Content Aggregation

What is Content Aggregation?

Organizations have different repositories where they store various kinds of information. For example, there can be a repository for policy documents, a repository for how-to documents, and another for internal communication and solution documentation. Suppose an end user has a query, the answer to which resides in one of these repositories. This can get time-consuming and tedious for the end users when they try to find the information they are looking for from different sources. To simplify this process, Whatfix enables customers to integrate their repositories into their Whatfix Dashboard using Content Aggregation.

Content Aggregation is a web crawler that finds, analyzes, and crawls all the customer data/information/support documents from their content repositories and integrates them within Whatfix. You can think of Content Aggregation as a digital librarian or a search engine that can search through all the web pages and documents from different sources in seconds and provide you with relevant information faster.

Content Aggregation works with repositories like Sharepoint, Salesforce, OneDrive, ServiceNow, Confluence, Share Files, Freshdesk, organizations' websites, internal and external portals, etc. This improves organizations' ability to aggregate information for their end users.

Type of crawling in Content Aggregation

There are two types of crawling performed by Whatfix Content Aggregation.

• Web Crawling: Whatfix crawler loads the web pages in a browser and extracts their HTML content. It then passes the content to extract useful information like text, title, and URL of the child pages. This process is continued in a recursive manner until all valid links are visited based on the configured regex or until the crawling limit is reached. 
• API Crawling: Whatfix crawler directly hits the data APIs of the customers' repositories to fetch relevant information like text, title, links, and URLs to the next set of records in case of paginated APIs. This process is continued until all records are fetched or the crawling limit is reached. 

Benefits of Content Aggregation

Content Aggregation can help organizations improve their support content and customer satisfaction while reducing costs and staying ahead of the competition. With the help of Content Aggregation, companies can make informed decisions and improve their overall performance. Content Aggregation benefits the end users as well as the organizations' internal employees.

The following are some benefits of Content Aggregation:

• Deep Search Capability: Content Aggregation offers deep search, which means, search on Repository links is possible on the basis of the title as well as the content/words/phrases available on that page. This adds value to our customers, as their end users can get what they are looking for faster, which improves the user experience. It also helps organizations' internal employees when they try to troubleshoot customer queries.
• Helps optimize solutions: This benefits your end users and the organization as a whole. With Content Aggregation, data analysts can understand the pattern of help content consumption, the type of help content that is most looked for, streamline their support portals, and help optimize and improve their products or services.
• Saves Time and Manual Effort: With Content Aggregation, you do not have to create manual links for your support portals. Content Aggregation promises to fetch up to 2000 content within 48-72 hours. This also saves the time of going back and forth between articles and creating multiple links.
• Automatic Syncs: With Content Aggregation, sync updates are automated, which means that even if there are any updates, additions, or deletions in your knowledge base, a sync is performed timely and the repository links on your Whatfix dashboard are updated. You can also set the sync frequency. This ensures that end users have access to the updated information.
• Contextualization: Content Aggregation supports features like automatic tagging of repository links with relevant tags to help with better contextualization.

Process of Content Aggregation

Whatfix first integrates organizations' Content Repositories on the Whatfix Dashboard using Content Aggregation. These crawled repositories are then integrated with Whatfix widgets such as Self Help and Task List.

These widgets are then made available to the end users. When the end users want any information that is stored in the repository, they can derive it all by searching for it in the Self Help or Task List.

For example, if an organization has multiple repositories, they can use Content Aggregation and crawl all the repositories into the Whatfix Dashboard, and then integrate it with Self Help and Task List depending on their requirement. Content Aggregation now works as a search engine. If an end user of this organization wants to find any information, they can simply search for it on Self Help and get what they are looking for.

Repository integrations supported by Whatfix

SharePoint, OneDrive, ServiceNow, Freshservice, Confluence, Salesforce, ShareFile, Freshdesk, Zendesk, and Seismic are out-of-the-box integrations supported by Whatfix's Content Aggregation capability. In addition to this, Whatfix also enables you to integrate other unsupported repositories using the Custom Repository approach.