Solved

Does anyone use Guru standalone as an External Facing Help Center?

  • 29 October 2021
  • 5 replies
  • 537 views
Chris Aleman
Userlevel 2

We currently use Wordpress for our user help center to publish articles and have accessible information for our users. The accordion style hierarchy topics>subtopics>articles is likely the only plus I see of it other than using Guru. The hierarchy of our Wordpress system also only goes about 3 or 4 levels so even that is pretty limited.

I was wondering if anyone using Guru as a external Help center for any users outside of their org and if so how did you make it work for you. Examples or links would be very helpful as well! 

I would love to use Guru’s analytics and editing capabilities to move on from WordPress that does not serve our users that well since it’s pretty hard to maneuver or analyze.

I am trying to not lean too heavy into integrating into another app since I want the analytics of Guru and our engineering teams bandwidth are pretty short which is why we have put off this issue for so long.

icon

Best answer by Anonymous 2 November 2021, 15:09

View original

5 replies

A

Great question @Chris Aleman! There are a couple of options to consider for having Guru Cards powering your external help center:

  1. Use Guru’s API: We use our own external API to publish to our Developer Documentation (also attached a PDF that’s helpful). We use a third-party help docs site called ReadMe that allows us to publish a specific board of Cards into their Guides. Here is the technical documentation on how we did it. This script takes the contents of a board in Guru and makes API calls to ReadMe to create or update docs in markdown format based on the changes seen in Guru. A handful of Guru customers have implemented or are considering similar solutions using Guru’s API. There are a few different ways to do this, but you’ll need a technical resource on your team for the implementation/maintenance (we can also help through our services team, let me know if you’d like to explore further). @Mirna Lessinger @Ben Sykes I could be wrong, but is this something you’ve looked into?
  2. iPaaS (Zapier or Workato): I haven’t seen any examples of this, but we now have integrations with Zapier and Workato to enable all sorts of workflow automations. Not sure if anyone in the community has explored this further, but there could be a possible solution with Wordpress. We also have integration partners that could advise and implement a solution potentially, let me know if you’re interested in exploring and we can connect you with the right partner!
1 Attachment
Ben Sykes
Userlevel 3
Badge

Hey @Chris Anderson,

So we use Workato and Guru’s API to do this - we use Salesforce as our CRM software so our Customer Portal uses Salesforce Knowledge base.

What we do is when a card that is in our “customer facing” collection, we have a condition of if TRUSTED status = Verified AND if the verifier is someone from our “SME list” which is in a lookup table. When those conditions are met, the body of the card is moved across to Salesforce Knowledge Base, and the boards that the card are placed onto are mapped to the corresponding Data Categories in SF.

When the article is created in SF, we use Workato to then add the “Salesforce Article Number” to the tag of the Guru card, so it creates a 1-2-1 relationship between the card and Article. So for us, that means that if we edit the card, and if it becomes unverified again, we again use the Trusted and SME conditions I mentioned above to prevent the updates from going to SF, until its been reviewed and verified. It also means that if we archive the card, it also archives the corresponding article in SF.

So we store all of our content in Guru - but it’s hosted in our CRM platform for customer use, so they can search for it in our customer portal.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s taken us over 12 weeks to develop, with A LOT of trial and error :joy:

Does that that answer your question somewhat @Chris Aleman? I’m on PTO for the next week, but if you want to see it in action or have any follow up questions just let me know, unless I’ve 1000% not answered your question :sweat_smile:

Mirna Lessinger
Userlevel 2
Badge +2

Apologies for the delay  @Chris Anderson! We also use SFDC as our CRM and our Help Center is hosted on SFDC Community. We have a script that publishes verified content from Guru to SFDC Knowledge, pretty similar flow to what @Ben Sykes described, except for the Workato integration. Maybe something for us to consider in the next phase.

Mirna Lessinger
Userlevel 2
Badge +2

@Ben Sykes curious, so the card publishing Guru > SFDC happens via Marketo? 

Ben Sykes
Userlevel 3
Badge

@Ben Sykes curious, so the card publishing Guru > SFDC happens via Marketo? 

We use a Workato recipe, but yeah, the engineers write it in Guru, and Workato authors the content into Salesforce for us. When we edit the card or archive it in Guru, the updates flow automatically into Salesforce as well.

Reply


Terms & ConditionsCookie settings