Docaposte's e-signature teams absorbed an eightfold surge in requests without escalating to level 2

Growth broke what twenty people could hold in their heads

Docaposte had sold electronic signature for ten years when Covid arrived. Companies could no longer sign on paper, and the Digital Trust Services team went from around twenty people to forty in a few months.

• Knowledge was spoken, and speech does not scale. At twenty, everyone knew everything. At forty, new joiners found nothing, because nothing was written down.
• Every team wrote its own documentation. Word files, slide decks and PDFs sat on individual laptops, checked by nobody.
• Two colleagues, two answers. The same question came back differently depending on who you asked.
• The product team became the bottleneck. It held the knowledge, so support, sales, account management and project directors kept asking it the same questions.

Our client-facing teams struggled to find the information and were unsure of their answers, so they lost confidence. And the client waited a long time for a reply that was not always good.

A choice made by the people who would live with it

Docaposte set up a project team with every affected team represented, wrote its requirements, benchmarked four solutions and piloted the last two. Confluence went out early: the technical teams love it, but knowledge management is not its core job. An American product went out on data sovereignty. The pilot scored the final two even, and the project team decided.

• Sovereignty and security came first. Data held in Europe, and an ISO 27001 certified solution.
• Content has an expiry date. Authors are alerted when an article is due for review. On product, compliance and legal spaces, nothing publishes without approval.
• Clients get links, not attachments. Release notes and procedures are shared as web pages, so support stops rewriting the same explanation and Docaposte stops mailing PDFs.
• Everyone knows what goes where. Elium holds procedures, product descriptions, tool guides, the new joiner pack and the FAQ. Confluence keeps technical documentation, Salesforce the client portfolio, Teams the day-to-day conversation.
• A sponsor at the top, and a structured start. The head of the signature business sponsored the project, and Elium ran the workshop sequence. In three months the architecture was set and the first teams trained.

When we started, we did not know where to begin. The support was structured from day one: how many sessions there would be, what we would do in each one, and what we had to prepare in between.

The week the data centre went down

Docaposte had just outsourced level 1 support, which resolved close to nothing at first contact. So the team wrote an incident report procedure into Elium: what is happening, what to tell the client, updated live.

Then a data centre in the south of France failed. Requests multiplied by eight in two or three days. Level 1 absorbed all of it alone, with no escalation to level 2 and only slightly more abandoned calls than usual.

Three years on, the base holds more than 1,600 contents. Product teams are called on for real product news instead of repeat questions, and new joiners start from one onboarding pack. Next: keeping translations current, restarting the community animation that slipped after launch, opening the base to clients, and adding AI so search keeps up.

Our product teams can finally focus on their own work. The client-facing teams have the information, which gives them standing with clients and confidence in themselves. They answer faster, and our clients get better answers.

Knowledge that lives in conversation works at 20 people and fails at 40. Docaposte wrote it down in time, and its teams now answer clients from the same page instead of from memory.