Helpjuice vs. Salesforce Service Cloud

Helpjuice is an excellent platform when you’re looking to modernize the way you create documentation. Many companies, especially larger corporations, are stuck in the past, utilizing PDFs and share drives to house and access procedures. With Helpjuice, we now have a centralized web-based platform that provides everything from analytic functions to standard templates, user-specific features, and more. My team specifically chose Helpjuice during the pandemic, when all the tech writers from my company (including myself) were moved into a single team. We needed to find a platform that would allow us to align our publishing standards while also moving us forward in the way we publish procedures. That platform was ultimately Helpjuice. Helpjuice certainly offers a variety of features, but one of the few drawbacks is that it does not incorporate or seem to integrate with any specific ticketing tool. While this isn’t an issue for me or my team, as we are required to use a specific tool internally, I can imagine that someone looking for a complete package with multi-step workflows and an intake process would not find Helpjuice adequate.

Incentivized

It is a helpful tool, but it can be a bit cumbersome to manage. It is also a bit expensive, but we already use CRM for Salesforce and it is convenient to be able to immediately tag contacts and accounts when the tickets come into the system and tie them directly to the account. I do know an integration with Jira is possible (we use Jira internally for our engineering team to escalate issues) but it is not configured right now so managing the connection between support tickets and Jira tickets is manual and hard to keep up with

Incentivized

• We were looking for a publishing feature where there would be some required oversight.
• We have really enjoyed the AI Tool of Wizardshot as it has helped reduce the time spent writing articles.
• The analytic dashboard to see who has contributed what and which articles are the most clicked on is wonderful

Incentivized

• Allows us to make changes quickly and with relative ease
• Can be flexible enough to use among several teams who do very different work
• Salesforce in general provides SO much training that anyone on the team can skill up and help maintain the system

Incentivized

• Article feedback disappears when resolved, would like to see a integration with Jira which we now use to track feedback changes.
• Analytics for the AI search would be appreciated. Currently we have no idea how many people are actually using this feature.
• A way to train the AI search bot. Currently there is no way to up/down vote answers or indicate how accurate or helpful an answer is.

Incentivized

• There is a slight scope for error, but sometimes it has a heavy impact. So this can be improved.
• Costing is high.
• Maintenance is more.
• Expertise is required for implementation.
• The number of communication messages have some limit per organisation account.

Incentivized

Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.

HelpJuice is really amazing as a starter knowledge base vendor. They have great customer service and the ability to customize your website is endless. However, it is difficult to scale up.

Incentivized

I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.

Incentivized

Salesforce's Trust Center clearly communicates occasional issues to anyone who subscribes, down to an organization's cloud instance. Bundled sandboxes ease updates, and seasonal upgrades are seamless, scheduled well in advance with plenty of information about what's coming. Support agents have noticed intermittent Omni-Channel disconnects due to internet connections, and these are clearly notified.

The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce

Incentivized

Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.

Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.

Incentivized

Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.

Incentivized

I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations

Incentivized

Prior to using Helpjuice, I was using Microsoft Publisher to create all the training materials and manuals for multiple divisions within my company. It was awful. It would lag whenever I opened larger manuals, it operated like software from the late 90s, it was not intuitive, from a design perspective, and after migrating to a MacBook Pro as my work computer, I discovered that the program was NEVER created for Mac OS, requiring me to run Windows on my MacBook whenever I had to update any procedures that hadn’t yet migrated to Helpjuice. What a nightmare.

Incentivized

Salesforce service cloud is more configurable than Zendesk and Freshdesk. It has its own inbuilt AI chatbot also which further improves service agent efficiency. Salesforce is more integration agnostic and has pre-built connectors with multiple 3rd party systems. However, in terms of pricing it is priced at a premium compared to the other solutions

The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports

Incentivized

• As I mentioned, my productivity in terms of working around issues, asking for help, etc. is greatly reduced on a DAILY basis.
• I spend as much time finding bugs and filing tickets as I do writing content, and this was especially true at the beginning.
• The Doc Center looks nice, so you'd never know the pain behind it.

• Because this is a cloud service, the security, implementation framework and feature list is very mature and you don't have to develop these during implementation.
• The larger the implementation programme the better the licensing arrangements
• Free developer toolkit for proof of concepts or showcasing features
• Limited to annual subscription model

Incentivized