We were very excited to work on a project with Balihoo, a company based in Boise, Idaho, that specializes in enabling large, nationwide companies to achieve local marketing success.

We were approached with a problem that Balihoo had with their help delivery system for their software products used by their customers.  Their product help was too tightly coupled with their software system, requiring official software release procedures to be followed every time product help needed to be updated or added.  This led to information getting out of date easily because the process to update took too much work, too many barriers, and was reliant on software release schedules.  It made a lot of sense to separate their help content from their software application so that it could be changed easier, and maintained by the business units without going through the programming teams and their procedures and systems.

The solution we came up with was a Balihoo Help Center, implemented as a CMS using Drupal, that would allow Product Help Topics, FAQ entries, and a Glossary, that would all be tied together through an easy to navigate system.  Ultimately, a good help system reduces in-person live chat calls and increased customer satisfaction if you put the power into their own hands to find answers on their time.

The system would also need to be maintained exclusively by the Balihoo internal support teams, so being easy to administer and create content, and to bring on new customers without involving a software engineer was critical.

Having easy navigation of the potentially hundreds of help topics was key, so a top-down navigation was put in place along with what I would call horizontal navigation, where topics are tagged with keywords, and each help topic has a list of other help topics with those same keywords.

Also, a challenging requirement was that customers would be given a customized help experience based on the products that they used.  The kicker being that the customers would not have logins on the system.  So a unique system was designed, that stretched the capabilities of Drupal outside of any existing modules, to have a unique URL for each customer that would then only display the help content that was associated with their products.  This was integrated on the lowest level, so that the customers navigation would change, and even the search would not be able to see help topics unless they were associated with their purchased products.  This system was achieved by having Balihoo content creators tag each piece of content with the appropriate products, then when a new customer is brought on, they are added through an administrative interface and given access to the appropriate products.  This makes it easy for a customer to be modified completely by the Balihoo team if they happen to add new products, the content in their help center changes automatically, you just have a one time change in one configuration option.

The end system has been a success for Balihoo, requiring little support from Zerrtech, and has been rolled out to many of Balihoo's customers.