How Darwinbox Transformed Self-Service at the Speed of SaaS

Darwinbox, a leading provider of cloud-based Human Resources Management Software (HRMS), has rapidly emerged as one of the youngest and fastest-growing players to debut on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises.

As a SaaS company with frequent product updates and a growing global customer base, Darwinbox made a strategic decision to overhaul its self-service approach.

We sat down with Sagar Garuda, Senior Director of Learning at Darwinbox and Prem Garudadri, Director – Product Documentation at Darwinbox, to discuss how they went about this transformation, and how it helped them meet the needs of both their teams and their end users.

The challenge

Quarterly product releases and a rapidly growing user base made it increasingly challenging to keep users informed about the latest features and improvements. Traditional methods like formal training sessions and static PDF documentation could no longer keep pace. Concurrently, users began to show a preference for learning on their own via self-service options.

To stay ahead, Darwinbox set out to create interactive, personalized, and scalable content experiences tailored to diverse audiences, including internal teams, partners, and customers. This meant finding the right tools and partners to bring this vision to life.

The solution

Darwinbox rethought both content production and content delivery.

On the authoring side, they adopted Paligo, a cloud-based Component Content Management System (CCMS), while also expanding their skilled writing team. This gave them the structured authoring, collaborative workflows, and reuse capabilities needed to manage high-volume documentation efficiently. Simultaneously, they optimized their content delivery by bringing all the new content to the users without complicating writers’ jobs. “We want the writers to do what they do best: write, not publish,” said Sagar Garuda.

After evaluating the leading Content Delivery Platforms (CDP) on the market, they eventually identified Fluid Topics, as having the capabilities they required to create the content experience their users wanted, and that their teams needed.

With Fluid Topics, Darwinbox launched a fully branded help portal in under a month, offering a unified experience to all their users. Granular access controls ensure that each audience only sees the content intended for them.

They also opened the door to other teams for content contributions without requiring access to authoring platforms like Paligo. Teams can write in tools like Confluence, and Fluid Topics ingests and standardizes the content structure and presentation.

“You build content how you want… and Fluid Topics, just like magic, is able to structure and publish it automatically,” said Sagar Garuda. “To an end user, it’s seamless, they wouldn’t even know it came from a different platform.”

Key enablers of success

Unified content repository: Darwinbox eliminated silos, creating a single source of truth for documentation. Teams like Sales, Marketing, and Implementation have access only to the content relevant to their needs, all from one central platform.

Chatbot integration: Using Fluid Topics APIs, Darwinbox integrated their help content into their own chatbot and can retrieve recently updated articles dynamically. The result? A 65% support deflection rate, saving time and boosting efficiency.

User analytics & change management: Robust analytics empowered Darwinbox to track user behavior across their help portal: who accessed it, how long they engaged, and whether users were raising support tickets without first consulting available content. With visibility into metrics like document views, topic engagement, and user ratings, they gained a clear understanding of what content resonated and what required refinement. These insights also informed targeted change management efforts, helping guide users toward more effective self-service.

Results & highlights

Darwinbox achieved major milestones in scaling their help portal and driving user engagement:

Content growth:

• Expanded their article library from 5,000 to 10,000 after ending the first year at 7,500, doubling their original volume.
• User increase: Active users tripled, rising from 4,000 to 12,000.
• 1 million views: The help portal recorded 1 million views over the past year (April to March), up from just 50,000 views at launch.

Engagement highlights:

• Users spend an average of 13 minutes engaging with content.
• 25% use the search bar to find information.
• 25% navigate via tiles.
• 20% access content through bookmarks.
  

These results reflect a successful shift to self-service and a highly effective content experience.

Why Fluid Topics was the right choice

Fast implementation: As the ability to get up and running quickly was so important for this fast-growing company, having an out-of-the-box solution was essential. They found that within a month, they were able to make their help portal available, and then just rolled it out to different categories of users.

The option to configure the turnkey solution in-house: They wanted to be able to tailor the branding of their portal to fit their corporate image. Thanks to Fluid Topics’ Page Designer and its WYSIWYG editor & drag and drop” components, they were able to customize without any heavy coding and maintenance.

The stellar content experience: Providing a positive content experience was essential for Darwinbox and they found a gamut of features that made it easier to do so. From the personalized search that adapts results based on user behavior, to bookmarks, ratings and feedback, they turned their content into an exceptional content experience.

Granular access control: With all users on the same portal, it was crucial to define specific access rules and ensure users could only view what they were intended to see. With Fluid Topics, they created and defined separate user groups.

Seamless tool integration: An important criterion for Darwinbox, Fluid Topics seamlessly integrates with both their existing tools (Confluence) and new ones (Paligo), allowing them to publish to their help desk portal with a click.

Conclusion

By embracing a forward-thinking content strategy, Darwinbox swiftly overcame the challenges of rapid SaaS growth into a powerful opportunity to modernize its self-service capabilities.

Their fully branded help portal now offers both internal teams and external users an intuitive, personalized, and efficient way to access the information they need, independently and seamlessly.

Equipped with robust tools for streamlined authoring and publishing, Darwinbox’s content teams are empowered to focus on delivering high-quality, user-centric documentation that drives adoption and customer satisfaction. This strategic approach positions Darwinbox for continued success in a fast-evolving market.