About Aspire

Aspire deals in offering a landscape SaaS solution that helps businesses solve their everyday challenges. They have expertise in designing software solutions for businesses that are facing manual or outdated business processes in the landscape industry.

Aspire Software, a ServiceTitan company, offers a SaaS solution for the landscape and janitorial industries providing an end-to-end solution for running those businesses. The parent company, ServiceTitan, offers business solutions in other vertical markets like air conditioning, and heating and cooling.

Challenges faced

Aspire maintains two types of documentation – a user guide, and a knowledge base consisting of how-to documentation. The Aspire User Guide was originally created in Microsoft Word and consisted of over six hundred pages. They made the Aspire User Guide available to their clients in PDF format. While talking to Kendal, who is the Documentation Manager at Aspire, he said that the biggest problems or the limitations they faced were:

• It was necessary for clients to download a new PDF copy of the user guide whenever it changed
• Even the slightest change in the document or any version update required making the entire document available to all clients to re-download
• The user guide contains around 3000 internal and external hyperlinks. Microsoft Word did not provide features to manage and automatically verify those hyperlinks
• Linking to specific places within the Word/PDF document from other sources was impossible

The business needs

Maintaining all this information in a huge Word document was a challenge to maintain and distribute to an ever-growing client base. By observing the following challenges, Aspire realized that converting the Aspire User Guide from Word to Document360 would be beneficial:

• Periodic distribution of the User Guide to an expanding client base was difficult
• Changes were not immediately available to clients
• The PDF documents that clients had previously downloaded quickly became outdated and stagnant

How Document360 helps to solve the problem

About three years ago, Aspire chose to convert their documentation from Word to Document360. This decision was made because Document360 provides easy document maintenance, is available online, and sharing with the clients is easier. Additionally, it is now possible to share links with clients to a specific portion of the Aspire User Guide that is applicable to specific scenarios.

Since the Aspire User Guide contains so many hyper-links, links can become broken due to user error. Document360 provides broken link analytics to automatically report the links that are broken and show where they occur within the document. During the conversation, Kendal said, ‘I started to use the broken link analytics. I learned it and have used it to fix many links. That has been very convenient.’ He shared that he found 198 broken links in their documentation using this feature which they are now able to fix.

Aspire has their new releases every 2 to 3 weeks with a 7-week cycle, and they find Document360 very useful as it is easy to update the documentation and publish release notes instantly for each software release.

Kendal further mentioned that

Document360 makes it easy to provide articles to teammates to review and update prior to publication of specific changes.

Kendal said that, with Document360, their documentation is much more accessible to their clients allowing them to become more knowledgeable. As a business, Aspire has grown rapidly over the past 5 years. This huge growth was a primary driver for moving to a documentation tool that is user-friendly and easy to use for their clients.

Closing line

Document360 has been helping Aspire for the past three years in so many ways like creating and sharing effective technical documentation, communicating all their feature releases in an organized way, and much more. That is how Document360 helped Aspire to create customer centric documentation. Kendal closed the conversation saying that

Document360 as a documentation tool is very beneficial for SaaS companies.