MindTouch Delivers For SAP And Salesforce By Turning The FAQ Into A Self-Service Sales Tool

MindTouch is using data to provide context to customer support pages so people can get better answers to the questions they have about a product or a service. The FAQ just doesn’t do it anymore. It’s either because the questions don’t apply or the answers don’t address a customer’s issues.

MindTouch has won customers such as SAP and Salesforce.com by turning the manual into a contextual data engine that correlates to the individual and the overall customer base. It turns product and service data into a knowledge engine that serves relevant information on a per-article basis. The contextual knowledge base can also be applied to search results. Articles that get the most interest rise to the top.

The system is built so the identity of the individual determines which results are presented. It takes information from Facebook, Twitter, CRM agents, websites and other communities to create a profile of the customer’s product history. The process makes it more self-service-oriented and helps customer service representatives up-sell and cross-sell at the right time.

A logged-in user can get contextual information based on products, skill level and languages. An anonymous user can be limited to prevent any competitive intelligence or to encourage registration so that they tie into the company’s identity management system and can be tracked and targeted for specific campaigns. Support agents and field techs have broader capabilities and access to the overall knowledge base.

Forrester Research found that 71 percent of customers prefer self-service help. They want specific information before they buy a product or a service. There are different ways that this can be done. Developers can either download an SDK and test out an app, or they can try a cloud service and reach out to the community.

MindTouch uses context to help deliver a service for customers. It’s the type of service we should come to expect as the capabilities to correlate data provide the ability to offer deeper forms of context.