About Comgate

The payment provider behind 21,000 Czech and Central European e-shops

Comgate is a Czech payment service provider operating under the supervision of the Czech National Bank. It supplies payment gateways to e-commerce businesses and card terminals to physical retail, alongside BNPL and business lending – and it has done so since 2000, when two students founded the company that would become Comgate a.s.

Today Comgate holds a European payment institution licence, is a Visa and Mastercard Principal member, and is PCI DSS Level 1 certified. It processes CZK 53 billion a year – roughly €2.2 billion – across 21,000 e-shops and 9,000 payment terminals, in nine currencies, for customers in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and Romania.

All of it runs on roughly 80 people.

The challenge

A help section that could not hold a user guide

When Comgate first set out to let customers self-serve, they tried to build a knowledge base inside their own website, as a help section. It did not hold.

The interface was built to display graphic elements rather than long-form text, which made detailed user guides difficult to publish. There was no way to structure a knowledge base at all – no table of contents, no article hierarchy. Customers who wanted to configure a payment gateway or a terminal had no option but to call support.

There was a second, quieter problem, and it was internal. Comgate had no internal documentation function at all. Product knowledge, tariff rules and process guidance lived with the people who happened to hold them. When the company hired Kristýna Vávrová, it hired her for precisely that gap.

“I was specifically hired to build the private knowledge base.”
Kristýna Vávrová – Comgate

Before

  • Customer guides: A website help section built for graphics, not text
  • Structure: No table of contents, no article hierarchy
  • Gateway setup: Customers contacted support to configure gateways and terminals
  • Internal documentation: None – knowledge held informally by individuals
  • Support email: Ad-hoc, written per agent
  • Ownership: Split across teams

After

  • Customer guides: A structured public portal at help.comgate.cz
  • Structure: Categories, articles and versioning in one system
  • Gateway setup: Customers set up the gateway themselves from the guides
  • Internal documentation: A full private knowledge base for ~80 colleagues
  • Support email: Standardised templates managed in Document360
  • Ownership: One owner, both knowledge bases, one platform
“Document360 made it very simple to create a logical, well-structured knowledge base that includes a list of topics, sub-topics and articles.”
Michal Petrák – Communications and PR Manager, Comgate

The solution

One platform, two audiences, three languages

Comgate chose Document360 to host their user guides. Over the years they expanded it into a two-part knowledge base, with a public and a private section, both run from one account. The public portal serves customers and Comgate’s own staff. The private knowledge base serves colleagues only, and carries the material customers must never see – tariff rules, pricing logic, internal process.

“One is public, which is for our clients and for my colleagues in three different languages, and one is like internal help for the colleagues.”
Kristýna Vávrová – Comgate

Multi-language publishing

The public knowledge base is published in three languages, serving customers and Comgate’s own staff across the markets the business operates in. The private knowledge base runs in Czech, with some Slovak.

Snippets and templates – the reuse system

Comgate maintains 167 snippets and 6 templates. One person is not hand-writing three language variants of every payment-method block; reusable content is written once and placed everywhere it belongs.

Smart Bar and status indicators

Articles that are no longer current carry a Smart Bar notice at the top of the page, so nobody works from out-of-date information. New and updated articles are flagged so colleagues see at a glance what has changed.

Workflow states and assignment

Colleagues assign draft articles to Kristýna for review; workflow states track what is in progress and what is live.

A use case most knowledge bases never reach

Comgate also manages its standardised customer-service email templates inside Document360. The knowledge base is not only the place customers go to find answers – it is the source of truth for the answers support sends out.

“We used Smart Bar mostly for our private knowledge base when we were informing about some deprecated articles.”
Kristýna Vávrová – Comgate
“I need for my colleagues who are not in charge of the content for them to be as easy as it gets. If it’s easy, they will use it.”
Kristýna Vávrová – Comgate

Business impact

The business grew 40%. The documentation kept up, with the same headcount.

When Document360 first published Comgate’s story in July 2024, Comgate served 15,000 clients across three countries. Today the company’s own figures are 21,000 e-shops plus 9,000 terminals across five markets, with stated presence in four more. The knowledge base absorbed that growth without a corresponding team.

“Mostly it’s me, like in 90% of the time, it’s me who is writing the articles.”
Kristýna Vávrová – Comgate

1,902 articles. Ten seats. One owner.

Roughly 190 articles per licensed seat, with a single person producing nine in ten of them. For any documentation team of one – which is most of them – that is the ratio that matters.

Support calls got shorter

The change Comgate reported after the public knowledge base went live was in the shape of a support call, not just the volume.

Customers configure the gateway themselves

Comgate reported that customers began setting up payment gateways from the online guides rather than calling for help – the outcome the whole project was commissioned to produce.

Search data closes the loop

Analytics show the team what customers searched for and did not find. Technical writers respond by changing keywords, adding tags, or splitting an article so it surfaces properly – documentation that improves from its own usage data.

“Earlier customer calls would run longer because even the basics had to be explained to them and we often had to wait online till they tried our solution and it worked. But now, the support staff sends a link to the relevant article, which is a lot more detailed, allowing customers to find their solutions themselves.”
Michal Petrák – Communications and PR Manager, Comgate
“Document360 has helped ease the load on our customer support team because customers are now enabled to handle issues themselves.”
Michal Petrák – Communications and PR Manager, Comgate

One role, consolidated by design. The internal and external knowledge bases started under separate owners. Within a year Comgate merged them, because the information was the same information.

“During the first year, we realized that it is not useful for me to write the private knowledge base and other colleague to be in charge of the public. So gradually I became responsible for the public knowledge base as well.”
Kristýna Vávrová – Comgate

Conclusion

What a documentation team of one can actually hold

Comgate is not an outlier in its staffing. Across B2B software, documentation is overwhelmingly owned by one person or a very small team, carrying content for a company many times the size of their function – and usually without the authority to make anyone else contribute.

What Comgate demonstrates is the ceiling. One content owner, ~80 colleagues, two knowledge bases, three languages, 1,902 articles, a regulated payments business processing CZK 53 billion a year – and 40% client growth over two years absorbed without the documentation falling behind.

The mechanism is not heroics. It is reuse: snippets, templates, structured workspaces and a platform designed so that the colleagues who are not content owners can still contribute without training.