloadable cheat sheet

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A continually negative customer service experience can fundamentally undermine a business, irrespective of how wonderful the product/service actually is. There’s only so much modern consumers will accept from a company before they choose to jump ship, even if it means finding a more expensive or even inferior offering.

What is Customer Service?

Customer service is crucial to driving business growth through its role in retaining loyal customers. Companies leading in customer experience showed compound average revenue growth of 17% over a period of five years, compared to other companies who saw only 3% growth.

Customer service roles are also gaining more status and have excellent career prospects. This is partly due to the fact that services are becoming more complex, technical, and customers are expecting more. With many competing products, exemplary customer service makes your business stand out. This also means customer service should be part of everyone’s role.

Why Customer Service Skills are critical to your business success

While customer service skills have always been an essential part of good business operations, their importance to short and long-term business success is growing rapidly.

Competition is increasing

Your business has always been up against competitors, but as the global market develops and becomes increasingly connected, the number of companies you’ll be competing against is rising too. This jump in competition means it’s not only harder to get new customers through the door, but also means there are more alternatives should your consumer base be dissatisfied.

With so many options at the touch of a button, the opportunity for customers to spend their money elsewhere is greater than ever, so the experience you deliver needs to be as good as possible.

With this in mind, customer service skills are essential, as they often play a large part in the experience your customers have with your product/service – particularly when things go wrong.

Customers are louder than ever and will make bad experiences public.

In 2022, a dissatisfied customer is a dangerous customer. Armed with the power of social media in the palm of their hand, your customers have everything they need to tell the world about your performance, particularly when it’s bad. The modern customer regularly shares negative experiences with friends, family and the wider world, and this can quickly snowball into a full-blown negative reputation if it occurs too often.

Strong customer service skills help to avoid these incidents, even when things go wrong. Whether it’s just helping customers make the most of the offering, or ensuring they’re cared for in the event of an error, customer service is critical to minimising negativity and maximising the customer experience. The faster and better a problem can be solved, the lower the chance negative sentiment will be shared in the public domain – protecting your reputation and future opportunities.

Customer expectations are growing

As customers become more global, they’re exposed to greater levels of opportunity and potential, this makes them aware of what can be achieved and in many cases, raises expectations. The customer of 2022 wants more for less and they’re seeing companies deliver on a daily basis – Netflix and Spotify are both great examples. Whether expectations are realistic or not, customers are holding the companies they use and engage with to higher account, and so it’s essential competitive businesses rise to this challenge, or face the consequences of delivering disappointment.

With good customer service skills supporting your business, you can meet and even exceed the expectations of your customers. This not only drives return custom but elevates your brand and satisfies your customers view of your company and its offerings.

Customers want to help themselves

Good customer service skills don’t just come in the form of a person engaging with another person, they also come from providing the right solutions so your customers can get what they need on their own. This may come in the form of a FAQ page or even a full-blown knowledge base like Document360, your customers want to find the information that will help solve their problems and you want to minimise the human resources to satisfy your customers. A knowledge base software helps achieve both goals and moving into the future will only grow in importance as consumers look to help themselves more than ever.

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10 customer service skills that drive business growth

We want to really drill down into the core customer service skills that everyone in your company should be developing.

1. Empathy

Empathy is one of the most well-known customer service skills out there – but do you know what having empathy really means?

“Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself,” says Mohsin Hamid. It’s a beautiful quote, but scientifically speaking there are two types of empathy you need to cultivate in customer service. These are affective empathy and cognitive empathy.

Cognitive empathy is being able to imagine what your customers are thinking and see things from their perspective. This skill is crucial to handling difficult problems and successfully helping customers. Affective empathy is feeling the emotions of others, and you need both to truly connect with people.

2. Emotional control

While it’s important to have empathy and be in tune with your emotions, you also need to be able to control those emotions effectively. Shorthand for emotional intelligence is EQ. Emotional control is a subset of EQ, and it plays an important role in successful social interactions.

Emotional control is when a person manages the generation, experience, or expression of their emotions, and also their own emotional responses to the emotions of others. It means we don’t lose control when we feel frustrated and start shouting abuse at customers.

We can choose how and when we express our emotions, giving us the ability to guide a social interaction towards a desired outcome. That doesn’t mean you should take abuse from customers, but you should be in control of adapting your response to any given situation.

3. Projecting warmth

Projecting warmth is the ability to make customers feel like you care about them and put them at ease, and it’s strongly predictive of purchase intent. If your prospective customers are thinking about buying your products and they reach out to customer service, they should feel they get a warm response. But what does this actually mean?

Social psychologists call it the warmth and competency model and it goes beyond the idea of “smile more”. Our unconscious ability to pick up on the warmth and competence of others determines up to 82% of our overall judgments about that person.

Warmth is defined as showing trustworthiness, friendliness, helpfulness and sincerity. You can train your agents to show these traits by being accurate in your customer service, smiling and remembering your customers, going the extra mile to help your customers, and living up to your values.

You project warmth partly with your tone of voice, but also with body language and how you dress. Warmth is conveyed differently over digital channels compared to face-to-face or over the phone. If you’re communicating with text only through email or live chat, make sure your written communication is warm and friendly using the odd exclamation mark, and even emoji.

4. Active listening

Listening to your customers is an important skill, and one that all customer service agents know well. But do you know how to apply the two distinct types of listening to your customer service?

“To learn through listening, practice it naively and actively. Naively means that you listen openly, ready to learn something, as opposed to listening defensively, ready to rebut. Listening actively means you acknowledge what you heard and act accordingly,” says Betsy Sanders, former Senior Vice President of Nordstrom.

Naive listening is the opposite of defensive listening, because you listen openly without focusing on your own intentions, while defensive listening is using the time when they speak to form a counter-response. Active listening means you feed back to the other person what you’ve heard them say to show you understand.

We’re all prone to cognitive bias, where we distort reality to fit our beliefs and ideas about the world. It’s our way of conserving attention, since we don’t need to pay attention to every little detail.

This evolutionary habit means we may end up missing important details about others. For example, we might assume a customer is struggling to understand the product, rather than seeing that there genuinely are technical problems with your software. This is huge, because unhappy customers are likely to churn, and then complain about you to 9–15 of their friends.

Practice naive listening by consciously emptying your mind the next time someone speaks to you. Wait until they have definitely finished speaking before you respond, and rephrase what you heard them say back to them to show that you understand.

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5. Product knowledge

Customer service agents are the product experts. You are responsible for selling its use cases and benefits to existing customers.

Salespeople are often billed as the product experts, but nurturing repeat customers is crucial for SaaS businesses. In these types of businesses, the line between sales and customer service is blurry, and customer support agents often find themselves in the position of recommending services.

“Know what your customers want most and what your company does best. Focus on where those two meet,” says Kevin Stirtz, which is excellent advice for customer service agents.

You must be inclined to study your products and services with a level of attention to detail unknown to most people. Make it a goal to spend at least half an hour studying the product every day. Agree this with your manager so you can have dedicated time off from tackling frontline problems.

Develop your understanding of whatever product you’re supporting, research your own product and its competitors in depth, and be able to explain its potential for use in a variety of different situations. Being ready to recommend new features or plans will help you turn problems into an opportunity for impressing your customers.

6. Troubleshooting

If you’re working in customer service, you will be solving problems all day. You need to become very good at diagnosing a problem, choosing a course of action, and following it through to the end. Then rinse and repeat. These are your troubleshooting or problem-solving skills.

To make matters more difficult, you often have to tackle problems where you don’t have access to the customers’ product or service. Or, you are troubleshooting on behalf of someone else and may not have the full range of information. Sometimes customers will be angry at you right from the start.

Asking your customers the right questions and eliminating possibilities is key. You also need to think about the overall context of the problem, and whether it is unique to one customer or could be a system-wide problem.

Often the key to great troubleshooting is experience, and never give up – even when the situation feels impossible to resolve.

7. Situational Awareness

One skill that will help you get better at troubleshooting is the habit of Situational Awareness. This is a concept used in tactical combat, and it plays a key role in enabling individuals to make appropriate decisions in dangerous situations.

In a customer service role, it’s rare that you will find yourself in any real physical danger. But being able to read a situation quickly and decide what to do is crucial for keeping customers happy – and ensuring they don’t quit your business.

8. Patience

We all know that we need to have patience, but it’s not just about waiting passively for something to happen. It’s an active, mindful state we can all cultivate more in our lives. Patience is the ability to deliberately wait until the right moment to make your move – knowing that timing is often everything.

Unfortunately, many parts of being in a customer service role can be tedious and test our patience – especially if you’re hearing the same problems every single day. It’s tempting to rush through the job, and focus on targets instead of helping people.

Having patience means resisting the urge to rush towards a resolution, and instead accepting the natural flow of events as they happen. Exercising patience is how you create true customer satisfaction and loyalty.

9. Clear language

Customer service pros are masters at using clear language to get their point across.

Your ability to clearly communicate your point is crucial, and this is especially true for email and chat where a lack of tone can create ambiguity. There must be no room for interpretation in your writing since there is very little feedback from the customer. If they can’t understand your questions or instructions then they won’t be able to fix their problems. Clear communication reduces customer effort and drives their loyalty.

There are no set rules for clear language since it all depends on your audience – each communication should be tailored for the individual. Your writing skills should be honed to the point where you can easily and clearly communicate your point so that someone else can understand it. This means being able to empathise with your customer and put yourself in their shoes.

When you write your next email, read it back to yourself to check that the meaning is clear. Edit it like you would a professional document, and restructure it so it flows better. Remove any words that are difficult to understand, and replace them with simpler words.

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10. Confidence

It may seem obvious, but customer service agents need build their confidence in order to be successful in their role.

Confidence is more about how you make other people feel, rather than how you feel inside. It involves outwardly projecting the fact that you believe in yourself, while at the same time being relaxed and humble so you don’t come across as arrogant.

“At the time your customer is most insecure, is the time you need your front line most confident,” says Chip Bell, Keynote Speaker & Author, of The Chip Bell Group.

A confident employee puts customers at ease, and assures them that they can fix the problem – or at the very least find someone who will. Confidence is also infectious. It can come from experience, but you can also make the effort to learn to be more confident.

Try something new that lies just outside your comfort zone to give you a quick confidence boost. Talk to a person you might like to befriend, wear that daring outfit, or try a new sports activity. Make facing your fears a habit, to develop your confidence over time.

And when speaking to customers, make the effort to sound more authoritative (while at the same time respectful). Take control of the situation – don’t expect customers to tell you how to fix their own problems.

How good customer service skills impact your bottom line?

Great customer service skills generate word of mouth promotion

It may be obvious, but in the modern world, word of mouth is everything. With more choices than ever and performance data at their fingertips, the modern customer is increasingly looking for strong indicators of quality, before buying. This includes everything, from the product quality and the brand, to the customer service experience, it will all be judged accordingly and has major potential to influence future business.

By offering a consistent high-quality customer service experience, you can turn your customers into brand advocates that do your marketing for you. Just think about how much you spend on awareness, education and conversion..now imagine your customers doing all that voluntarily for you. That’s what good customer service can do.

A great customer service experience drives repeat custom

Customer loyalty is hard to build, but with great customer service skills, you lay a fantastic foundation to create a regular return customer. By offering a high-quality customer service experience, you can develop connections with your customers that show you not only care about their problems but are actively prepared to dedicate resources to finding solutions.

This commitment is often highly appreciated and in many cases, drives repeat custom. Once a consumer has had a good customer experience, it’s likely they’ll return looking for it again, and be much more open to engaging with your company if you have what they need.

High-Quality Customer Service skills unlock up-sell opportunities

A happy customer is an opportunity. Chances are if your customer enjoyed their first experience engaging with your brand and your products/services, they’re likely to be much more open-minded to purchasing further offerings. Customer service skills play a key role in this opportunity as it’s often the communication between customer service and customer that unlocks the potential for upselling. During these communications, the customer’s problems and challenges become that much clearer and it may actually be in their interest to investigate additional solutions to reduce their stress.

Conclusion

Customer service is one of the most varied roles out there, with useful skills to develop ranging from more empathy and active listening, to organisational abilities and clear communication.

It’s a lifelong journey of learning, but you can start today to improve your skills in helping customers. “Customer service is an attitude – not a department,” says Mo Hardy. Good customer service means putting customers at the heart of everything you do as a company.

Customer service is everyone’s job – not only those working in the customer service department. We can all benefit from increasing these customer-focused skills, since customers are the lifeblood of every business.

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HATs are typically used to help you produce large amounts of documentation that is centrally managed by your technical writing team.

Some common Help Authoring Tools are industry standards like Madcap Flare or Adobe RoboHelp, and they enable you to single source documentation across a range of print and digital platforms. There are now some relative newcomers available, such as our own SaaS knowledge base software Document360, which you can use to quickly create modern documentation websites that are easy for customers to use.

Unfortunately, since some HATs can be quite expensive, it’s tempting to look into free options for your business. These options can range from free but proprietary self-hosted solutions, free SaaS (Software as a Service), to free and open source software. You can also use some WordPress plugins to add a knowledge base to your main website, if it’s already hosted with WordPress.

In this post, we’ll go into detail about why free Help Authoring Tools might not be the best solution for your business.

Open source Help Authoring Tools have limitations

You may have heard of the benefits of open source software, because it’s free of cost and you have access to the actual software code. In some cases, this is very attractive for companies – especially if you want to integrate the code into your own software products.

On the other hand, free tools do not give you the same functionality and support as paid software solutions – naturally, you get what you pay for. Free software is usually developed once and then released to the public, without receiving the ongoing development behind most paid tools.

Sphinx is an example of an open source Help Authoring Tool with an active community. It can produce HTML files, Windows HTML help files, and PDF files (via Latex) and is very popular with the Python community, as Sphinx was developed to write the Python programming documentation. Sphinx doesn’t have a steep learning curve, and you can produce documentation that looks very professional. You write your documentation using a plain text markup format, reStructuredText.

The average person is used to the common WYSIWYG mode of text and content editing of most software solutions, and using a plain-text markup format might require some time to learn. Open source solutions are good in some cases, but you probably won’t get the modern, intuitive WYSIWYG interface of a paid SaaS tool.

Often the front-end design aspect is also lacking in open source software. The focus is usually on being technically robust, since the product is often made solely by developers. Open source software is generally aimed at more technical users than average, who will be comfortable using tools like the command line in their daily workflow.

Open source software is also not exactly “free” as most people would understand the term. The code is often free, but the software organisations behind the tools will not host your files for you or give you a domain. You’ll still need to pay for hosting, and any other services or hardware you require to maintain the documentation on your own servers.

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Free software is often overly technical

With free software, you may not be able to work inside the software’s editor (because it lacks one). You’ll need to employ external tools in order to create the documentation. Version control may be difficult unless you use software workflow tools like Git or Mercurial, which is another tool for your team members to learn.

Your internal software users will need to have more advanced technical capabilities and experience of working with programming and tools like the command line, which may not be the right skill set for the employees writing your documentation.

One alternative is Gitbook, which is an open source tool integrated with Github and is typically used for software documentation. They have a free version for small teams and it includes a WYSIWYG interface that you can access with a few clicks. It’s also free for non-profit and open source teams, so if you fit into one of their categories this software could be a good choice for your organisation.

Overall, you’re probably looking at a longer time to market with these types of tools due to their UX limitations. They’re much better if you’re a technically-inclined individual looking to host some documentation, rather than a business selling a product.

Avoid Help Authoring Tools with a freemium version

You might still want to look into some free tools with an easier user interface – ie commercial solutions with a freemium tier. Saving money can be an attractive prospect for many businesses, especially if times are tough, or you’re not sure what tool you want to opt for in the long term. For example, HelpNDoc is free for individual users as long as you don’t use the software for commercial purposes, otherwise you’ll need to upgrade to one of their paid subscription plans.

You can also use some free WordPress knowledge base plugins from the WordPress plugin library. WordPress is the open source website publishing platform used by many businesses for their CMS and front-end site, and it can also be attractive to stay in the same ecosystem.

Using free WordPress plugins is not as professional as paying for a real Help Authoring Tool. Customers expect companies to have a modern user interface for their documentation. With WordPress plugins, your knowledge base will also be an add-on to your main website theme, and you will be very limited in how you can organise your content.

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Paid Help Authoring Tools are better for business

Paid SaaS solutions are the way forward for many companies who want the best products and are interested in investing for the long-term.
Even though you pay for your SaaS subscription, the service you get includes the actual software, product support, software hosting, and product development. You’re not just paying for the software code, which is all you’d get with most free solutions.

The ultimate advantage of paid Help Authoring Tools like Document360 is the premium software support you get with such plans. Software as a Service works like outsourcing part of your IT department, so you get flexible services that can scale or retract as your business develops. The SaaS provider supports the people at your company to use its software as best fits your needs, meaning you don’t have to hire more staff to benefit from the latest technology.

SaaS tools like Document360 are still affordable because you only pay for the number of accounts that you use. It doesn’t have such extensive functionality as other HATs like Madcap Flare or Adobe RoboHelp because it’s not aimed solely at the enterprise market. Although enterprise customers can benefit from Document360, it’s primary purpose is to help you create a Markdown-supported documentation website that scales with your product.

SaaS tools like Document360 also host your documentation site for you, so you don’t have to add in yet another tool for hosting or CMS. Your SaaS solution includes your publishing CMS, front-end website and data servers. All you need to do is focus on creating content, without worrying about all the extra stuff behind the scenes.
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Free Help Authoring Tools are a viable solution for individuals who are developing their own products, and who don’t want to spend too much money on paying for more software. Open source solutions are generally aimed at developers who are comfortable with customising their own workflows and don’t expect a WYSIWYG interface. It can be attractive to avoid paying as many upfront costs, but paying for hosting becomes prohibitively expensive when you attract large volumes of traffic to your site.

Free software solutions are not a good choice for companies that need to scale and require a professional level of service from their vendor. Help Authoring Tools like Madcap Flare and RoboHelp are pretty expensive for the average company as they provide a wide range of functionality, but there are more affordable options available.
Take a look around a few options before you commit to a subscription. Document360 has a free trial you can sign up for now.

The post Why “FREE” Isn’t Your Answer to Help Authoring Tools appeared first on Document360.

The problem when choosing a tool is that in the past, many software solutions have been developed for enterprise customers. These clients are frequently operating in industries with extensive regulatory requirements – for example, pharmaceutical or manufacturing – which often demand large amounts of documentation across many platforms and in multiple formats.

This means that these companies require tools with a wide range of functionality, and Help Authoring Tools ended up being more like a content management database and publishing system bundled together.

The major Help Authoring Tools – such as Madcap Flare and Adobe RoboHelp – cost in excess of $1,000 for the yearly plans. Although they are sold in tiers with individual pricing and functionality, they can still price out the many of the growing tech teams that require some of their functions for their documentation.

And up until fairly recently, these have been the only tools available. You’ll welcome the good news that there is now an expanding market of more specialised Help Authoring Tools sold in a more affordable payment plan.

Document360

Document360 is the best value Help Authoring Tool for growing tech teams. It was created by Kovai for the team’s own documentation needs, at a time when nothing else suitable was available on the market. Essentially, Document360 helps your team create, collaborate, and publish a self-service knowledge base for your software with ease.

When you purchase a subscription, you get a highly optimised, responsive, dynamic knowledge base website with a focus on behind-the-scenes publishing capabilities. It allows you to provide a modern UX website for users – but it’s far more than just a site. The front-end design is optimised using Information Architecture best practices so you can usefully present large amounts of information for your users to learn from.

In Document360, you can write your own documentation in markdown for an in-editor formatting experience, converting your text directly to web-ready HTML. It accelerates the speed at which you can produce live documentation, and you can easily publish and manage your content in the intuitive back-end interface.

Document360 is well-suited for teams by offering intuitive peer review and publishing, versioning and rollback, internal commenting, and previews for how the content will look once published. You can choose different team member roles in case you have people who should access your documentation in read-only mode, or you want to review your content in beta. Document360 allows you to have five team users in the basic plan.

As a development team, Document360 responds quickly to your product feedback on improving the interface functionality. If you don’t currently see a feature in Document360 that you’d like, there’s a good chance they can develop it for you as part of the product roadmap. This is all part of why you get incredible value for money with Document360. It’s a very high quality Help Authoring Tool, and at $49 per month for the startup plan, this works out at only $588 per year.

Stoplight for API teams

Stoplight is another type of Help Authoring Tool that’s aimed at API development teams. Although it’s not cheap, Stoplight is customised to help you produce very robust API documentation that looks very good for your users.

Stoplight has some fantastic functionality that allows you to build your API documentation in minutes using its visual editor, Hubs. Combine your OpenAPI documents (an open source specification to help you design, build, document and consume REST APIs – previously called Swagger) with markdown to create internal and external API documentation. Or, you can use your own API design with Stoplight and still get the same experience.

You can deploy your Stoplight documentation to the cloud with one click, or download the static HTML files to host your documentation anywhere. As documentation is crucial to the success of your API, Spotlight is incredibly useful for API engineering teams and it only costs $24 per user per month. On the other hand, it’s not good value for money for companies who do not want a Help Authoring Tool for this specific purpose.

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HelpDocs simple knowledge base

HelpDocs is a Help Authoring Tool that allows you to create a simple knowledge base website for your customers. Even on the basic plan for HelpDocs, you can edit the CSS for your website and customise it to your needs. It allows you to create an authoritative knowledge base to guide your users, cut down on support tickets, and offer a better overall customer experience.

It helps you provide a self-service solution for your customers by allowing you to create infinite subcategories for your content. No matter how complex your documentation ends up being, you can use HelpDocs for your knowledge base. You also have a lot of control over external user permissions, meaning you can heavily customise who can see what content within your HelpDocs knowledge base.

This software is aimed at customer support professionals who would like their Help Authoring Tool to integrate with other software in the customer support stack. This includes Front, Intercom and Drift. It also supports multiple languages with automatic translation of your help content in more than 100 languages in the higher pricing tier, if this is something you’re looking for. HelpDocs begins at $39 a month for five team accounts, which is great value.

Madcap Flare extensive functionality

No list of HATs would be complete without properly discussing Madcap Flare, first released in 2006. It’s an industry standard and used by thousands of businesses across the world. You may be thinking, is Madcap Flare right for my team?

The answer is that Madcap Flare has a dizzying range of functionality, most of which may be irrelevant for your growing tech team. It’s this functionality that makes it worth its price tag at $1,648 a year for the cheapest plan. For example, you have the ability to produce topic-based single-sourced content, which is a very common way to handle your help content in the enterprise. You have lots of files, managed by many different people, over a very long period of time.

With tools like Madcap Flare, your help files are viewed as important data that is stored, tagged and curated for future use. The features of Madcap Flare support this type of workflow and make it a content database. The interface is reminiscent of Windows 95, presumably for the comfort of long-term users. Flare provides a dedicated XML editor for marking up your content with an XML-based tagging system.

It also allows you to produce a customer-facing knowledge base website, but in this case you will need to design and manage the website yourself. Adobe RoboHelp is another industry standard that is again aimed at the enterprise, and has similar capabilities to Flare.

Consider these enterprise tools if you anticipate producing huge amounts of documentation, are operating in an industry with complex and strict regulations, or you’re working with legacy documentation. For companies in these situations, solutions like Flare or RoboHelp may be absolutely essential for your documentation goals. See Tom Johnson’s review of Flare for more information on this topic.

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Why Document360 is such good value

Unlike Document360, extremely powerful, generalist Help Authoring Tools have a steep learning curve. This is because they are intended for complex use cases, and whole training courses are dedicated to users of Madcap Flare.

Document360 cuts out all the unnecessary features, focusing instead on giving you a streamlined workflow for your online documentation. It’s perfect for growing tech teams who need a stylish knowledge base for their product – and fast. Document360 also allows for easy front-end code customizations to your website so you can modify it to suit your needs.

Also, in the case of Flare, you have a lot of software functionality to manage your content, but the software and your data must all be stored on your own servers. This means even after you purchase the software, you’re still responsible for buying and maintaining software and hardware infrastructure for your business, as well as paying employees to maintain it.
Since its packaged as Software as a Service, Document360 stores and hosts your data for you – this means you only ever use what you need. It’s an out-of-the-box solution for your rapidly expanding, agile team – and if you need more, you can easily upgrade your plan.

Things to consider before you buy

There are many more questions you need to ask yourself before committing to a new Help Authoring Tool. Do you need translations? What file formatting do you require? How many knowledge bases do you need? How will you be using video, audio, text or image?

Technical Writers can use a wide range of tools in their work, but Help Authoring Tools are specifically designed for creating and managing content. Knowledge base solutions like Document360 are all-in-one tools that offer an internal and external publishing experience, so you can go from zero to public-facing content much more quickly.

On a side note, free Help Authoring Tools will not scale effectively with your business. These include some free open source tools and WordPress plugins. You will only achieve the functionality you need from sophisticated paid SaaS tools like Document360.

Over to you!

There are a few different subcategories of Help Authoring Tool on the market right now. Hopefully you understand what solutions like Document360 have to offer your business and are considering signing up for a trial.

Document360 can be easily afforded by early-stage startups, while still enabling you to move seamlessly between its product tiers as your company grows. It has been specifically designed for agile, rapidly scaling tech teams.
We’ve published many other posts surrounding the types of Help Authoring Tools on the market to help you decide on a solution for your business. Check out Best Help Authoring Tools (HAT) & Software Compared and Is MadCap Flare Help Authoring Tool Worth Its Price?

The post Best Help Authoring Tools for Growing Tech Teams appeared first on Document360.

Our own Document360 is an out-of-the-box SaaS knowledge base solution that helps you produce a modern help website for your customers. We’re going to look at some of the key differences between RoboHelp and Document360 to help you choose the best solution for your tech business.

RoboHelp targets Windows enterprise users

First of all, Adobe RoboHelp is aimed at enterprise IT customers with complex use cases. These companies are often working in highly regulated environments like healthcare, IT or manufacturing, and are required to produce many types of documentation across platforms. Sometimes they may be obligated to produce a specific output, such as 500 pages of printed documentation for their product. These customers consequently tend to have a large number of touchpoints, including printed manuals, online help, context-sensitive help, PDF download, and more.

There is also a need to personalize content for different users and be context-sensitive, which RoboHelp provides through condition tags, variables, snippets with context sensitive help and dynamic content filters to help you produce intelligent content that responds to user needs.

One important thing to note is that RoboHelp works on Windows only as a desktop installation. If you’re running Mac or Linux OS, then this software is not for you. It’s part of an ecosystem, and users of RoboHelp are often customers already using Adobe Technical Communication Suite – including FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Captivate, Acrobat. RoboHelp integrates with FrameMaker to publish content from FrameMaker and you will likely be using RoboHelp as part of a workflow with their other tools.

RoboHelp is directly aimed at companies dealing with legacy content, who for example might want to output their content repository to a brand new website with one click. Adobe RoboHelp focuses on producing responsive HTML5 websites, as well as mobile apps. These companies may be dealing with older processes and systems that have been in place for a number of years, and appreciate RoboHelp’s strengths in managing their existing documentation. Scripting knowledge is required to automate many of the functions in RoboHelp in order to make your processes more efficient.

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Document360 is developed for agile teams

In contrast, Document360 doesn’t assume that you have any existing documentation projects. It’s a Software as a Service (SaaS) knowledge base solution built for agile technology teams. It’s available through subscription and is platform-agnostic, so users on any operating system can benefit from Document360. Your content creators can log into the interface through the browser from any device, anywhere.

Enterprise customers dealing with entire documentation products and lengthy release cycles may find they do better with a product like RoboHelp. Others who want to iterate on their documentation continuously and have an up-to-date help site available 24/7 should consider Document360 instead.

Document360 accelerates the speed at which you can produce live documentation, which you can easily publish and manage in the intuitive back-end interface. Document360 is built on a completely different model to RoboHelp, even though both tools enable you to produce robust user documentation. Document360 allows you to update your content in real-time, so you don’t need to deploy your docs again every time you make a change. You edit the article, hit publish when you’re done, and your documentation is live right away. If you see a mistake, just repeat the process.

RoboHelp clients are also typically operating in waterfall development cycles, where software development is linear and sequential. There is typically no room to treat documentation production as an ongoing organic process.

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Adobe RoboHelp is for large documentation projects

Unlike Document360, extremely powerful, generalist Help Authoring Tools like RoboHelp has a steep learning curve. They are intended for complex use cases, and whole training courses are dedicated to users of RoboHelp. While RoboHelp offers immense value for the right customers, this type of software may not be necessary for companies looking for a less complex and technical knowledge base to host their documentation.

When your content is in production, RoboHelp’s code view and preview mode help you visualise what your content will look like in the final output. The CSS editor allows you to customise the presentation of your content. One important feature of RoboHelp is its XML source code editor with syntax highlighting, live code validation, and code completion. Integrations with popular collaborative tools like Git and Sharepoint enable shared workflows, and one click import from Word enables teams to use the programs they feel comfortable with to produce content.

In contrast, Document360 does one thing really well: enables you to create web-optimised, responsive, dynamic knowledge base websites with modern UX. This means your team can focus on what it does best – producing content, not learning complex new technologies. The front-end design of Document360 uses Information Architecture best practices. This includes hierarchical categorisation for your articles, so users know they are encountering a professional knowledge base, and drag-and-drop reordering so it’s easy to make changes.

Behind-the-scenes publishing capabilities also enable a collaborative authoring process. Choose different team member roles in Document360 in case you have users who should access your documentation in read-only mode, should be able to write articles but not publish them, or you want to review your content in beta. Intuitive peer review and publishing, versioning and rollback, internal commenting, and previews make producing content fast and easy.

Support for writing documentation in markdown in Document360’s in-editor formatter means writers can format content as they write. It’s clearer how documentation will look in the final version, and means you can later export your documentation to other platforms along with styling.

Over to you!

These two tools are aimed at similar markets, but in practice their features are completely distinct. RoboHelp and Document360 are customised for teams producing documentation, but really they are intended for entirely different use cases. RoboHelp is aimed at the enterprise client with a large variety of customer touchpoints and a strong need for regulatory compliance. It’s similar to tools like Madcap Flare in that it’s trying to appeal to a broad client base. In contrast, Document360 helps you build a dedicated knowledge base for your users.

While RoboHelp can be an extremely good choice for those teams looking to produce large amounts of documentation across a variety of platforms, Document360 is perfect for teams of any size that anticipate rapid future growth. The software allows you to continuously iterate on your documentation and provides a collaborative publishing experience on a SaaS platform that can be accessed from anywhere. Document360 allows you to have two team users in the startup plan. When your team grows, upgrade to a more advanced plan to suit your needs.

We’d love to hear from you if you’re interested in trialing Document360 for your company.

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HelpNDoc costs $282 (as of February 2019) for the full ad-free version of HelpNDoc. There is also a free version with banner ads if you want the software for personal use. The standard price entitles you to free updates of HelpNDoc and high-quality customer support for one year after purchase.

When you choose HelpNDoc, you download the software to your desktop as an on-site installation like MadCap Flare or Adobe RoboHelp, so it’s not a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. Nevertheless, it’s a more streamlined Help Authoring Tool than solutions like Flare since it offers a more focused set of functionality.

Also Read: How To Create a Software Installation Guide 

We’ll now go into the important features that you might find are missing if you choose HelpNDoc for your documentation.

1. A lack of support for non-Windows Operating Systems

First of all, HelpNDoc is only available on a Windows Operating System. It’s specially designed to work well within the Microsoft and Windows ecosystem, and integrate with Microsoft development tools like Microsoft HTML Help Workshop. HelpNDoc can generate. CHM files (compiled HTML files) which are specific to Windows applications.

If you require your Help Authoring Tool to work on a Mac or Linux OS, then you will need to consider choosing another tool. There is no way to make HelpNDoc work on any system other than Windows. This won’t be a problem if your whole company uses Windows, but if you use HelpNDoc and want to collaborate with other writers they may not be using a compatible system. The same applies if you want to use your own toolchain outside the Microsoft ecosystem.

As a result of this Windows focus, HelpNDoc is also designed more to look like a traditional Microsoft Word interface and uses the horizontal ribbon design. Overall, it has a Windows-95 era look and feel. For traditional Windows users, this design will probably be very easy to use. For users from other backgrounds, the design may not quite be in keeping with other software tools they are used to.

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2. It lacks a modern User Interface

HelpNDoc allows you to single source your documentation for a number of different formats and outputs. This means you manage your content in a centralised database, which is housed in HelpNDoc. Your documentation files are platform-independent until you choose to output them to a particular format.

As we mentioned earlier, HelpNDoc can output compiled CHM help files for desktop Windows applications. It also supports online HTML documentation for a website, printable PDF or Word documentation, and can output to ePUB and Kindle.

It displays code samples in different languages: C/C++, Delphi/Pascal, Fortran 90⁄95, PowerBASIC and Visual Basic. HelpNDoc is designed for developers and you can use the script editor to automate repetitive tasks.

As a result of its close resemblance to Microsoft Word and developer-focus, HelpNDoc does lack a modern User Interface that you would normally find in SaaS solutions like Document360. Also, it does not produce a user-friendly website out of your documentation – developing and deploying a live site will still be your job.

In HelpNDoc, you cannot fully customise your HTML files to conform to your brand guideline. You must instead choose from a more limited colour palette included in the system. If you want a more customised design for your site, then you will need to code it yourself. And while HelpNDoc produces the code for your website, the company does not host the site for you.

Your site will need to be hosted on your own servers, and you’ll have to edit and regenerate the new files within HelpNDoc every time you need to update your documentation.

3. A lack of support for structured content

While you can single source your content, HelpNDoc does not support structured content like XML or DITA. HelpNDoc is aimed at producing a much smaller amount of documentation than you would in a tool like Flare. The content in HelpNDoc is not marked up with metadata that can tell you what the content is for. You can only structure your content down to the topic level and no further, which may be restrictive when managing large amounts of documentation. You are limited to creating one set of content in HelpNDoc, and the platform converts your documentation into your preferred formats.

Generally, topic-based authoring means that your content pages are treated as individual topics that should be reusable in any order. However, it’s often useful to have different pages interlinked in a structured way if the topic is particularly complicated, and HelpNDoc is restrictive in this sense.

HelpNDoc uses the concept of variables which are place-holders for textual or visual content. These can be placed anywhere in your documentation so you can update particular words, phrases, paragraphs or images in bulk.

In Document360, you can write your documentation in Markdown which means you can transfer your documentation to different platforms that support Markdown. Your Markdown documentation is styled using simple markup that is contained within the text itself. This has many advantages including being faster to work in than coding your style in HTML, or even using a WYSIWYG editor.

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Over to you!

HelpNDoc is a good choice of Help Authoring Tool if you have a very specific project you want to complete that is Windows-related. HelpNDoc also has a free version available if you want to use the software for personal projects.

On the other hand, if you want to produce a very professional-looking knowledge base, then Document360 is a better choice than HelpNDoc. Document360 works well if you already have a website for your company, and you want to produce a separate knowledge base for your documentation.

Document360 also has a dedicated writing and editing workflow for multiple users to collaborate on the documentation. The software is built on a powerful CMS (Content Management System) that your users can access through an internet-connected browser, which means that your technical writers can update your documentation on the fly – from anywhere.

HelpNDoc works better if you have people with development skills working on your documentation and who have access to the Windows desktop installation. Otherwise, it might represent a more significant learning curve than you have time for, and you won’t be able to update your documentation whenever you want.

Document360 is usable right away by users with no development experience. Sign up for a free Document360 trial to see if our solution meets your needs.

The post 3 Crucial Disadvantages to HelpNDoc Help Authoring Tool appeared first on Document360.

Unfortunately, many customers find that company’s help centers are not easy to use and this leads to either a churned customer or reaching out to support. Some customers might find the jargon confusing while your more experienced users resent having to wade through lots of documentation that doesn’t get to the point.

Crafting user documentation that hits the mark isn’t easy, but it’s within reach for most companies. In order to host the best documentation possible, you need to choose the right Help Authoring Tool.

What is a Help Authoring Tool?

A Help Authoring Tool is a content management system that enables you to create, manage, and distribute help documentation. The end user output of a Help Authoring Tool is usually the Help section on a company’s website, or an internal company knowledge base.

Help Authoring Tools can range from basic systems that have simple features to more complex Component Content Management Systems (CCMS). Usually, the features available include:

• WYSIWYG editor for editing text, code, images and video
• Multi-author functionality that enables collaborative content production
• Importing and exporting your documentation
• Customizable end-user interface to fit your brand

1. Document360

Document360 is more than a help authoring tool that allows you to quickly and easily create help documentation, product documentation, instruction manuals, user manuals, and FAQs. As soon as you sign up for an account the user-friendly interface lets you get started straight away.

What really sets Document360 apart are its multilingual opportunities for you to create a knowledge base content to support your customers with AI machine translation. Offer your help documentation in multiple languages for your global customer base.
Document360 is more than just a knowledge base tool. It integrates seamlessly with your other favourite apps, including help desks like Zendesk, Freshdesk, and chatbots like Intercom, LiveChat, and more.

Document360 features:

• Markdown text editor – style your content using typical formatting techniques such as headers, lists, and italics
• Category manager – organize your content into a hierarchy up to six levels deep
• Landing page customization – customize your knowledge base with your brand colors, logo, links and custom CSS
• Versioning – rollback and versioning allows you to see the history of changes for each knowledge base article and revert back if necessary
• Analytics – understand the performance of your knowledge base with advanced analytics
• Import and Export to Microsoft word document
• Output to multiple formats like Word, Markdown, HTML, PDF

Price:

Starts at $149 per project per month and 14 days free trial with full access to the platform. You can check them out here.

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2. ClickHelp

ClickHelp is a fully functioning Help Authoring Tool that runs in the browser with no installation required. You can author help content from a single portal and collaborate easily with teammates.

This software is a central place to manage all your technical content and create internal and external guides, multi-version software user manuals, FAQs, Knowledge Bases, Tutorials, API Docs, and more.

ClickHelp offers dynamic content support for single-sourcing – snippets, variables, and conditional blocks allow you to reuse your content across the documentation, saving untold amounts of time and effort.

ClickHelp features:

• Translation module – create a multilingual help site with ease
• Easy importing and exporting – import from Microsoft Word, HTML, RTF, CHM,
• ODT and export to CHM, HTML5 Web Help, PDF, DOCX
• Powerful full-text search – users can find content easily and support wildcard search
• Reporting – lets you analyze user behavior and measure team performance
• Context help – add context-sensitive help to your applications

Price:
Starts at $55 per author per month.

Also Read: ClickHelp Vs Document360: What Shoud You Choose?

3. MadCap Flare

MadCap Flare is a very popular Help Authoring Tool that provides topic-based XML authoring and publishing for technical communicators. Flare is aimed at content reuse and multi-channel publishing to make sure you get the most out of your documentation.

The power of MadCap Flare lies in its ability to publish content to a range of mediums including web, print, desktop and mobile. One of the disadvantages of Flare is that it’s a complex tool with a steep learning curve. It’s not a software that someone can just pick up overnight.

What sets MadCap Flare apart is how easy it is to import content from a range of inputs with an easy drag-and-drop workflow, including from Microsoft Word and Excel, Atlassian’s Confluence, Adobe RoboHelp and more.

MadCap Flare features:

• Advanced content authoring – a configurable interface to create technical documentation, eLearning courses and learning and development programs
• Topic-based authoring – organizes your content in reusable chunks that can be reused across different mediums such as Getting Started guides, advanced user manuals, and more
• Micro content – short, concise content that stands alone which can be used to feed machine learning and AI applications
• Pre-built project templates – dozens of pre-installed templates that allow you to create web and print-based outputs in minutes
• Collaboration capabilities – workflows designed to make collaborative authoring streamlined, providing contributions and reviews in the cloud

Price:
$149 per month per user.

Also, check out our article on the best Madcap-flare alternatives

4. Adobe RoboHelp

Adobe RoboHelp is powerful Help Authoring Software that enables you to create a range of documentation for HTML5 output, EPUB 3, KF8, and MOBI formats. What marks RoboHelp out as a serious HAT is the ability to export documentation easily and have different versions of your user manuals.

Again, RoboHelp is not an easy tool to learn. Its wide variety of features mean RoboHelp requires a good deal of time getting familiar with the software before you can produce your documentation.

RoboHelp offers intelligent content reuse so you can use global snippets to make changes once and have them reused in multiple places. Blend content from different sources and create snippets within existing snippets for even more versatility.

RoboHelp features:

• Conditional content usage – create and apply rules to particular content such as a topic, paragraph or word
• Single-sourcing – make changes once to a snippet and reuse across multiple outputs
• Micro-content authoring – micro-content snippets that can be used by search engines, social platforms, in-context help, featured snippets, FAQs, chatbots and more
• Importing files – smoothly import from Microsoft Word, HTML and Markdown

Price:
$29.99 per month.

5. Paligo

Paligo is a Component Content Management System (CCMS) that enables you to author technical documentation, policies and procedure manual, knowledge management, and more. What sets Paligo apart is having every tool you might need for the authoring process all in one tool.

This Help Authoring Tool uses an XML source format to ensure proper structure, consistency and flexibility when authoring your content. Structured authoring makes it easy to reuse your content and guarantees your content’s value in the long-term.

Paligo is another topic-based authoring tool with smart content reuse that allows you to release your documentation in a fraction of the usual time. It supports team collaboration with a cloud-based CCMS.

Paligo features:

• Single-sourcing – smart content reuse that allows you to reuse content at scale with component reuse, block content reuse, text fragment reuse and dynamic variables
• Structured authoring – user-friendly XML editor that enables you to quickly author structured content with Paligo
• Multi-channel publishing – publish your content to a variety of outputs including HTML5, SCORM, PDF, Zendesk and Salesforce
• Versioning – version history and rollback makes it easy to keep track of changes made to your content and gives you the ability to compare versions
• Import existing documentation – Paligo offers a simple migration process from Microsoft Word, MadCap Flare, DITA, DocBook, HTML, Zendesk, Atlassian Confluence and many more.

Price:
Starts at $179 per month per author.

6. HelpNDoc

HelpNDoc is an intuitive and user-friendly Help Authoring Tool with a focus on producing documentation for multiple outputs from a single source. HelpNDoc supports HTML and CHM help files, PDF and Word, ePub and Kindle eBooks, Markdown documents and much more.

HelpNDoc is incredibly easy to use – if you know how to use a web browser and a word processor then you should be able to easily get up to speed with this software. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you can start generating a wide variety of documentations that are responsive across platforms.

Lacking the power of some of the other solutions in this list, HelpNDoc makes up for it with its ease of use.

HelpNDoc features:

• User-friendly user interface – the functions of HelpNDoc are clearly displayed in a ribbon format with some elements only appearing when needed
• Tools are integrated – all the necessary tools for creating documentation are integrated, including the table of contents editor, WYSIWYG topic editor, keywords editor and library
• Modern word processor – the functionality you’ve come to expect from tools like Microsoft Word is available in HelpNDoc’s word processor
• Media library system – all media elements such as videos, images, documents, HTML code snippets and variables are managed by the library

Price:
Starts at free with ads and limited features.

7. ProProfs

ProProfs knowledge base is part of the ProProfs suite of software and allows users to create user-friendly help documentation. You can publish private or public knowledge base sites for your target audience and author documentation from ProProf’s attractive built-in templates.

ProProfs supports multiple authors working collaboratively and has an internal review process for content. You can set up roles and permissions for your authors ranging from administrator, viewer, editor and contributor.

ProProfs is more than just knowledge base software. It offers integrations with the ProProfs Help Desk, ProProfs Live Chat, Salesforce, Zendesk and Freshdesk, so you can take advantage of more streamlined workflows with your favorite software.

ProProfs features:

• Single-sourcing – write a piece of content once and reuse in multiple parts of the documentation
• Context-sensitive help – use tooltips, lightboxes and pop-ups to present your documentation contextually in your app
• Multi-branding – create multiple help sites with ProProfs and brand them individually
• Article workflows – set a workflow status for articles depending on what stage they are at in the review process
• Advanced reporting – provides actionable insights for your documentation’s performance

Price:
Starts at $30 per author per month.

Also Read: Top 7 ProProfs Knowledge Base Alternatives in 2022

8. Confluence

Confluence is popular wiki software designed as a shared workspace for teams to work more collaboratively. The advantage of Confluence is its integration with Atlassian’s suite of software including Jira and Trello.

With Confluence, the software is organized into spaces which are areas that contain pages for individuals, teams and strategic projects. Pages are documents where people create, edit and discuss their work. Confluence comes in-built with an extensive library of templates for you to create your documentation.

You can make documents and share them with your team – these documents can be set as “read only”, “edit only”, or “read and edit”, so you have full control over access.

Confluence features:

• Real-time editing – co-author documents in real time and publish updates that track version history and highlight changes
• Advanced search and page tree – you can organize and find your pages easily with advanced search, labels, and an intuitive page hierarchy
• Jira integration – Connect your plans to development work with issue-tracking and dynamically updating roadmaps
• Commenting – collaborate better with in-line and page comments, GIFs, emojis and images
• Permissions – control what information employees can access and protect sensitive content

Pricing:
Starts at free for up to ten users.

Read more: Document360 Vs Confluence: Which is a better Knowledge Base?

9. Helpinator

Helpinator is an easy-to-use Help Authoring Tool that is designed with the convenience of technical writers in mind. You should be able to use this software to create technical content even without prior experience in technical writing.

Helpinator calls itself an Integrated Documentation and Development Environment, and aims at developers writing documentation for software products. Helpinator stands out for its built-in phrase expander and spell checker that helps you write faster.

Helpinator is not cloud-based so you will have to run it on Windows 7 or 10.

Helpinator features:

• WYSIWYG editor and templates – no requirement to know HTML or any other markup language
• 20+ output formats – Helpinator offers single sourcing for publication across formats such as WordPress, CHM, and PDF
• Support for multilingual projects – every project can store any number of languages in the same file
• Built-in tools – includes image annotation editor, screenshot capture and GIF recorder

Price:
$99 per year.

10. Dr. Explain

Dr. Explain is a Help Authoring Tool aimed at companies who sell software products. It allows you to create a user guide for your software application and republish it across multiple formats, supporting CHM, PDF, DOC & HTML formats.

The unique selling point of Dr. Explain is that it allows you to save time by automating routine processes, such as creating and annotating screenshots, importing old documentation, indexing content and customizing visual styles.

This solution is not cloud-based and you have to download the software on Windows in order to use it.

Dr. Explain features:

• Screenshot capture – allows you to capture and annotate screenshots in order to quickly create technical illustrations
• Specialized text editor – designed for creating help files and documentation for software
• Preview content – instant preview for online and print formats
• Context-sensitive help – install your help content in app on desktop and web-based products
• Single-source publishing – create documentation once and then publish across context sensitive help files in CHM format, web guides in HTML, DOC, and PDF with table of contents and links

Price:
Starts at $190 per user per year.

11. Author-it

Author-it is a help authoring tool that is specifically aimed at the eLearning market. In addition, Author-it is a scalable CCMS solution with enterprise-grade security for technical writers, content developers, and non-technical contributors. It’s aimed at helping teams to single source their documentation and work more collaboratively with other team members.

Author-it supports multi-channel publishing so you can create content once and serve it wherever you like in a range of document types and web formats, with no need to manually adjust or format content for different outputs. Author-it takes your source content and streamlines the publishing process for you with the click of a button, saving you time and effort.

From product manuals to medical device documentation, knowledge bases, and web help sites, you can publish top-quality content in easily digestible formats to reach your customers where is most convenient for them,

Author-it features:

• Localize content and manage translations – makes it easy to translate documents cost-effectively
• Review and approval workflows – interact with the rest of your team and make comments, reviewing changes when they happen
• Variant management – customize documentation by creating variants for different teams, roles, and locations to reduce duplication of effort
• Single-sourcing – author once and republish across multiple platforms

Price:

Contact the Author-it team for details on pricing.

12. WebWorks

WebWorks is a help authoring tool that helps businesses create beautiful documentation for their customers using Reverb 2.0. It offers One-Click Publishing that helps you develop a content publishing workflow with speed and accuracy.

You can take documents from your favorite authoring tools such as Microsoft Word or Markdown and instantly transform them into a responsive HTML5 site. WebWorks uses a tool called a Stationery which is essentially a customizable template that stores a set of instructions that define the publishing process.

WebWorks comes with advanced search features that enable you to take charge of the customer’s documentation experience. You can define synonyms for keyword searches and adjust relevance rankings to surface the most important or relevant results.

WebWorks features:

• Point-and-click user interface – an intuitive authoring experience that hides the complexities of a powerful system
• Compatibility with other authoring tools – author documentation on your favorite platform and publish with WebWorks
• Customizable design – create a help site that exactly suits your brand
• Custom analytics – understand how customers are interacting with your documentation

Price:

Pricing starts at $27.08 a month.

Final remarks

As you have now learned, a wide variety of Help Authoring Tools are available on the market, and each one is slightly different. If you’re looking to invest in a HAT, it’s worth trying a few different solutions on for size to see which one suits your company best. For more information check out the “What is Help Authoring Tool” guide. 

Remember, you may not need all the functionality of a tool such as MadCap Flare or Adobe RoboHelp. If you’re looking for a simple knowledge base solution, consider Document360 for your documentation needs. You’ll have all the control over your content and none of the headache of learning a complex tool.

An intuitive knowledge base software to easily add your content and integrate it with any application. Give Document360 a try!

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The post Best Help Authoring Tools (HAT) & Software Compared appeared first on Document360.

We’ll now go through 10 real-life examples of outstanding knowledge bases to illustrate each of the best practices.

Contents

1. Getting started tutorials – MailChimp
2. Information architecture – Slack
3. Search functionality – Stripe
4. Article formatting – Microsoft
5. Article writing – Hubspot
6. User Experience design – Shopify
7. Branding – Uber
8. Scalability – Twitter
9. Navigation – Meetup
10. Imagery – HelpScout

1. Getting Started Tutorials – MailChimp

For SaaS (Software as a Service) companies, your software onboarding stage is crucial for customer engagement and retention. It’s also significant when customers are signing up for a free trial and deciding if they like your product.

Your knowledge base must be accessible to new users. These types of users need to get up and running with your product quickly, and this is where documentation comes in.

Email marketing software company MailChimp makes its Getting Started tutorials (called MailChimp 101) into a memorable experience for its customers.

MailChimp understands that it is competing for its customers’ attention among many other products and services. It’s invested heavily in this crucial stage of its documentation.

A long scrolling page, appealing illustrations, and good use of whitespace form a design that is pleasurable to use.

2. Information Architecture – Slack

Your Information Architecture (IA) is the framework of your knowledge base content. It consists of a taxonomy of categories, button labels, navigation menus, and interlinking between pages.

This internal structure of your knowledge base is like a map that guides users to where they can find the information they need. Consistency in IA is your key to making a knowledge base that empowers customers to self-serve.

It’s clear from the beginning that team messaging software company Slack has several core help topics. It illustrates these topics with custom icons encouraging users to click through for more.

When you dive deeper into any topic, sections open out to reveal a handy list of subtopics and articles – while continuing to anchor the main navigation.

Users always know where they are in Slack’s knowledge base because of its use of Information Architecture.

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3. Search Functionality – Stripe

A good search functionality is also essential for your knowledge base. Search relies on the software in the back end that comes built in with your knowledge base, and also the tagging and organising your content.

People search for content in a variety of different ways, so having the suggested search is an ideal way to help customers discover content.

Payment processing software company Stripe shows a list of articles when the user starts typing in the search bar along with previews of the content, which are also tagged with a category.

This means the user can refine their search without having to read through lots of irrelevant articles. For Stripe search, the essence is speed – essential for time-strapped developers. Discover more analysis of Stripe’s knowledge base.

4. Article Formatting – Microsoft

Article formatting means anything to do with how you present your articles that is distinct from your website design. Formatting is generally to do with font type, font size, font weight, page layout, and imagery.

Microsoft documentation is complex and aimed at a variety of audiences. Formatting is key for making it accessible. Microsoft has broken up long articles into a list of smaller articles, and presents it as an accordion list of contents.

This breaks up the text to make it easier to scan, and helps the user pick out the important elements. Microsoft also makes good use of bold font weight to call attention to the most significant items on the page.

Microsoft keeps to one main point or action per paragraph, as this is a good rule of thumb for documentation. It makes information more digestible.

Finally, Microsoft uses an ordered list to explain the differences between the various types of setup. Users can pick the option that best fits them and ignore the rest.

5. Article Writing – Hubspot

Article writing refers the actual words you use on the page to explain your help topics to your users.

It’s good practice to make suggestions or guide users in your documentation, rather than using the imperative (ordering them to do something).

There are a few important rules to follow when writing documentation:

• Using the active voice
• Striking a casual but professional tone
• Simple wording that is easy to understand

Marketing automation software company Hubspot has written its documentation in a way that is easy to understand for the casual user. It doesn’t require any knowledge of technical terms.

The language is simple and to the point, written in the active voice.

Documentation should be written in a way that your support team would speak to real-live customers – friendly, helpful, and polite.

6. User Experience Design – Shopify

User Experience (UX) design is the use of visual design principles to create a positive website experience for your users. It brings many elements together to help users achieve their goals, and it means putting yourself into your users’ shoes and designing from their perspective.  

UX highlights which steps users need to take next and provides context for their actions.

Shopify knows that its users are busy and under pressure to run their ecommerce businesses. Its documentation carefully outlines the real-life processes that users need to go through when using its software.

Shopify gives clear options to users and breaks complex processes down into steps. This increases the likelihood that users will successfully complete their tasks.

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7. Branding – Uber

Customers always want to feel looked after, to know you think they are important, and like you are taking their concerns seriously. Branding your knowledge base makes sure it looks like part of your company, and contributes to the overall User Experience.

Ride-hailing software company Uber brands its documentation in the recognisable Uber style without detracting from the UX. Uber uses its customary fonts and colours while also making its knowledge base friendly and accessible.

The key is to keep branding subtle but recognisable – don’t overdo it.

8. Scalability – Twitter

Scalability means your knowledge base can handle a large amount of content. You must be able to regularly add to it as your product develops.

You should organise your help content so you can scale your knowledge base without the needing to massively reorganise it. Structure your categories so they are broad enough to contain all types of future content you intend to publish.

Social media app Twitter has gone for categories called:

• Using twitter
• Managing your account
• Safety and security
• Rules and policies

These are broad enough to contain all Twitter’s user documentation for the near future.

Our own knowledge base software Document360 allows you to structure your content in any way you wish, and it’s flexible enough for you to reorder it at any time.

9. Navigation – Meetup

Your navigation is the menu for your knowledge base. It contains all of your categories and content, and is usually accessed in a variety of ways.

Social discovery app Meetup chooses to display its navigation in the page body. It reveals every subcategory in the knowledge base, and lists the first few content pages in each category so that users can decide which link to click on next.   

Meetup clearly labels its categories and content, and when you click on an article it also has quick links to direct users to related content.

Combine your navigation with good search functionality as we mentioned earlier to provide an integrated self-service experience.

10. Imagery – HelpScout

Documentation that consists of only text and no images can be very boring and difficult to pay attention to. Illustrations can be very soothing and make your documentation more enjoyable to use.

Help desk software company HelpScout makes good use of imagery in its documentation by including custom icons for each category.

Help Scout also uses screencasts to show users what to do.

Use videos, screenshots and GIFs throughout your documentation to visually explain to users how to complete certain tasks.

Conclusion

If you use these ten best practices regularly, your documentation is sure to amaze your customers.

From investing in your Getting Started to tutorials to writing your documentation in an accessible way, your customers will appreciate your efforts to help them. Illustrating your text to make it more actionable is becoming more and more popular for knowledge bases.

Don’t forget to pay attention to the User Experience and how your customers are using your help content in the real world. Make it the default for your customers to be able to get what they need.

Taking a little time to plan your content in advance will make it easier to scale your knowledge base in the future. Now check out our ultimate guide to knowledge base software.

The post 10 Knowledge Base Software Best Practice Examples appeared first on Document360.

Markdown generates some controversy, but it still proves incredibly useful in certain contexts. In this post, we’ll discuss exactly what Markdown is, and whether it’s appropriate for your documentation project.

Definition of Markdown

John Gruber is the original creator of Markdown, and he defines it as:

“Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).”

Gruber’s definition shows that Markdown intended for anyone producing content on the web – which nowadays pretty much for anyone. Markdown is open source free software, which means that anyone can use it.

It’s licensed under a BSD-style open source license.

What is Markdown Editor?

The first thing you really need to know about Markdown is that it’s a way of formatting text content in an editor – without requiring you to know or use coding languages like HTML or CSS. You certainly don’t need to know some other programming language such as JavaScript or Ruby.

Syntax

For our purposes, Markdown is “plain text formatting syntax” – but it’s also a tool (parser) that converts this plain text formatting into HTML to display on the web.

The Markdown syntax is the information that your tool holds about the text. So for example, presentational syntax tells you how to present the text, as in the case of making it bold or underlined. Semantic syntax tells you what the text actually is, so that could be a list or a reference.

Markdown is fairly notable in that it combines both presentational and semantic syntax.

How to use Markdown for Technical Writing?

The key way you work with Markdown is in a file with an extension that is either . Markdown or .md. You write your text in the normal way, but format it using Markdown syntax – which can be found online.

You save your files in the Markdown format if you’re working in a plain text editor, or ensure your editor has a parser for Markdown. Many editors support Markdown, like Document360 which is our knowledge base platform. If a product supports Markdown, the company will tell you somewhere on their features page or their homepage.

Just try using a bit of Markdown in Trello to format some of your cards. It presents a vast improvement over no formatting and is relatively easy to do.

This is an excellent cheat sheet for getting started with Markdown. Check out this in-depth guide to Markdown from Ghost.

Also, Check out: Must Attend Technical Writing Conferences of 2024

Markdown Versus Other Markup Languages

Markdown is just one kind of markup language, of which there are many. The name “Markdown” is in fact a play on words of the term “markup”.

Markdown is used to render plain text in the browser but other markup languages may communicate directly with the computer. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is both human and machine-readable.

According to Webopedia, a markup language is defined as a tool used for:

“The processing, definition and presentation of text. The language specifies code for formatting, both the layout and style, within a text file. The code used to specify the formatting is called tags.

“HTML a an example of a widely known and used markup language.”

This means that the tags for formatting directly applied within the plain text file, as opposed to being specified in a separate file like CSS for example.

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language, and probably the best-known markup language used on the web today. Markdown has evolved as a way to simplify markup for web users.

Simple and easy to use Markdown editor to format text content without the need of HTML or CSS.

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History of Markdown Editor

Markdown was first created in 2004 by John Gruber, who collaborated with Aaron Schwartz on the syntax.

The reason they began their project is because historical markup languages were not at all easy for the average person to use.

The term “markup language” originated in the traditional publishing industry, where documents literally “marked up” by the author or editor. This was to tell the printer how to format the document when printing the final copy.

Imagine you had to write something, but also needed to communicate systematically to other people down the production line that you want:

• This bit in bold
• This bit to be a heading
• This should be a quote from another author
• Tell them an image is to go here
• This whole section highlighted

Markup the content in the traditional way but visualize the look and feel of content in modern style.

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Enter Markup Languages

Since most markup languages were originally designed for very complex technical projects, there grew a need for a “lightweight” markup language. It had to be so simple that just anyone could use it – without years of training.

Technical Writer Tony Ibbs delivered a very interesting talk at Write the Docs Prague 2018 about the history of markup languages.

As you can see from Tony’s slide, Markdown is still a bit of a newcomer on the markup language scene.

Benefits of Markdown for Technical Writing

As a result of its simplicity, Markdown quickly became very popular among web writers.

Interestingly, it experienced a surge in popularity among technical writers around 2016. Some people were very excited about Markdown, while others – not so much.

Many technical writers find lots of benefits in using Markdown for their documentation. Some of these benefits are:

• Markdown provides semantic meaning for content in a relatively simple way
• You can write rich formatted content extremely quickly (compared to writing directly in HTML tags)
• You can read Markdown easily in plain text before rendered by HTML
• It doesn’t interrupt your workflow with the need to click buttons
• It’s platform-agnostic so your content is not tied to the format of your editor

Markdown is also lightweight, which means you don’t have to learn a lot to get started with it.

Lots of product documentation is written in Markdown because it is so versatile, and it can usually be transferred between different platforms. For example, you can write in Markdown in a text editor like Atom, or even a version-control platform such as GitHub since that also supports Markdown.

Markdown is lightweight editor and you don’t have to learn to get started with it.

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Markdown can be used in Static Site Generators such as Jekyll or Hugo, which are tools specifically designed to be documentation sites.

It also works in our own knowledge base software, Document360, which allows you to work in Markdown in the editor and provides shortcuts for writing in Markdown.

{Image caption: Our Document360 editor with Markdown capabilities enabled and Markdown shortcuts}

When Should you Use Markdown?

So why should you use Markdown instead of a WYSIWYG editor, which are standard and abundant nowadays?

The WYSIWYG editor usually requires you to click buttons to achieve the formatting you want, and limited by the design of the software creators. You also have to work in your chosen editor at all times, which takes the focus away from the actual content.

Some people are concerned that Markdown doesn’t have enough functionality to suit their needs or if they extend it then the content won’t be reusable. Markdown can be extended with extra functionality. This means someone creates another version (or “flavour”) of Markdown to suit their needs. On the other hand, if you extend it, your Markdown flavour may not be portable to another platform.

Ask yourself whether you likely to have thousands of pages content potentially reused across multiple platforms such as web, internal knowledge base, and print?

In this case, Markdown probably isn’t for you.

But if you want to quickly create simple text documentation with rich formatting, then Markdown may be for you.

Controversy Surrounding Markdown

Markdown editor created for a reason, but some people oppose strongly against using it. Reasons for this include:

• Markdown not originally intended for writing documentation so there may be limitations in how you can use it (John Gruber himself a prominent blogger, and blogging is one of the best use cases for Markdown)
• It’s not standardised like other markup languages, so you don’t necessarily know how it will be rendered in a browser
• There are dozens of “flavours” of Markdown as people have extended Markdown to offer the functionality they need, which aren’t compatible with one another
• Markdown merges the semantic meaning of your text and how it should be displayed, which some people find unsuitable
• It’s limited stylistically in how you can display your content – but this is an intentional design choice behind Markdown

Markdown’s innate flexibility and potential for use in a wide variety of contexts is what has led some to warn against using Markdown. Many people recommend it, but it just isn’t suitable for everyone.

The co-founder of Write the Docs community Eric Holscher advocates strongly against the use of Markdown in technical documentation.

He recommends to use Asciidoctor, or Sphinx and reStructuredText (rST). rST is another markup language like Markdown but it has an official standard, which makes it popular among some developers.

Should I Use Markdown Editor?

Just like anything, Markdown a good choice if your project needs suited to it. Markdown has limited functionality because of the way designed. This makes some people swear by it and some people hate it.

Think about the interface in which create the content, the technical complexity of your documentation project, and the types of users who will need to create and review documentation.

Make sure you design the proper workflow for your documentation, and research the proper technical writing tools for delivery to avoid future styling issues. Markdown is not an editor in itself, so it has to be coupled with a CMS (Content Management System) to produce live documentation.

If you want to extend your Markdown-formatted documentation with CSS or more HTML, it’s important to note that these extensions will stop the style of your content being portable between systems. Some things you have added to work in your current editor (eg Document360 being one editor) may not port well, and therefore not work in a different editor.

It’s probably safe to say that many of the problems people using Markdown come from using it in inappropriate contexts. Markdown is safe to use if you know exactly what it can do, and what its limitations are.

Final Remarks

Markdown is a great tool for easily making formatted text files that display across a variety of platforms. It’s popular with technical writers for its ease of use and relatively short learning curve.

Research your options before committing to launching a product documentation project in a particular format like Markdown. Make sure the other platforms you need to use – now and potentially in the future – are Markdown-compatible.

If you’re ready to go with Markdown, get started with Document360 now.

The post The Ins and Outs of Using Markdown for Technical Writing appeared first on Document360.