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MindTouch

Score7 out of 10

179 Reviews and Ratings

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What is MindTouch?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Content from MindTouch site visualized with Wave Analytics.
Example MindTouch implementation from customer Whirlpool.
Example MindTouch implementation from customer Conga.
Example MindTouch implementation from customer Cisco Meraki.
Example MindTouch implementation from customer Hitachi Data Systems.
Example MindTouch implementation from customer Zuora.

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Reviews

What users are saying about MindTouch.
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MindTouch - Moving from KBs and PDFs to easy to use and customer friendly

Incentivized
Seth FaberView profile
Global Services eServices Manager in Customer Service at Hitachi Data Systems (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Authoring content is simple and not overly burdensome
  • APIs and connectors allow integration into CRM systems and anything else we can imagine
  • Flexibility which allows us to replace a knowledge base, wiki, PDF manuals and various team sites, Creating a single tool that delivers the right content to the right audience, all in one place.

Cons

  • Reporting for large amount of contributors is difficult as each has to be search separately
  • Advanced enterprise type of features like synonyms, full page content reuse (not just sections), use case to article linking data in search result prioritization as content reuse is not accounted for but page views are
  • MindTouch only searches content within MindTouch so our support website has 2 search boxes that act differently. One performs federated search across the entire website including MindTouch and the other only searches MindTouch. It is difficult to present both options on MindTouch pages but users need to also find content that is not in MindTouch.

Return on Investment

  • MindTouch helps reduce knowledge and information silos by offering a place for everyone to store their content.
  • Employees are finding what they need when they need it without having to find "the guy" who knows that stuff.
  • Customers are helping themselves and solving their own issues which allows support to work on higher priority issues.

Alternatives Considered

Oracle ATG Web Commerce, Oracle Service Cloud and Salesforce Service Cloud

Good for a one-person documentation/knowledge base shop

Incentivized
Nina WishbowView profile
Principal Technical Writer in Customer Service at Skyport Systems (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • The MindTouch service has been more reliable than other, similar products I've used.
  • It also is easy to customize the appearance and layout of pages once you're familiar with how the product is structured.
  • It allows embedding of videos, which we don't do very much of at present but would like to do more of.

Cons

  • Surprisingly for a content delivery company, I found the documentation to be very sparse, so at first it was learning by trial and error.
  • The product is also not very flexible at the highest level. You have to fit your topic structure into their framework, which can be somewhat limiting.

Return on Investment

  • MindTouch has not been particularly good as a review tool. People in my company have objected to using it, so I have to copy and paste new articles into Google Docs, which has a better review function.
  • That said, as a one-person documentation department, MindTouch has been a reasonably good platform for me. It has all of the features I need to create a help website and in-product help. Since it's a web service, it's easy for me to stay in synch with engineering without the overhead of working inside the produce code base.
  • My biggest objection to it so far is that its export to PDF feature is not as advanced as I would like. It's labor intensive to get a nice looking PDF from MindTouch.

Success with MindTouch?

Incentivized
Kristen KileyView profile
Instructional Designer at Kareo (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • When they release product updates each Thursday, sometimes those break areas of our site. Either it interacts with and breaks our custom branding or it breaks the layout and responsiveness of existing pages. So far MindTouch has not been able to find a solution to any of my tickets on these issues. So that puts the problem back on us to go through all of our 3,000+ pages and apply a fix, or to rebrand certain areas like our customized search page which broke and was reverted back to default.
  • The reports could be more helpful. I'd like to filter these reports further before I export.
  • the search feature isn't strong enough. Doesn't always pull up the best results, and it's difficult to sort through the results and know what is what. Is it a video? An article?

Return on Investment

  • It has increased the sharing and spread of our training articles because of the PDF export feature on each article. This allows our customer facing staff to email PDFs to customers.

Usability

Easy & fast content authoring platform

Incentivized
Lila Krutel MeyerView profile
Sr. Education Manager in Product Management at Gainsight (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • Authoring and editing articles is quick and easy.
  • Mindtouch has a really responsive and helpful support team.
  • You can customize the structure of your documentation on MT.
  • You can easily re-use content from one article in another, as well as pull in multiple articles to a path or sequence of documentation.

Cons

  • You can't easily manage the sequence of articles in a sub-category or guide.
  • If you are migrating documentation from another platform to MT, you may encounter a rocky road and lots of manual QA.
  • There's no real draft management functionality available. If you want to offer article feedback to someone, all you can do is enter text in a single comment box at the end of the article. As a result, we still use Google Docs for drafting and sharing articles for review, and then when they're finalized, we publish them on MT.
  • Some of their backend tools for reviewing broken hyperlinks, or locating unpublished articles, as well as their OOTB reporting options need improvement. They feel somewhat buried in the backend and inflexible; for example, you can't export a long list of records for easier review.

Return on Investment

  • Increased organic search traffic
  • Increased frequency and ability to update existing docs
  • Increased customers' ability to self-serve

Usability

Customer Success is providing the right content, every time, anywhere!

Incentivized
Travis SousaView profile
Director of Support, CFO in Finance and Accounting at DealerTeam.com (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • MindTouch has build a relevant platform to create and host public facing help content. It is easy to use yet robust enough to get highly technical with API's and seamless integrations.
  • MindTouch continues to revolutionize customer success. In the two years I have subscribed to their services, they continue to release new and useful features, educate and inspire the industry, drive innovation, and build strategic partnerships for long-term success.
  • MindTouch provides amazing customer and technical support. On top of a stellar product, they go out of there way to offer the best customer experience.
  • The Company Culture at MindTouch is impressive. Upon several visits to headquarters in downtown San Diego I have had the pleasure to become aquatinted with many of the employees. The company is comprised of stand-out talent and exceptional people working for the common goal of customer success
  • A dominate social media presence. If you want to know about MindTouch, you don't have to go very far. These guys are experts at what they sell and practice everything they preach.

Cons

  • Every emerging technology strives to improve. Not all problems are foreseeable and bugs exist. If I could dream up where MindTouch can improve, I can assure you they have already begun.
  • The standard pay structure of buying a full year in advance might be tuff for smaller startups
  • I would love MindTouch to provide video hosting as part of their service.

Return on Investment

  • Providing existing clients with self-help documentation is directly responsible for retaining one of our biggest customers. Because they were having trouble training employees, they considered leaving. Building our Success Site gave them the confidence of 24/7 product support. We have reduced churn over the last two years to a single client who closed the doors. Aside from a few reductions in user licenses, all existing clients are set to renew their annual subscriptions, making this the first year we will have 100% customer renewals.
  • We have reduced the time to onboard new customers by 35-40%. Touch Points and Learning Paths for role based users focus on specific content, increase the efficiency of user training, reduced frustrations, and greatly improved product adoption.
  • Help Tickets use to be extremely time consuming with scheduled webinars and basic user training. What use to be a 30 minute phone call before MindTouch is now a reply email with a link to a help article. Through Analytics we can see a constant increase in users searching out success articles and benefiting from self-help. I personally spend 50% less time on training calls and in general helping customers with basic questions.

Alternatives Considered

Desk.com and Salesforce Service Cloud