Customer Community Help Portal
Deliverable
Cloud-hosted product help portal for highly vertical IT FinOps SaaS services
Primary skills
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Information architecture
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Brand voice and tone
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Content governance
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UX writing
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Web analytics
Primary tools
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Jive community service
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Madcap Flare
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Zoomin Connector for Flare-to-Jive bulk transform and publishing
Timeframe
2015-16
When I was brought into Apptio as Senior Content Strategist in 2015, my primary task was to migrate its substantial product help into the just-launched TBM Connect community. This portal ran on the cloud-hosted Jive service. The community portal was restricted to authenticated customers, partners, and select others.
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Besides the Engineering org where I sat, the Sales and Marketing teams were invested in how the Apptio services would be presented in the community portal. Apptio had built a highly valued brand voice, and we intended to not just maintain but expand the brand value through effective content discovery.
To accomplish this goal, my team worked closely with the overall owner of and key contributors to the Apptio Community portal so we could deliver value in two ways:
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Value to customers: Provide a single resource to meet customers' information needs, regardless of what part of Apptio produced the content (Customer Success, Education Services, User Assistance, and so on). In other words, don't publish our org seams!
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Value to the organization: Accomplish the above goal by single-sourcing product help content from our Madcap Flare-based Content Management System (CSM; Learn more). In addition, we single-sourced PDF help guides, and later launched efficient content localization practices--all from one XML source content collection. In other words, write once/use many times!
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Business impact: The Apptio Community help portal was highly effective. Customer engagement grew to a critical mass of all users of Apptio services. We were also pleased to see that the help portal became the primary go-to resource for Apptio employees. In fact we effectively grew our tech writing capacity by engaging with SMEs throughout the company to collect their best ideas and insights for customer-facing content. We did so through a carefully managed content curation and governance process .
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The image below shows the "Product Central" home page, which was the primary hub for all product help resources on the community site. Specific site usage metrics and product-specific content is proprietary to Apptio.
