What tools are you using to ensure customer facing materials are up to date?

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

Is there a tool out there that can scan your website, whitepapers, knowledge base for tags or keywords that will tell you should update this collateral based on changes to your product. If not, how do you manage ensuring that the collaterals customers are receiving are up to date.

Kristi Faltorusso

I am not aware of any tools that scan, although if someone else is, I am all ears. The best way we have managed this is 1) keeping a central repository for all materials; we are a MS shop so we use OneDrive and SharePoint 2) organizational communication on how to use the appropriate documents and when; we advise people to not share these materials to their hard drive but rather download them each time they need them so if we have made changes and modifications they have the most current version (this is a hard one) 3) Marketing has a process where they review and refresh anything needing an update on a quarterly basis. I don't have a great solve but this is how we have managed it. 

Kelly Hook

Agreed with @Kristi Faltorusso that I haven't seen any way to auto-flag or update static content.  I'm at a Series A startup and our approaches tend to be scrappy, but we have a lot of customer-facing documentation around how to get started using the product, feature updates, the onboarding journey, etc. For those onboarding documents, we have an Onboarding Architect team which sits under CS and is responsible for ensuring the information that allows customers to self-service is current. We run into this issue with UI video trainings as well if there's a major feature release which requires us to re-record a training. 

For internal alignment on what's most up-to-date like sales collateral, whitepapers, case studies, etc I found this sales portal template in confluence useful as well: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/sales-portal

 

Thomas Seelbinder

Also, not aware of a tool that does this - sounds like a great idea!

We house all documents in Dropbox so all modifications, new docs etc are shared immediately and review our KB every 60 days, or immediately after a feature launch to bring everything relevant up-to-date.

 

 

Shaun Porcar

I'd love to see some innovation here as well. Most of what I have heard about or seen recently that's close to what you're looking for seems to be focused on improving signal to noise with Slack — especially as we see more teams dabble and dive headfirst into opening channels for every strategic customer they work with. 

Otherwise for kbase and collateral management in general I've either established or agreed to specific version control protocols or naming conventions with my colleagues on the product and marketing side of the house. Recently in Ser A-C stage orgs where resources and specializations were still thin, we'd split ownership of updates based on the content we were already developing. Product would own core product, feature related content, etc while CS would own content driven by specific use cases and support inquiries. I've generally adapted to the [popular] platforms that we've already invested in as a company such as sfdc, zendesk, confluence, Gdocs etc, but I'm keen to discover a better mousetrap for this endeavor that requires less overhead to maintain.

Samma Hafeez

I believe Seismic has been trying to solve for this. I received a short demo from one of their AEs at the 2019 Pulse conference in SF and recall this being an area of focus for the company. I don't have any direct experience though, but happy to make an intro - I know some of the folks who work there. https://seismic.com/product/content-management/

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

looks like there are still some gaps in coverage but a good tool nonetheless.