As companies explore ways to improve the customer experience, documentation is getting more recognition for its role in creating loyal and satisfied customers. Clear and informative installation guides, user manuals, and service documentation elevate experiences by helping customers get more from their products and solve problems fast.
Bo Jensen understands the importance that documentation can bring to customer experience. For more than 15 years, he has helped a team of 40 technical writers support more than 6,000 products from Grundfos, the global leader in pumps and pump solutions. From household heating systems to industrial applications, Grundfos pumps are used by millions to keep systems running.
“Supporting documentation is often the first thing that customers and service operators look at when trying to install or fix Grundfos pumps,” says Bo Jensen, IT Project Coordinator at Grundfos. “Documentation should be clear and consistent to help customers get the best performance from pumps every time.”
The Grundfos technical documentation team creates supportive content for all 6,000 Grundfos products, including installation and operations guides, data booklets, data sheets, and service kits. In addition to working on new product documentation, older content is regularly updated to fix errors, clarify steps, or update boilerplate language. While documents are created and managed in English, they are translated in up to 50 languages to meet the needs of international audiences.
Today, Grundfos uses XML Documentation for Adobe Experience Manager to manage thousands of data topics and provide customers with up-to-date information across more channels.
“XML Documentation for Adobe Experience Manager streamlines content creation and editing processes to help us keep documents updated and accurate faster,” says Bo Jensen. “Our writers can spend more time making sure that they are answering all of our customers questions and providing the clearest and most user-friendly experiences possible.”
“I have been extremely impressed by the work Adobe puts into continuously improving XML Documentation for Adobe Experience Manager. Today, everyone loves working with the Adobe application and they would never go back.”
Bo Jensen
IT Project Coordinator, Grundfos
Improving experiences and speed with structured DITA content
When Bo Jensen first joined Grundfos, Adobe FrameMaker was the tool of choice to create highly professional documentation. As the IT Project Coordinator, it is Bo Jensen’s job to find ways to improve the documentation process and make workflows even better for technical writers. Because the 40 writers work at Grundfos offices around the world, Bo Jensen created FrameMaker templates and intuitive widgets to improve consistency and efficiency.
Bo Jensen continued to search for ways to improve the workflow and the customer experience. While writers would copy and paste standard copy between documents, content reuse was low. Updating copy involved scrolling through multiple long FrameMaker documents to find areas that need to be updated.
Most importantly, relying on PDF documents created in FrameMaker limited the customer experience. Customers who wanted their questions answered needed to go to the website, download a lengthy PDF, and scroll through the guide until they found the information they were looking for. Bo Jensen wanted to give customers an easier way of getting the answers they need on any device.
Several years ago, Bo Jensen heard about a new trend in documentation that sounded like the solution Grundfos was looking for: structured DITA XML content. But finding the right component content management system (CCMS) for DITA content was no easy task. Bo Jensen required a web-based system that would make it easier to perform updates, check systems, and collaborate with writers anywhere.
