About Cenosco

Cenosco, involved in Integrity Management Software, builds engineering solutions for asset-intensive industries. Their solutions help clients maintain their assets, help keep their people safe and comply with regulations. They have six products in their portfolio so far. Their clientele includes gas and chemical companies, clean energy firms and others like papermills.

Business Requirement

Cenosco required an online knowledge base to host user manuals for their growing list of features and expanding client base. With engineering software, in general, being complicated, they train their clients in using the software before giving them a manual.

Initially Cenosco was typing out their manuals in Microsoft Word documents and sometimes converting them into PDF documents before sharing them with clients. However, it posed certain challenges.

• The manuals were extremely text heavy making it difficult for clients to instantly find the exact information they were looking for.
• They review and update the documentation four times a year. So, there was no way to ensure every user had the latest version of the manual.
• The Manuals often had to be created in different formats for different clients, and some of them did not adhere to brand guidelines.

With new software product features being added often, they needed a dynamic knowledge base that could be reviewed and updated regularly. With them having six different products, with different sets of clients for each, they needed a tool that allowed them the option of different reader groups.

Solution

Once Cenosco’s technical writer, Elsa Tolsma-De Klerk, joined the company, she advised the management to opt for an online knowledge base, they evaluated multiple tools in the market before zeroing in on Document360. The following features of Document360 met their business requirements:

• It was easy to import documentation from various formats.
• The table editor feature made it easy for the team to recreate their tables directly into the platform rather than copy-paste it from other formats like excel.
• The category structure helps them structure their documentation for various reader groups and products.
• Document360’s multiple versions enabled them to cater for clients on different product versions.
• Access and security feature helps them allow clients to access only certain information relevant to them while making the entire base accessible to all their employees.
• The AI-powered search engine helps the customer support team access the exact information that their clients require and share the link instantly with them.
• Version history helps them check everyone who has worked on an article and the changes made, so it can be reviewed and given feedback on.

Cenosco has a good documentation workflow in place to ensure that documentation is peer-reviewed to meet their customer expectations. While they have 15 contributors, including subject matter experts, all their contributions are reviewed by a team of two technical writers, who check the documentation for stylistic consistency and information flow before publication.

Elsa Tolsma says the frequent positive feedback from the customers, as well as Document360’s intuitive interface, has made many members of their staff enthusiastic to contribute content to the knowledge base. She says usually people are reluctant to write and add information, but for the first time after adopting the knowledge base, she has begun seeing so many requests to contribute.

Document360 workflow feature helps us to manage the peer-review and approval process easily. This has helped us provide feedback and be more productive

Business Impact

After Cenosco adopted Document360, the customer support team often just shares a link to the knowledge base or relevant information with customers because it is easy to access. They have also been receiving positive feedback from clients on the ease of navigating through the content on the knowledge base.

The rich analytics provided, helps technical writers check

• Most popular articles
• Most searched terms
• Most searched terms that did not yield results because of a spelling error or because the information is genuinely missing in their manuals
• Inputs for their marketing team on what their clients look for

Conclusion

Adopting Document360 helped Cenosco create an online user manual, which they could update regularly, ensuring their customers could always access the latest versions. Positive feedback from customers and regular usage has encouraged many subject matter experts from within the company to also write articles and contribute to documentation, making the site more vibrant.