Success Strategy to Make Technical Documentation an Integral Part of your Customer Journey
Presentation Abstract
Improving the reach, velocity and experience of your customer-facing content is critical in this digital age. But most organizations end up focusing on product/marketing content, while technical documentation is often ignored primarily as these two departments exist in silos.
Join this session by Laralyn Melvin, Senior Director, Technical Publications, and Bernadette Javier, Manager, Web Experience, Palo Alto Networksmdash;to learn how they made technical documentation a central focus of Palo Alto’s customer journey on the web.
- How adopting a single web platform for both marketing and technical content helped them achieve this goal.
- What impact did moving from unstructured FrameMaker to DITA using Adobe FrameMaker have on their content strategy.
- How were they able to achieve 3X speed for their published output, and serve 4.5X more customers through efficient content reuse.
- And how they improved the overall customer journey by offering a consistent content experience at every touch-point of the customer journey, pre- and post-sale.
What can attendees expect to learn?
Often documentation is an overlooked piece of an organization’s content strategy, siloed off in its own area. This talk will detail how unifying your documentation with the rest of your organization’s content can improve the customer journey.
Meet the Presenters
Laralyn Melvin is a technical writing veteran with over 25 years working as a writer in Silicon Valley. As Senior Director of Technical Publications at Palo Alto Networks, Laralyn was chartered with building a writing team and launching a new documentation strategy that would meet the needs of a quickly growing, enterprise-level customer base. The team, which has grown from one writer in 2012 to a team of 22, has developed an innovative, topic-based documentation portal with 1.1M visits per month and a user base of over 200,000 users.
Bernadette Javier is a Senior Web User Interface Manager at Palo Alto Networks. She has personally driven the integration, roadmap and use of various Adobe technology products to deliver a world-class technical documentation website. Bernadette began her career as an electrical engineer and is currently serving her country as an U.S. Air Force Officer, going on 20 years. She is her happiest travelling the world and dominating the volleyball court.
Matangi Vaidyanathan has a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature and a Post Graduate Diploma in Management. Matangi started her career in advertising, and forayed into editing and marketing positions, before she took to technical writing in 2002.
Matangi is passionate about problem solving and answering the questions why and how. She immerses herself in learning and writing about highly complex subjects, such as API-based integrations, virtualization, and SaaS application security, and supporting users through the process of adopting new technologies that improve the way of life. Currently, as a senior manager at Palo Alto Networks, she coaches her team on delivering useful, accessible content to drive the adoption of the Palo Alto Networks Security Operating platform. Matangi balances her zest for technology and writing with running, yoga, and exploring with her Saint Bernard.