[CASE] Dr.Explain helped Action-MCFR Mediagroup reduce the number of technical support requests
Dmitri Lashkhia, head of the Business Process Support and Development Department of Action-MCFR Mediagroup, tells us how Dr.Explain helped the company improve the efficiency of using the partner network.
DE: Could you tell us about your company? What is special about it?
Action-MCFR Mediagroup (action-mcfr.ru [ru]) specializes in selling different journals and fact books. Currently we publish 112 journals and provide 17 reference systems and 23 services. For example, we provide the well-known reference systems "Lawyer" and "Human Resources", and publish the popular journals "Financial Director" and "General Accountant".
DE: What are your specialty and your role in the project?
I’ve been the head of the Business Process Support and Development Department of the company for about 3 years. We distribute our information products not only through internal channels, which means that our project is very big. Most of the sales are generated by our partner network. Our partners are different companies, from small businesses to major ones.
We wanted our partners to have access to the information about our products and to be able to register and analyze the data about their sales, so we developed Dealer’s Back Office. It’s a feature-rich, complex web application.
DE: Was it important for your company to create a help system?
Dealer’s Back Office has a lot of features, and we frequently add more features. We add something new almost every week. For two years we did without any help system at all. That’s why we were flooded with users’ questions like “How can I do it?”, “Could you please help me ...?”, etc.
To understand the load on our technical support team, imagine two thousand users (employees) constantly performing various actions in the online system, almost every user having some questions about using our system.
We realized that unless we create a help system, our technical support team will always be overloaded with users’ requests.
DE: How did you try to reduce the load on your technical support team?
We regularly held meetings with the users. We showed them the new features and discussed the details of using our system. But that approach was very inefficient because spoken information tends to be partially lost or distorted. Besides, we kept adding new features and changing the existing ones, so the oral instructions became outdated soon enough.
DE: Did you compare Dr.Explain with other help authoring tools or methods? Why did you eventually choose it?
We wanted to have a tool that would allow us to create a website containing easy-to-use help information.
Among other things, it was important for us that our technical writer could easily publish the new versions of user documentation without the assistance of IT professionals (a programmer, a webmaster, and a system administrator).
Dr.Explain has met all of our requirements.
Before buying the license, we also examined Dr.Explain’s documentation and the examples on its website, and tried out the free trial version. All of that has helped us a lot to take the final decision.
I’d like to mention Dr.Explain’s killer feature: screenshot annotation.
I should also say that we have easily blended the online help created by Dr.Explain into the main website of our project, matching its style. That’s always very important for website usability and brand perception.
DE: How did it help your project?
Our project has a special feature for sending technical support requests. The feedback helps us solve our partners’ issues more efficiently.
In the past, we were flooded with such requests, and resolving the issues took a lot of time.
Thanks to Dr.Explain, our technical support team receives fewer requests. Now the users can read the user documentation to learn about our product’s features. We have greatly reduced the load on our technical support team.
DE: Would you like to add anything?
It’s awesome, guys. Really.
Let me only remind you about the comment I emailed to you, regarding the publishing of a topic depending on its status. It’s important for us.
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For more details about the projects of Action-MCFR Mediagroup, please visit its website action-mcfr.ru [ru]