Content at Salesforce: The Knowledgebase Ninjas Podcast Episode

What goes on at Salesforce in terms of technical documentation? Last March, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Gowri Ramkumar on the Knowledgebase Ninjas podcast, where I answered that question.

The conversation focused on the need to minimize content. After all, who wants to read a bunch of technical stuff? Customers look at content to solve business problems quickly — mostly when they’re in a jam. And when you write content for millions of customers, you risk weighing them down in an ocean of words and causing lots of needless floundering when you write towards every single itty-bitty edge case.

Of course, it’s great to have millions of customers — that’s a benefit of being at Salesforce. We’re one of the largest software companies in the world. To maintain our success, we’ve had to have a ruthless eye on the purpose of our content: (1) to increase customer adoption of Salesforce; (2) to reduce customer attrition of Salesforce.

We use metrics on our content to show how we reduce support costs by tens of millions of dollars each year. By helping to minimize support calls or customer cases from many communication channels, we know that we’re doing our job.

What else do we talk about on the podcast episode?

• The goals of the Content Experience team at Salesforce.
• How writers at Salesforce prepare to write content for new features.
• My career path into technical writing and becoming one of Salesforce’s first writers.
• Tech writers who have inspired me and the value of rigorous quality assurance on content.

Want to learn more? Then listen to the podcast episode and subscribe to the Knowledgebase Ninjas Podcast to hear from more people in the content industry.