How Emplifi saves $30,000 per year and cuts documentation time by 30% with Jira and Confluence Cloud Premium

Challenge: After a multi-company merger, Emplifi's social media software firm needed to unite teams on a shared platform and establish new documentation practices.

Solution: By customizing Jira and Confluence cloud, Emplifi created a collaborative workspace and an internal-external documentation portal for both customers and employees.

Impact: Creating a central hub for collaboration and both internal and external documentation has saved time and money, increased visibility, and improved user experiences inside and out.

Multiple business and technical teams, collaborating to create one industry-leading product

Emplifi is a modular, adaptable platform for nurturing customer relationships through social media. Named a leader in the Forrester Wave Social Suites, it’s a trusted tool for major, global brands like Spotify, Cartier, and Sony – an impressive accomplishment for a brand that is still quite young. 

Emplifi formed when four social media management tools merged between 2020 and 2022. For Director of Technical Content Kris Klima, this time of transition created new documentation challenges. All the teams within each company had their own tools and processes. To successfully combine products for their customers, they needed to successfully combine their teams and establish clear, shared processes for internal and external documentation, such as customer success guide best practices guides for various internal teams. 

“We needed to integrate these separate products and create common-ground processes and workflows,” Kris says. “This was a large-scale, cross-functional effort.”

Emplifi's endeavor toward centralization

After the merger, teams found it difficult to find documentation and collaborate effectively across disparate tools. “The impact on everybody down the chain of development, from product managers onward, was immense,” says Kris. 

People would reach out to subject matter experts or product managers when they needed help, interrupting their flow. Plus, without a hub for information, employees would create their own documents. This not only led to information siloes, but also duplicate efforts as people covered the same topics others had already written about.

The goal: A two-sided documentation portal to elevate the customer and employee experience

As Emplifi’s teams merged, Kris saw an opportunity to build effective documentation practices from the ground up. He envisioned a comprehensive, two-sided documentation portal: an internal knowledge base for employees, with a customer-facing side for Emplifi’s users.

The new documentation solution would benefit both customers and employees for years to come. “Too often, product documentation is just seen as a box to check before the release,” Kris says. “It’s actually a huge aspect of creating a good service experience.”

A customized Confluence and Jira solution built for collaboration, through collaboration

Emplifi considered many documentation platforms, but Kris and his team gravitated toward the Atlassian cloud, for its scalability and seamless integration with Marketplace apps. Atlassian cloud was already in use across Emplifi, which gave Kris confidence it could meet the diverse needs of both employees and customers.

Kris chose Confluence as Emplifi’s go-to tool for documentation on Atlassian cloud. “I approached Confluence as a platform I could shape into exactly what I needed using apps,” he shares. He turned to Atlassian Partner K15t, using their Scroll Apps for Confluence to create a sleek and powerful internal-external documentation hub powered by Jira and Confluence.

“Our writers work directly within development teams, and documentation tickets are part of development projects,” Kris explains. This approach made Confluence and Jira a perfect combination for the new portal. Documentation and development teams could work in their preferred tools, while still collaborating closely.”

 “A well-designed documentation portal is critical for enabling users,” says Shannon Meehan, K15t’s Head of Product Marketing. “When it’s consolidated and visually appealing, it elevates both the product and the user experience. For Emplifi, Confluence and the Scroll Suite were the perfect fit.” In fact, K15t now uses Emplifi’s documentation portal as a showcase for what K15t’s apps can do.

The standout feature of Emplifi’s setup is its flexibility. Kris and his team can easily make content public for customers, private for employees, or both. Thanks to Atlassian Guard’s single sign-on, employees can quickly access the portal, and Kris’s team can manage content and the sites independently – no developer required.

 “Kris demonstrated how apps from multiple Marketplace vendors could work together to make the setup even more efficient, and his team’s workflows more flexible,” Shannon adds. “It’s a brilliant example of Confluence’s extensibility in action.”

Premium AI and Confluence databases save time and stress

As Emplifi built their solution, they took advantage of Atlassian Cloud Premium features, like Confluence databases and Atlassian Intelligence, to maximize efficiency and minimize re-work.

Verifying every release with Confluence databases

Kris's team uses Confluence databases as a content lifecycle management tool and a bird's-eye view of all content before every release. “You just open the database filter, and the content properties are right there, without looking through hundreds of pages to find one specific thing,” Kris explains. “Even the fact that we can easily check if the new pages are labeled is huge, because labels are important for how we use K15t’s Scroll Suite. Confluence databases help us avoid situations where we release documentation, then need to republish because we forgot to label two pages.”

Editing efficiently with Atlassian Intelligence

With Atlassian Intelligence built into the platform, both writers and developers can edit content independently instead of depending on someone else. “Previously, developers would have to ask someone on the documentation team, or a native English speaker if they aren’t one themselves, to clean up their content,” Kris says. “Now, they just use Atlassian Intelligence.”

Writers are benefiting too by reducing the need for peer editing. “Before, you’d be asking someone else to check over your work,” Kris explains. “Atlassian Intelligence is a convenient, smart helper to clean up the mess that can sometimes happen when you’re editing all day.” 

Freeing up time, money, and focus

Now, Empifi’s documentation and engineering teams collaborate seamlessly with Jira and Confluence — truly integrating documentation into the development process. For example, Confluence documents can be easily embedded into Jira tickets, so experts can review them without leaving Jira. Development projects can also be closed even when documentation tickets remain open, without affecting statistics or goals.

“Jira and Confluence are a perfect pairing,” Kris says. “Writers don’t have to use a code-editing tool to write documentation, and developers don’t need to navigate an unfamiliar environment designed for technical writers.” 

With this new Atlassian-powered documentation hub, Emplifi’s teams are unifying people and knowledge across the organization, as well as providing even better support for their customers.

More than $30,000 and 30% of documentation time saved every year 

By choosing Atlassian over other tools on the market, Emplifi is saving over $30,000 per year on tooling and licenses. “Now, we just focus on writing,” says Kris. “Everything else is taken care of automatically by our Atlassian setup.” 

Since implementing Atlassian tools, Emplifi is releasing more documentation while saving money and time. “Compared to doc-as-code solutions, we’re saving 25-30% of our time throughout the documentation lifecycle with Jira and Confluence.”

Using Atlassian Intelligence has also helped teams eliminate an additional six hours or more of manual editing time every release. 

Faster delivery through smoother cross-functional collaboration

Having a single source for documentation and collaboration is improving information flow across technical and business teams, including HR, Marketing, IT, Legal, and more. Breaking down silos has reduced stress, streamlined communication, and saved one full working day per person during each two-week release cycle – all leading to better, faster delivery. “The information flow has massively sped up,” says Kris. 

Full visibility into development history 

Now, documentation and release notes are stored in Confluence and linked to Jira tickets, making it easy for teams to find the root causes of issues and answer questions. These improvements have helped the team resolve issues faster. 

“Rather than asking colleagues, the information we need is right there in the docs. Subject matter experts can just link to the documentation site, instead of writing out a response,” says Kris. Teams also appreciate that interacting through the Emplifi documentation site helps them collect valuable feedback, too. “Thanks to our Confluence and apps setup, we can literally update any page at any time with zero dependencies."

Customer Outcomes

Emplifi’s customers love the excellent service they receive throughout the journey, from onboarding, to managed services, to ongoing training. Documentation has been key to creating these elevated experiences. In the first six months after the documentation site launched, 10,000 customers used it to navigate and optimize their Emplifi platform, saving customers and employees approximately five hours per week on support.  

Emplifi’s team also used the Confluence API as a source for their in-app, AI-powered search. “Confluence content’s code is clearly structured and well defined. That made it easy for our Innovation Team to train our Librarian to identify and serve the right content so they can address customers’ questions directly in our platform,” says Kris. That adds up to faster, self-serve answers and less time messaging with customer support. 

Winning advocates and awards

Employees have seen how much easier this solution made documenting, finding, and sharing information with each other and customers. Atlassian noticed too, naming Emplifi the winner of the 2024 “Work Differently, Together” Award. This award recognizes organizations that have developed successful collaborative processes, effectively used Atlassian’s Team Playbook tactics, and created meaningful communications with business stakeholders.

“Emplifi takes a collaborative approach to all of our work management processes,” says Emplifi’s SVP of Product Martin Triska. “It’s integral to our business that we have effective platforms like Atlassian in place to enable our most important outcomes. We’re truly honored to be acknowledged by these platforms for excelling in collaboration. It’s incredibly exciting that Atlassian has recognized Emplifi as a leader in driving innovative, teamwork-focused processes that create real value for our customers.”

Making life easier for customers and employees with documentation that solves problems

Emplifi is on a mission to create a unified and effective way for brands to reach, engage, and retain modern customers. With Confluence, Jira, and K15t’s Scroll apps, Emplifi is accomplishing this mission for their customers and employees. 

With Jira and Confluence Cloud Premium, Emplifi has connected multiple teams on a common platform and laid a strong foundation for documentation that will continue powering the company’s success from the inside out. 

“Atlassian’s solutions are key to our team’s success. Integrating Confluence and Jira allows us to streamline lifecycle management, react to customer feedback, and deliver new product features, including their documentation, quickly and with as little friction as possible,” Kris says. “It is especially rewarding to be recognized by Atlassian for our collaborative nature when it comes to work management processes that involve product, engineering, and documentation. This award not only shines a light on our team’s efforts, but also underscores just how innovative workflows within the Atlassian ecosystem benefit the product and, by definition, our customers.”