About Mobileforce

Mobileforce is a multiproduct SaaS company focused on Field Automation to enhance Revenue Operations. Mobileforce’ SaaS products helps its customers automate sales quotes, streamline field service operations and drive more revenue. Mobileforce products include:

MOBILEFORCE CPQ (Configure, Price and Quote), which empowers sales teams to provide quotes based on the data fed into it and grow revenues

• MOBILEFORCE FSM (Field Service Management), which arms field service teams with creating service tasks and real-time scheduling of appointments, technician location skills matching, and real-time tracking for lightning-fast service response times.
• MOBILEFORCE CONNECTED PORTAL: A self-service experience which helps companies deliver white-glove digital and mobile UI experiences to customers and partners .
• MOBILEFORCE PLATFORM provides centralized access to important business data directly from CRM environments, so it improves customer engagement, speed response times and streamlines processes for a better customer experience.

Business Requirement

Mobileforce was looking for a documentation repository to host all their user documentation for the suite of software products in their portfolio. They were initially storing all their documentation in a large file system. They were using Markdown editor for their documentation. However, they faced a few challenges.

• They recruited non-technical writers to author their technical documentation. They found it difficult to use the Markdown editor because it required a lot of technical know-how
• Their file system did not have the option to index information to help their users to find information based on “search keywords.”
• The file system did not provide easy mechanisms to create and manage article categories, create table of contents, easily navigate to FAQs, ask questions, tag articles by roles of users who the articles target, etc.
• The documentation needed to be customer facing as well as provide protected access to specific documents that partners, solution consultants, and even select employees could also access.

Eventually, Mobileforce began looking for a documentation platform that could be customer-facing. Some of their business requirements from the platform were

• Documentations look professional with headers and footers and ability to customize look and feel based on company brand guidelines.
• To be able to customize Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).
• A search engine where customers could search and find the exact information they were looking for
• Being able to limit access to what customers of different pricing tier could see. They wanted to allow only certain customers to access their API documentation.
• Easy parsing of markdown content to HTML format without their staff requiring a detailed knowledge transfer
• Ability for multiple authors and reviewers to collaborate in creating and publishing articles.
• Ability for the system to provide feedback on what search terms did not result in any articles being found, and thus using these terms to create articles that addressed customer needs.

Solution

After looking at several options in the market, Mobileforce chose Document360 to host their user documentation. Here’s how Document360 met their business and technical requirements.

• Multiple choices of editor, including WYSIWYG and Block, making it easy for non-technical staff to author user documentation
• The flexibility of authors to seamlessly choose between Markdown and WYSIWYG gave them a lot more flexibility.
• Reader groups allowed them to give access to different sections of documentation category based on pricing tiers. Authentication could be introduced to customers who access API documentation.
• Snippets allowed them to insert the same information in multiple places instead of having to key it in every time or copy-pasting it from a previous article.
• CSS and JavaScript allow them to customize their home screen to display or hide anything they choose to
• Rich analytics helped them track what customers were doing on their documentation site, including terms they were searching for but did not find answers
• The peer review system helped them ensure their articles were reviewed once before they were published.

Mobileforce Software began documenting its product from the early stages, which helped them scale its operations rapidly and establish its public user documentation site.

T K Lakshman, Chief Technology Officer at Mobileforce Software, mentions that their

Technical writers, who often don’t have technical knowledge, but have a good grasp of the English language, have been able to use Document360 seamlessly due to flexibility in keying in options.

Business Transformation

After the implementation of Document360, Mobileforce has been augmenting its documentation using the rich analytics provided. They list out questions that did not yield an answer, quickly fill those gaps, so the next time the question is asked, answers are available. They also use data on usage of the documentation, as a source of feedback on the ease of use of their product itself.

Conclusion

Document360 was the perfect fit for Mobileforce Software which began adopting a knowledgebase platform while scaling operations in terms of customers. The in-depth analytics are used to improve the knowledge base and features like reader groups and authentication to entice customers to move up tiers. The platform has also been found easy to use by all their stakeholders including writers, users and internal staff.