Documentation is overlooked no more

Before Refined, 55 Degrees shared their documentation in a public Confluence space. But there was one problem: No one was reading it.

“I think the big issue was that Confluence can be a bit clunky to use,” says Margaux Fiche, customer experience manager. “It’s hard to have a nice landing page and you’re limited in terms of what you can do, and the colors you can choose.”

The team had a theory that because the documentation didn’t look appealing, and was a bit tricky to navigate to, it was going unread. Too often, support requests could have been avoided if customers had read the article anticipating their issue.

Refined Sites gave the CX team a way to package documentation in a more-consumable format, and evidence that the improved user experience was paying off showed up in the content of the team’s 200 support requests per month.

“We’ve heard way more, ‘Oh, I found this on your documentation, I have questions,’ versus just a question without taking the time to look for the answer,” says Fiche, who heads up the site and manages the documentation it houses.

“They go and dig, and it’s quite nice.“

Integrating Confluence documentation and JSM support helps both customers and agents

55 Degrees used both Confluence and JSM before applying Refined Sites, which meant that they were familiar with both tools. But one thing they found very useful with Refined Sites was the way they could integrate the two on a Refined site to get more from each.

“That’s the nice thing,” says Fiche, “[the documentation and support] is all in one place instead of being in different places, and it’s very easy to navigate from one to the other.”

Refined Sites allows you to embed service points – JSM request type links – directly in the documentation (they appear on the page itself and at the top of the Confluence page), giving folks a quick and easy pathway to ask for help if the instructions aren’t meeting their needs.

Says Fiche, “We quite like the fact that we could have our page where you would report a support issue in the same place as the documentation.”

Building transparency and trust

JSM serves two purposes on the 55 Degrees help site: a product roadmap as well as a tool for support requests.

The site's bug tracker – which comprises a table of issues visible to anyone on the site (note: this functionality is no longer available in the newest versions of Refined Sites) – serves as a transparency tool, enhancing customer trust by showing users what’s being worked on. It also gives them the opportunity to leave feedback.

“Reported bugs land in JSM, and as long as we don’t limit access to a ticket it shows up publicly,” explains Fiche. “It’s something I know our users really appreciate as they can see what we’re working on, comment, and leave further requests.”