MindTouch is a customer experience management platform with content management and help authoring capabilities. Formerly known as MediaWiki, it is optimized for building knowledge bases for customer self-service and agent assistance purposes.
N/A
Narvar
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Narvar, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their post-purchase oriented customer experience platform, providing shipment tracking, customer pick up options, notifications, and purchase return capabilities and features.
I would recommend MindTouch to anyone who is looking to create and host their documentation for a product that has multiple types of users. Our business modal represents customers on the buy-side as well as the sell-side and we are able to easily organize documentation to service both types of users.
If you are an e-commerce retailer that needs out of the box functionality to enhance your shipment tracking, then I highly recommend Narvar. The monthly spend far out weighs the cost of having an internal team build this out --- not to mention the time it takes to spin the solution up.
Good privacy settings for each page. I can set a new article to semi-private until it's approved to go live. And I can send a link to that page out for review.
Good tracking on each page history.
Ability to view and restore previous page versions.
I like the category search bars that only search the current category.
User experience. The product's UX is fragmented and it's hard to figure out how to do some certain very simple, important things.
Many aspects of the product don't really meet industry standards for technical communication. They seem to have been cobbled together by people who don't fully understand what technical writers do. Product updates really don't address these issues. Folks in sales and support sometimes imply that the authoring platform MindTouch has created is the only way to do create documentation, which is counter to the experience of those of us who've been in the industry for any length of time.
Adding other functionality beyond the basic technology can be costly for a small to medium business. Narvar's grown rapidly since we started using them and their baseline costs for add-ons are out of our price range for post-purchase/returns.
We've put lots and lots of content into the MindTouch system, of course, so that makes it harder to opt out, but we're also very pleased with their rate of development and weekly pushing of improvements, as well as their response and solutions to our questions and input All in all, a winning combination.
MindTouch has many formatting options but some procedures (like editing a template) are not easy to figure out. We needed to create several custom templates for our content and found the MindTouch user documentation on this process somewhat contradictory and incomplete.
MindTouch is a hosted site, so as a heavy user there are times when I notice that pages are slow to load, or something happens like Amazon Web Services crashing the entire east coast for a few hours, that you do notice even if it isn't actually the fault of the MT tool itself. It's the risk of using a hosted tool, but the benefits are pretty amazing and outweigh these performance issues.
Mindtouch support is awesome. Support agents are friendly and helpful. Some can benefit from ongoing training. Overall the support experience is very good. One area they can possibly improve is visibility into product feedback. Seeing or getting insight into requests or votes for features would be an added customer experience.
Once it's set up, it doesn't require much support. We used to have quarterly or bi-annual touch bases with an account person to review our rating and customer usage but haven't heard from them in a while - either because we're too small or they got rid of this interaction. Can't say we miss it though because we can see our rating and feedback, and there is only so much you can do within the confines of the platform without adding on new functionality.
Written documentation and videos are very good and have helped on numerous occasions when I've had to look up how to accomplish a certain task. The reason I have not given a full score is mainly because there have been some inaccuracies in the documentation because updates to the MindTouch framework have slightly changed the way things work. But this is usually the same type of challenges I face when making documentation for the software solution we develop. So all in all I'm very satisfied with both the personal webinars and the online documentation MindTouch provides for their service.
Just know that there is so much more involved than adding your content. There are so many pieces to launching your site -- especially if you are moving from another platform. If you are not a person who typically works in the "website" realm, do your homework, ask your web people, engineers, etc., because there's a lot to do that you won't know about until you are unexpectedly smacked in the face with it. Learn from my mistakes! We are very happy now, but it was a long road getting to launch day for us
I will be brief. DealerTeam is built upon Salesforce and we try to support native apps. We used Desk.com first for basic Help Ticket management. The product did not satisfy how our customers were looking for information. We upgraded to Service Cloud with Knowledge Base and spent one year writing content and developing our support agency. Again, our customers were upset about submitting help tickets and waiting for answers. They wanted access to self-help while working with a customer. Today we continue to use Service Cloud with MindTouch integration and have found complete success. There is simply no other solution I know of that is a flexible and easy to use as MindTouch when it come to providing customer success and product support
I haven't seen anything like Narvar exactly. The most similar is the estimated delivery text notification/reference page functionality on Shopify sites.
Time to publication can be very quick, provided there are not multiple changes in flight at the same time for the same page.
We have seen a tremendous increase in customer traffic and SEO.
MindTouch allows us to custom-brand the look and feel of our site to match our company's marketing and branding. This instills trust in our content.
The relative simplicity of the platform enabled us to hire the best people and best writers we could find, without worrying so much about specific past expertise in a complicated publishing platform.
