Editor’s note: Paligo is a valued marketing partner of TechWhirl, and this article has been produced as part of a sponsored collaboration. The content provides an overview of Paligo’s integrations and their impact on technical writing and customer support workflows. While this is a paid feature, TechWhirl maintains its commitment to delivering insightful and relevant information for our audience of technical communication professionals.
Take a look at the Techwhirl archives, and you’ll see that for decades technical writers have struggled with becoming full partners with organizations’ support teams and product teams. In recent years organizations have made some progress towards understanding how this trio plays a pivotal role in ensuring that users – customers, partners, or internal stakeholders – get the right information at the right time. As demand for self-service options increases and businesses look for ways to optimize resources, synergy between these groups has never been more critical.
Enter Paligo, a Component Content Management System (CCMS) designed with structured authoring principles at its core. Paligo’s integrations with leading customer support platforms such as Zendesk, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Freshdesk, offer a seamless bridge between technical content creation and customer support delivery. These integrations showcase the potential for technical writers to elevate their role as the crucial lynchpin between product and support teams, while delivering an exceptional user experience
The overlooked nexus: product, support, and technical writing
Customer support teams rely on product and technical teams to stay informed about changes such as new features, updates, or even product retirements. Similarly, technical writers play a vital role in translating these updates into user-friendly content. This collaborative process ensures that support teams are equipped with accurate, timely information to address customer inquiries effectively.
Source: Whatfix
However, gaps often exist in communicating and disseminating this information. Without efficient systems in place, support teams may face delays in accessing critical updates, resulting in frustration for both employees and customers. By contrast, a well-integrated ecosystem where technical content flows seamlessly from writers to support systems can significantly improve the customer support process.
Today’s users prioritize self-service for support resolution
The preference for self-service among end users is clear. A study from McKinsey showed that 90% of B2B decision-makers expect digital self-serve and remote support models will grow post-COVID. In addition 99% expect to make purchases in end-to-end self service digital portals. And Microsoft studies as far back as 2015 showed that 90% of consumers want self-serve customer portals for brands and products. Users overwhelmingly favor accessing a knowledge base or help center before resorting to direct contact with customer support. This makes the quality and accessibility of technical content foundational to customer satisfaction.
The challenge lies in maintaining high-quality, up-to-date documentation that can be easily accessed in various formats and languages. For technical writers, this means not only producing exceptional content but also delivering it in a way that aligns with the user’s chosen support platform.
The impact of high-quality documentation
When documentation is well-crafted and readily available, organizations receive benefits that go to the bottom line:
- Ticket deflection: Users can find answers on their own, reducing the volume of incoming support tickets.
- Faster resolution: For tickets that do reach support, agents equipped with accurate, up-to-date content can resolve issues more efficiently.
- Enhanced customer experience: Accessible and user-friendly documentation fosters trust and satisfaction, which in turn increases customer loyalty and stickiness of product/service offerings.
Structured authoring: The secret to scaling content
The increasing complexity of products and the demand for multilingual, multi-channel documentation requires a scalable approach to content management. Structured authoring organizes content by following a set of standard rules and schema (such as XML). Discrete content components can be optimized for reuse, and the tools available allow for a topic-based approach to content development.
Paligo, built on structured authoring principles, empowers technical writers to work smarter and faster. Writers can create modular content that is consistent, adaptable, and easy to manage across multiple channels. This approach not only streamlines content creation but also ensures that updates are implemented seamlessly across all documentation.
Paligo integrations bridge the gaps
Paligo’s integrations with Zendesk, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Freshdesk take this synergy to the next level. These integrations allow technical writers to publish content and manage it directly from Paligo, ensuring that knowledge bases and help centers are always stocked with the latest, most relevant information, all from a single source of truth.
Zendesk and Zendesk Preflight
The integration of Paligo with Zendesk provides a best-in-class solution for technical writers managing content for help centers and knowledge bases. Paligo’s single-sourcing and structured authoring capabilities allow writers to create and reuse content efficiently, minimizing repetitive tasks like manually updating multiple articles. Changes made in Paligo can automatically propagate across all linked articles, ensuring consistency and saving significant time. Also, advanced features like variables for dynamic content updates and conditional content settings make it possible to tailor documentation for different audiences without duplicating effort.
The integration also simplifies the publishing process with tools like Zendesk Preflight, which offers detailed mapping previews and lets users control how content aligns with Zendesk categories and articles. Writers can selectively publish specific topics, choose content visibility settings, and even remove outdated articles directly from Paligo. This streamlines content management, improves collaboration, and reduces maintenance overhead, making it a powerful tool for scaling support documentation effectively in Zendesk.
Salesforce and Salesforce Preflight
The integration of Paligo with Salesforce is immensely beneficial to technical writers tasked with creating and managing content for Salesforce Knowledge. This integration streamlines the process of publishing structured and reusable content directly into Salesforce Knowledge, ensuring articles and subsections are organized hierarchically and intuitively for users. Paligo’s powerful single-sourcing and content reuse capabilities allow writers to efficiently update content across multiple publications and maintain consistency.
With features like Salesforce Preflight, writers can preview and manage content before publication, reducing errors and ensuring proper categorization within Salesforce’s nested layout. This tool enables selective publishing, visual mapping of articles, and real-time updates, significantly enhancing workflow efficiency. In addition, the ability to integrate data categories directly from Paligo ensures content is tagged appropriately for better discoverability and relevance to specific audiences. This integration transforms Salesforce Knowledge into a dynamic, well-organized help center tailored to user needs, maximizing the value of documentation efforts for both internal teams and end users.
ServiceNow
The integration of Paligo with ServiceNow empowers technical writers to create and manage content for ServiceNow Knowledge Bases with greater efficiency and precision. Paligo’s robust CCMS allows writers to craft structured, reusable content that can be published directly to ServiceNow. This integration ensures that articles meet ServiceNow’s layout requirements and are presented in a professional and accessible format.
Features like topic-based authoring, advanced version control, and conditional filtering enable writers to tailor knowledge articles to specific needs while maintaining consistency across publications. By automating publication and updates, this integration reduces manual tasks and enhances workflow productivity, delivering a more polished and effective help center experience for users.
Freshdesk
The integration between Paligo and Freshdesk provides technical writers with an effective solution for managing and delivering content to Freshdesk-based help centers and knowledge bases. Using Paligo’s structured authoring tools, writers can create reusable content topics that seamlessly maps to Freshdesk’s Category > Folder > Article structure. This process ensures consistency and reduces redundancy when updating or creating articles in Freshdesk. The integration also supports both automatic updates to existing articles and the creation of new content, aligning perfectly with Freshdesk’s framework.
Writers can customize Freshdesk-specific layouts within Paligo, allowing them to tailor publication settings to meet organizational requirements. The integration leverages Freshdesk’s API for smooth data transfer, simplifying the publishing workflow and making content maintenance more manageable. These features enable technical writers to focus on delivering high-quality content while maintaining a professional and organized knowledge base in Freshdesk.
Benefits for technical writers
These integrations aren’t just about making content available. They’re about empowering technical writers to align and streamline content development and delivery to product and support teams. With Paligo:
- Efficiency improves: Writers can manage a single source of truth for content, eliminating duplication of effort and ensuring consistency.
- Collaboration enhances: By integrating with platforms that support teams use daily, technical writers can align content more closely with the needs of those teams.
- Scalability is enabled: Structured content makes it easier to scale documentation efforts as businesses grow and product portfolios expand.
Real-world outcomes
Organizations leveraging Paligo and its integrations report significant improvements in both internal processes and user satisfaction. For example:
- A provider of planning solutions for churches with more than a dozen Zendesk help centers reduced content development and maintenance workloads by 50%, improving collaboration and content reuse, and implementing standard processes.
- A global supplier of robotic order fulfillment solutions drove efficiencies in technical content delivery, including streamlined translation management, simplified multi-channel publishing, integrated image management, and improved collaboration, which cut document backlogs by half.
- A software solutions company specializing in applied AI for professional services built a scalable documentation practice that supports increased productivity, extends content reuse across products, and standardized processes for update and maintenance releases.
Conclusion
Leveraging Paligo’s powerful integrations with leading help desk applications, technical content teams, empowered by structured authoring and scalable tools, can ensure that internal and external users have access to the information they need in the formats they prefer. The result is a win-win-win: improved operational efficiency, happier customers, and a more cohesive organizational strategy that unlocks the full potential of their knowledge ecosystem.
Businesses’ product and support teams can more easily achieve their goals for the customer experience with the faster updates and more accurate content that Paligo’s integrations can provide.
