In this blog, we will dive into how we can change the challenges of a remote induction for a distributed team into opportunities for better collaboration.

Distributed team and induction training: What exactly are they?

A distributed team is a team of people from various locations around the world who collaborate and work together. They don’t necessarily share an office or sometimes even the same timezone. Team members can easily connect and work to achieve their goals thanks to many digital collaborative tools like Confluence, Jira, Trello, Loom, and many more.

An induction training is when new hires go through the process of introducing them to their job, the company, and its culture while also equipping them with the knowledge, skills, and resources to become productive team members on day one. It can also be referred to as onboarding or orientation, though onboarding can be a longer process depending on the position, and induction is just a part of it.

For distributed teams, practical induction training is crucial but very challenging. With team members scattered across time zones and locations, the usual in-person introductions and guidance are harder to replicate. This is where Confluence steps in with its collaborative features that streamline induction training, making it structured, consistent, and engaging, no matter where your team is located.

Why induction training for distributed teams is a challenge (and an opportunity! )

Like any first impression, induction training is a critical moment. Get it right, and you build confidence and motivation. Miss the mark, and you risk leaving new hires feeling lost or disconnected. So, while your new hire is trying their best to leave a good first impression, you should also be doing the same. Induction training for distributed teams comes with its own set of challenges (besides the usual ones) that can feel overwhelming, such as:

• Coordinating across time zones: Trying to align schedules for live sessions can result in awkward timings for some team members, leading to frustration or reduced participation.
• Maintaining engagement in a virtual setting: Without the in-person interaction, it’s easy for new hires to feel disconnected, making it harder to capture their attention during training sessions.
• Ensuring consistent access to information: Distributed teams rely on digital resources, but ensuring everyone has access to the same materials simultaneously, regardless of location, requires good planning and coordination.

However, each challenge is also an opportunity to innovate. It’s a chance to improve the training experience and streamline processes by adopting the right tools. Here’s how you can turn those hurdles into advantages:

• Asynchronous learning: asynchronous tools allow new hires to access training content at their own pace and schedule, eliminating time zone conflicts and enabling a more flexible learning experience.
• Enhanced engagement with digital tools: moving away from traditional training formats, an interactive learning process offers new hires a more engaging, hands-on learning experience, reducing the monotony of slideshows or lengthy documents.
• Centralized knowledge sharing: a well-structured digital knowledge base ensures that all employees, no matter their location, have consistent access to up-to-date training materials, reducing confusion and ensuring that everyone is on the same page.

Best practices for virtual induction training with Smart Courses for Confluence

Smart Courses for Confluence takes remote induction training up a notch, making it easier, smarter, and far more engaging for your new hires. Forget the one-size-fits-all approach; Smart Courses helps you create personalized, interactive onboarding experiences that work for your team, whether they’re around the corner or across the globe. Here’s how you can bring everything together for an onboarding process that actually works!

Create engaging and rich content

Make learning interactive and engaging by adding videos, SCORM packages, and other multimedia elements. Smart Courses supports 8 types of content formats, enabling you to create dynamic, varied training sessions that go beyond static text and slides.

Provide multilingual learning

Break down language barriers with Smart Courses by offering courses in multiple languages, making your induction process inclusive for global teams.

Automate assignments and reminders

Effortlessly assign courses to new joiners with the continuous assignment feature in Smart Courses and also send them automated reminders to keep them on track. This ensures no one falls behind and every step of the induction process is covered seamlessly.

Track progress through insights

Keep track of course completion rates and learner progress all at a glance, identify any roadblocks early on, and ensure everyone is on track.

Seamless integration with Confluence

Combine the power of Smart Courses with Confluence’s collaborative features and provide a fully structured, accessible, and engaging induction training for your team all in one tool.

Empower your distributed team with better induction training

A well-structured induction program is more than just a checklist; it’s your team’s first impression on a new hire. When done right, it sets the ground for success by introducing not just the job but also your company’s culture, values, and goals. For distributed teams, the challenge (and also the opportunity) is creating an engaging experience that welcomes new team members no matter where they are in the world.
The success key to such a mission? Making employees’ induction training dynamic and accessible and using Confluence and Smart Courses together allows you to do just that. With features designed for collaboration, self-paced learning, and progress tracking, you can turn induction training into a more meaningful journey that equips your new hires to hit the ground running.

If you want to learn more about Smart Courses for Confluence, book a demo, and let us get to know you and answer your questions!

As a marketer, tracking your numbers is essential. It’s how you decide what to do and when to do it. Data is what separates guesswork from strategy, and without it, marketing efforts risk falling flat. The good news? You don’t need to start from scratch or hunt for fancy tools. If your team already uses Confluence, you’ve got a solid foundation to build on. With its ability to centralize information and foster collaboration, Confluence is a great place to start consolidating your data and setting the stage for smarter decisions.

In this blog, we’re diving into why data analysis is a non-negotiable part of modern marketing and how Smart Tables for Confluence can help marketers analyze and collaborate on data.

Why marketing data analysis matters

Marketing has come a long way from the old days of flashy and pushy tactics, especially digital marketing. Remember pop-up ads and mass email blasts sent to anyone and everyone? Back then, the strategy was more like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. This means that marketers used to work on reaching as many people as possible so some would notice the product and buy it. Therefore, the wider the audience you reach, the higher your chances of selling are.

However, today, the game has changed entirely. Marketing is now about precision, personalization, and making meaningful connections. This means that the more precise your aim is, the higher your chances of selling are. Marketing now thrives on careful segmentation and automation. Drip campaigns triggered by user actions are a great example of ensuring every message feels relevant and well-timed, boosting engagement and driving results.

With better access to customer data, marketers can craft campaigns that resonate deeply with specific audience segments. It’s no longer about the volume but about delivering quality content that connects. This focus on personalization isn’t just more effective; it also creates a better customer experience, fostering trust and loyalty and more sales eventually.

To sum it all up, today, every decision relies on numbers. Marketing data analysis is crucial for many reasons, especially to:

• Justify budgets and strategies: Clear, quantifiable results make it easier to pitch ideas or secure funding for campaigns.
• Measure campaign performance: Track which channels deliver the best ROI, from social media ads to email marketing.
• Understand your audience: Analytics reveals what your audience responds to and helps you tailor your messaging.

How Smart Tables for Confluence makes marketing data analysis easier

Honestly, we know words like analytics, data, and precision can sound intimidating. You might picture something straight out of a sci-fi movie: multiple screens, endless rows of numbers, and a sea of complex charts. But here’s the good thing: it doesn’t have to be that overwhelming. You can start simple. In fact, you can start with tools your team is already using, like Confluence, where you’re probably already collaborating on reports and other projects.

Confluence tables are already helpful for tracking numbers, but they can do so much more with a small yet powerful upgrade. Smart Tables for Confluence turns your basic tables into dynamic workspaces. It adds features like filtering, Excel functions, and reporting tools, all smoothly integrated into Confluence. This means you can skip juggling multiple platforms or exporting data back and forth. Everything happens right where your team is already working, making it easier to dive into analysis.

For marketing teams, using Smart Tables for Confluence can simplify the way campaign metrics, web traffic data, or ad performance numbers are managed. Need to filter your data to focus on key metrics? Done. Want to calculate conversion rates or engagement percentages without leaving the page? Easy. Prefer visuals? Create charts or pivot tables to present your findings in a way that stands out.

And it’s not just about the marketing team. Collaboration is key in marketing, and Smart Tables makes it effortless. Your team can edit, analyze, and update data together in real time. So, no more messy version control or freaking-out “Did anyone save the latest file?” emails.

Analyzing campaign performance with Smart Tables

Let’s say your team just wrapped up a social media campaign across multiple platforms. Now it’s time to report, figure out which posts did best, and define where to focus your ad dollars for the next round.

On your Confluence page, add a table with all your important metrics, like reach, impressions, clicks, and conversions, directly into a Smart Table in Confluence. And if you forgot to insert the Smart Tables macro from the beginning and have already started filling out your Confluence table, you can easily convert it to Smart Tables from the page view. To further smooth your operations, you now have the option to enable the tab mode and have all items belonging to one table arranged in different tabs that you can switch between. The tabs contain the Smart Table alongside any charts and pivot tables that were created based on its data.

Next, let the numbers do the talking. Apply formulas to calculate key performance indicators (KPIs) like click-through rates (CTR), engagement rates, or cost per conversion. No manual math, no hassle, and all on the same page as your report.

Now, this is the most important part: figure out the story your data is telling. Turn your results into visually engaging charts or pivot tables that would help you spotlight trends, like which platforms had the highest engagement or where your ads performed best.

Since confluence and collaboration go hand in hand, share the table and insights with your team right there. Everyone can contribute feedback, suggest tweaks, or discuss the next steps without juggling multiple file versions.
And there you go. No more scrambling to piece together numbers or worrying about errors slipping through the cracks. Instead, you and your team can focus on what really matters: refining your strategy, investing in the right platforms, and driving better results next time.

Smart Tables is a versatile tool that every team in the company can use, from the marketing team to the sales team, the support team, and anyone who needs to crunch some numbers. So, by integrating it into your Confluence workflow, you can make data analysis approachable, efficient, and impactful.

Learn more about our other Smart Apps for marketing teams and how they can elevate your Confluence experience. Do you still have any questions regarding Smart Tables for Confluence? Book a demo and let us get to know you and answer your questions!

Cross-Functional Collaboration in Confluence and Jira

A typical cross-functional business team could include a product leader, someone from marketing, along with a representative from sales, and possibly other functions, depending on the industry. Of course, Atlassian’s collaborative tools are essential here. Not only Confluence and Jira but all of Atlassian’s products are built to enhance teamwork by connecting all departments through shared documentation and project management systems. Now, it is common for each one of these departments to operate within their own silos, with their own specific goals, data, documentation, and processes. So, even if all departments are using the same tools, Confluence and Jira, in this case, it’s most likely that they are using them in different ways and for different purposes.

In marketing, Confluence and Jira work hand-in-hand to support project organization and communication. For example, marketing teams use Confluence to plan campaigns, share creative assets, document strategies, and centralize resources. By organizing content in Confluence, marketing teams ensure that all documentation is accessible to everyone whenever needed. Hence, it’s easier for everyone, from content creators to strategists, to stay on the same page. Then, they rely on Jira Work Management to break down plans into actionable tasks, set timelines, assign responsibilities, and track the progress of each campaign component from content creation to launch. With Jira, marketing teams manage the real-time execution of different plans, maintaining clear deadlines, workflows, and status updates across projects. Therefore, these two tools provide a synchronized workflow when combined together. In this case, adding a synchronized glossary for Confluence and Jira ensures that every member of this marketing team operates from the same definitions, promoting a clear understanding within one team.

But it’s not only the marketing team that can combine Confluence and Jira to manage their work. In fact, sales, product, or any other teams can use Confluence for information-sharing and Jira to monitor updates or insights depending on their workflow. Hence, when we’re in a case of cross-functional collaboration, having consistent terminology across Confluence and Jira is crucial to avoid terminology confusion across departments.

Smart Terms: one glossary for Confluence and Jira

Smart Terms is a glossary for Confluence and Jira that further enhances teams’ workflow, solidifies alignment, clarifies goals, and strengthens collaboration within the same team or in cross-functional teams by allowing them to access and update a shared vocabulary. So, in cross-functional collaboration, all team members can contribute to the definitions that matter most for the project, ensuring everyone is on the same page.

A cross-functional collaboration between sales, marketing, and product teams is essential to maximize efficiency, better understand customer needs, and align goals. When these teams work in sync, a company can gain a strategic advantage. For example, Insights from sales can inform marketing approaches, refine product development, and ultimately create a better customer experience. When these teams work together in Confluence and Jira, each department can quickly view others’ progress, access updates, and avoid redundant efforts. Our team recognizes Confluence and Jira’s complementarity, so we made sure to integrate Smart Terms with both tools to bridge the terminology gap between department-specific jargon.

If you have been a part of one of these departments, you know that there are many common terms that hold small but also significant differences depending on their context. For example, a term like “lead” usually means a marketing-qualified lead to the marketing team, a lead who has indicated their interest in what a brand has to offer. However, to sales, it could refer to a sales-qualified lead, a lead that has a high probability of converting into a customer. Another example is that product teams might use the word “feature” to describe an internal project component, while marketing interprets it as a customer-facing capability ready to be promoted. This is where Smart Terms comes in handy and ensures that all teams are aligned on the exact meaning of critical terms.

This is why including Smart Terms for both Confluence and Jira isn’t just a nice-to-have for your team but instead a powerful tool to:

• Ensure consistency across teams by avoiding differing interpretations of terms.
• Enhance efficiency by providing accessible definitions wherever they are mentioned on both platforms and reducing time lost to clarify terms.
• Promote cross-functional understanding by bridging gaps between department-specific jargon.
• Support scaling knowledge by keeping track of all essential knowledge as teams grow or change.

Bridging the gap with Smart Terms

To better illustrate how this works in practice, let’s take an example of a SaaS company with active marketing, sales, and product departments that are struggling to keep their teams aligned. Marketing is running campaigns and using terms like “pipeline acceleration” and “conversion rates” in the different reports shared across the platforms. On the other hand, the product team strictly used “pipeline” to refer to development work. Sales, meanwhile, had a completely different interpretation of “conversion” than marketing, as they associated that term with the late-stage deal process.

To avoid confusion, delays, and misunderstanding of deliverables and priorities, this team uses Smart Terms to standardize terminology across the board. Adding key terms such as “pipeline,” “conversion,” and “lead” ensured that every team member could instantly access the definitions whenever they encountered those words in Jira or Confluence.

So, to get your glossary for Confluence and Jira, start by installing Smart Terms for Confluence and Smart Terms for Jira from the Atlassian marketplace.
Here, both apps must be installed on the same organization’s cloud-based URL. You will also need to install Smart Terms for Confluence and Jira browser extension to allow terms to be highlighted. And if you’re still hesitating, Smart Terms for Jira is free for all Smart Terms for Confluence users. So you only buy one and get the other for free, it’s great, isn’t it? (you can also use this as an argument in case you have to get any purchase approval first )

Once your app is all installed and running, you can go ahead and create your glossary by adding terms to different Confluence spaces.

To highlight your terms in Jira, go to Jira settings, toggle the Sync available Confluence glossaries to automatically highlight the space
glossaries set in Confluence, or select the space glossaries from which terms can be highlighted in Jira. And, of course, you can add more customization and configure the appearance of terms per project from the Project settings.

And that’s it; you’re all set. Now, teams no longer have to guess. A quick hover-over or a click-on of the highlighted word mentioned in Confluence or Jira displays the term definition, media, and related terms. It helps your team to get the correct, context-specific definition that everyone can refer to, keeping everyone in this cross-functional collaboration aligned without needing clarification emails or follow-ups.

And to further improve understanding, you can create related terms in Smart Terms for Confluence to better illustrate how some terms are connected. Having related terms helps clarify complex concepts in your glossary for Confluence and Jira and makes it easy to navigate with direct links between related terms.

So there you go; using Smart Terms for both Confluence and Jira doesn’t just prevent miscommunication, it also empowers teams to move faster and with greater confidence. And if you want to know more about Smart Terms, here are 5 essential features you need to know about Smart Terms for Confluence, and how AI can help you set your glossary for Confluence with Smart Terms.

Do you still have any questions regarding Smart Terms for Confluence and Jira? Don’t hesitate to book a demo. Let us get to know you and answer your questions!

Without the right tools, you can’t expect your team to be highly responsive and efficient. Providing good tools allows your support team to resolve support tickets efficiently and provide insights that drive product improvement. It might not be an issue for you if you already have an extensive support team managing customers’ queries. But if you have just launched your product and started growing your team, getting an excellent tool for your team doesn’t have to drain your account.

In fact, Jira Service Management (JSM) is excellent at helping your support team track ticket resolution, especially in the software development industry. Integrating Confluence with JSM allows you to organize all the documentation, content, and files your team needs to deliver high-quality service every time.

But it doesn’t stop there. Adding Smart Tables to your Confluence pages will elevate your team’s experience, streamline their process, and, hence, increase their productivity.

So, if you’re managing a small support team or thinking about starting a support team, this article is for you. We will discuss some of the best practices of using Confluence and Smart Tables for Confluence, discover a few of the cool features of Atlassian Intelligence, and, last but not least, share our favorite reporting tips using Smart Tables.

Understanding customer support and ticket volume

Let’s start by understanding a few related concepts. First, we have customer support. It is one of the most crucial teams, whether your product has recently been launched or has already reached maturity. Customer support teams are the people who help customers when they encounter trouble with a company’s products or services. Their ultimate goal is to ensure that customers successfully solve any issues they face with the company’s product and that they continue to happily use your product to solve the main issue they chose it for, aka the job the product was hired for in the first place.

Next, let’s look into customer support tickets and customer support ticket volume. Customer support tickets are raised by customers who have a query or problem related to the product or service they are using. These problems can be classified to:

• Technical Issues
• Billing and Payments
• Product Inquiries
• Complaints and Feedback
• Account Management
• Policy Questions
• Other categories, depending on product specifications

Customer support ticket volume is the number of tickets or queries received by a customer support team from the customers. Tickets can come through different channels, such as:

• Emails
• Phone calls
• Social media messages
• Live chat queries

However, ticket volume is volatile. It can change with product complexity, number of customers, or even seasonal demand. Ticket volume may give information on how many issues or requests customers raise, but it doesn’t always show the support quality.
A high number of tickets means customers are engaged and your product is in demand, but it might also point to problems with the product or communication. The real focus should be not only on handling the volume but also on understanding the types of issues and solving them effectively to keep support quality high. For that, you need organized documentation that is easily accessible to the support team for effective problem-solving.

Efficient documents with Smart Tables

To ensure every customer gets the best support, you need consistent messaging across all platforms. This means all customers should get a message that matches the brand’s voice at every touch point. Also, one issue should be explained and solved the same way every time and with every customer. Businesses must consistently deliver the same value, messaging, quality, and services to customers from the first interaction to the post-purchase support to ensure they will stick around.

However, that is easier said than done. You can’t expect consistency and productivity from your support team if you don’t provide the right tools and guidelines. Confluence can be your team’s go-to wiki. It is the perfect tool to create your knowledge base, centralize potential customer issues, and share best practices. This way, you can guarantee your customers get an excellent, consistent experience and have their issues fixed faster. And, of course, you also guarantee that your team’s working process is seamless.

Stating information in big blocks of words is difficult for readers to navigate, but having it in a table form makes it easier and faster to find the correct information. But not just any table can do that; you need a Smart Table that adds filtering, Excel functions, and reporting features to native Confluence Tables.

It’s simple. Here is how it works: Once you have enabled your Smart Tables for Confluence, you can insert a Smart Table macro from the macro list or through the shortcut “/ Smart Table”.

And if you forgot to start with that and have already started writing your documentation on a native Confluence table, you can easily convert it to Smart Tables from the page view.

Once the table is set up and documentation pages are published, your support team can use the Smart Tables filtering option directly from the Confluence page view by selecting only the needed categories. This will help them quickly identify the specific issue the customer is facing and how to solve it.

You can include in your table as many details as you want to help them filter between the different options faster.

Atlassian Intelligence to summarize your Confluence page and more

We have seen the importance of well-detailed and organized documentation in supporting your team. But let’s be honest: no one likes to read a long document if they don’t really need it. So why not do your team one more favor and generate AI summaries using “Summarize writing” by Atlassian Intelligence to include a page summary that will help your team quickly find any needed details and save time, which they will surely appreciate.

This is not the only feature that Atlassian Intelligence provides; you can basically use it as your personal writing assistant to help you create the content you need. Find out all about it here.

Support tickets: your wealth of hidden insights

Finding efficient ways to manage support tickets is a challenge all businesses face. As previously mentioned, simply responding to customer inquiries and managing ticket volume will not give you a competitive advantage. In fact, along with ticket resolution, continuous team training, and performance monitoring, you should also analyze tickets to find valuable and relevant business insights brought to you directly by customers. Therefore, customer support tickets are not just routine tasks; they actually can enhance your approach to customer satisfaction and product improvement. Hence driving your company’s growth. And don’t worry; we’re not scaring you off from going through the adventure of building your digital product; we’re just giving you a heads-up.

So, let’s take an example for our case: a few-year-old tech startup providing a digital product. This startup is having moderate growth with an increasing adoption of its solution. Therefore, this company is likely in the scaling phase. It is seeing steady growth in sales and installs but is also dealing with some challenges, such as user churn, support issues, and product improvement.

Here, we have a sample of historical data from a one-year period of support tickets and some key metrics such as sales, app installs, uninstalls, and support costs.

Once you convert your native Confluence table to a Smart Table, you can add different Excel functions to perform any necessary calculations.

Another cool thing about the Smart Tables app is that it is also very practical for data visualization. Because we sure know that well-represented information helps any decision-maker see the bigger picture when making strategic decisions.

In this example, various charts were created to analyze business performance and find correlations between the different metrics. Those charts helped to highlight business trends and drive insights into customer behaviors and opportunities for improvement. In fact, when comparing the trends of support tickets and sales, we can find that a peak in support tickets corresponds with lower sales in the same month. This could indicate that unresolved technical problems impacted the customer journey, reduced conversions, or caused potential customers to churn. In addition, we observe during another month that sales increase corresponds with high product inquiries, which could suggest that there is a growing number of users interested in learning about the product.

Another helpful feature in Smart Tables for Confluence is choosing what data to represent by selecting and unselecting the data range from the chart legend. You can also customize the chart type based on your needs and what best fits your data. Hence, you can focus your analysis only on relevant elements for your decision-making.

Of course, the correlations between all metrics will differ from one business to another and will also depend on your industry or niche. However, your business can’t achieve sustainable growth unless you understand how all its aspects are connected and affect each other.

If you found these different Smart Tables features interesting, check out how you can also use Smart Tables for Confluence to revolutionize sales tracking and help you create data reporting all in one place.

Do you still have any questions regarding Smart Tables for Confluence? Book a demo and let us get to know you and answer your questions!