How Darwinbox Transformed Self-Service at the Speed of SaaS

Darwinbox is the leading provider of cloud-based Human Resources Management Software (HRMS). In a context of rapid growth, being one of the youngest and fastest growing players to debut on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises, they were able to implement a modern content strategy in record time.

Operating under a SaaS model, with regular enhancements to the product and a skyrocketing number of users, they decided to transform their approach to self-service.

We sat down with Sagar Garuda, Senior Director of Learning at Darwinbox and Prem Garudadri, Senior Manager – Technical Writing at Darwinbox, to discuss how they went about this transformation, and how it helped them meet the needs of both their teams and their end users.

The challenge

With quarterly product releases and a flourishing user base, Darwinbox began finding it challenging to keep users informed about new product enhancements and features. The traditional method of knowledge transfer through formal training and PDF documentation was reaching its limits as the company grew. Concurrently, users were starting to prefer learning on their own via self-service options.  

To address this shift, Darwinbox aimed to offer self-service resources via personalized, interactive, and scalable content experiences tailored to different user groups, whether internal teams, partners, or customers.

To achieve all of this, they needed to find the right partners to bring their vision to life.

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The solution

Transforming their content strategy required a multi-pronged approach. One part concerned meeting the high volume of product content required. They did this by hiring a team of experienced writers and moving to cloud-based Component Content Management System (CCMS), Paligo. As a result, they took full advantage of the benefits of structured authoring such as collaborative workflows, content reuse, etc., and accelerated their content production.

Simultaneously, they decided to optimize their content delivery by bringing all of the new content to the users, without complicating writers’ jobs. “We want the writers to do what they do best. Write, not publish,” said Sagar Garuda.

After evaluating the leading Content Delivery Platforms (CDP) on the market, they eventually identified Fluid Topics, as having the capabilities they required to create the content experience their users wanted, and teams needed.

With Fluid Topics, they were able to get a help portal up and running within a month, allowing them to streamline content delivery to their diverse user segments. As they expected, all the functionalities needed were ready right out-of-the-box, packaging all the best practices into one solution. Additionally, matching their portal to their branding was as simple as a drag-and-drop.

Link to Darwinbox Help Center

What Darwinbox liked

Fast implementation: As the ability to get up and running quickly was so important for this fast-growing company, having an out-of-the-box solution was essential. They found that within a month they were able to make their help portal available, and then just rolling it out to different categories of users.

The ability to customize the turnkey portal on their own: They wanted to be able to tailor the branding of their portal to fit their corporate image. Thanks to Fluid Topics’ Page Designer and its WYSIWYG editor & “drag and drop” components, they customized without requiring any heavy coding and maintenance.

The stellar content experience: Providing a positive content experience was essential for Darwinbox and they found a gamut of features that made it easier to do so. From the personalized search that adapts results based on user behavior, to bookmarks, ratings and feedback, they turned their content into an exceptional content experience.

Powerful access right management: With all users on the same portal, it was key to be able to define specific access  rules and ensure users could only see what they were supposed to. With Fluid Topics, they created and defined separate user groups.

Data-driven decisions: Fluid Topics provided deep insights into content usage. Darwinbox found it easy to see analytics metrics such as Document and Topic views and ratings. In this respect, they understood which content was performing best, and which needed optimizing.

Low touch change management: An important criterion for Darwinbox, Fluid Topics seamlessly integrated with both their existing tools (Confluence) and new ones (Paligo), allowing them to publish to their help desk portal in a click. 

Conclusion

Darwinbox were able to turn the challenge of SaaS into an opportunity to both modernize their content operations and their approach to self-service. With a help portal matching branding requirements, both internal and external users alike can effortlessly find the content they need on their own, all while benefiting from a familiar and personalized user experience.

Ultimately, they have the right tools in place for writing and publishing to be able to focus on writing informative tech doc that meets user’s needs.