Meet Seismic

Seismic is the global leader in SaaS applications for sales enablement, helping organizations engage customers, enable teams, and ignite revenue growth. The Seismic Enablement CloudTM is the most powerful, unified enablement platform that equips customer-facing teams with the right skills, content, tools, and insights to grow and win. From the world’s largest enterprises to startups and small businesses, more than 2,000 organizations around the globe trust Seismic for their enablement needs. Seismic is headquartered in San Diego with offices across North America, Europe, and Australia.

The Challenge

Seismic’s small team of technical writers was struggling to keep up with the company’s steadily expanding product portfolio and rapid release cycle. The challenge was compounded by a series of acquisitions that brought them more technical content to maintain, in more systems and formats. With an antiquated toolset and cumbersome workflows, the documentation team’s backlog was rapidly snowballing.

We think of the time before Zoomin as the 'Dark Ages' of documentation at Seismic. Our team was a fraction of the size it is today, and we were drowning. We were battling outdated tools, and we were bogged down by inefficient processes. Documentation was starting to lag further and further behind releases. To make matters worse, documentation was delivered through a clunky interface that was difficult to navigate and search. Customers were beginning to get frustrated. We knew we needed to make radical changes to keep up with growing business demands and maintain our market position.

The Solution

In 2021, Seismic embarked on a transformative journey with Zoomin that culminated in the launch of a modern new portal, dedicated to technical content and tailored to meet Seismic's unique needs. On the back end, the documentation team saw immediate efficiency improvements from streamlined content development workflows. Zoomin’s ability to support a variety of different source content formats cut content development time in half out of the gate. The team continued to realize incremental gains as they consolidated access to content from various acquisitions without needing to convert content to a different format, allowing for the sunset of other systems. On the front end, the number of visitors to the portal began to steadily increase, and more users were engaging with documentation than ever before.

The user experience was exponentially better from Day 1. Having a user-friendly space dedicated to documentation was a huge step forward. Users could self-serve product answers more easily than ever before. The documentation team could self-administer everyday changes. And for the first time, we had ready access to dashboard reporting and data that gave us actionable insights to help drive strategic program improvements.

The evolution of Seismic’s Documentation Portal

In 2023, Seismic entered the next phase of its documentation journey, with goals of reducing friction and improving the self-service experience. With official product documentation in one portal, support-generated content in another portal, and no technical content at all in the product, Seismic users had to bounce between platforms searching for answers. Seismic partnered with Zoomin on a host of portal upgrades and enhancements:

A new unified search experience across multiple platforms (documentation portal, ServiceNow support portal, and the Seismic product).
New context-sensitive help recommendations in support case tickets.
New context-sensitive help recommendations in the Seismic product.
AI-powered product answers, article summaries, code explanations, and more.

With a great user experience in mind, Seismic also worked closely with Zoomin to align the documentation portal's design with the latest corporate and product branding, ensuring a seamless, cohesive brand experience across all customer touchpoints.

The continual improvements will absolutely have a positive influence on our customers’ experience.

RESULTS

Seismic sees a measurable impact

A remarkable 106% leap in the number of unique visitors, due to new integrations that surface documentation for users at more touchpoints.

Growth of 132% in the number of content views in 2023, with contextually relevant help content suggestions surfacing in the product and in support tickets.

117% increase in engagement, includi ng downloading, sharing, and rating of content.

An increase of 82% in 2023 in the number of users searching for and reading the available content, and answering questions through self-service.

A 50% reduction in technical writing hours, due to the elimination of redundant workflows.

144% increase in the number of single source articles available across multiple touchpoints.

Successful decommissioning of two third-party portals, reducing external vendor costs and maintenance efforts.

We've successfully increased the visibility of help content, improved self-service workflows, and sunset third party portals we no longer needed. As a result, we're seeing the needle move in the right direction on Support KPIs that matter to the business, like case deflection and cost reduction.

Salesforce has completed its acquisition of Zoomin

Seismic: Exponentially improving user experience with Zoomin

Business impact

+106%

unique visitors

+82%

product answers delivered

+132%

content views

-50%

content development hours

-100%

content conversion hours

-2

third-party portals