If you have gone to HI recently, you would have noticed that it has changed pretty significantly. In theory, we've made everything easier for customers to do on their own. Managing instances is easier than ever to find, edit and submit changes. Requesting upgrades can be done on a single page, and will allow you to see what instances are available for upgrade as well as which release you can upgrade to. Managing open issues is just a click away, and from the homepage you can see just how much work needs to be done.
With this new look and feel for self-service, we want to increase the accessibility and consumption of solutions, workarounds and content that already exists so that customers don't have to open an incident or wait for someone to respond to you in order to get their answer. The goal was to remove some of the more common incidents out of our incident drivers and make them self-service success stories. Not every change relates to traditional Knowledge Management work, like knowledge base articles, but it all serves the same purpose, enabling users to self-serve.
You can read about the changes in a blog published by Suzanne Smith called Self Service Delivered Now. That blog contains links to articles the go into more detail about the changes.
This is the new Support page:
Now when you go to Support, you're presented the option to perform a search prior to actually getting to the incident filing page. This allows customers to find solutions that are already available prior to filling out the incident form and waiting for a response from technical support. The search is configured to look at all of our knowledge base articles, product documentation, known error articles (a sub-set of knowledge base articles), and community content. We're hoping to have some people leverage that search for their troubleshooting needs. We've made a concerted to beef up our content, so most of our common issues are covered in knowledge base articles.
Some changes we have made:
- Where our search results populate
- How they are displayed
- Filtering of your results
If the customer decides to proceed with filing an incident, they can choose Create an Incident. This page is similar to our legacy incident filing page, but it has an updated layout and some improved functionality. On the legacy filing page, as you typed a short description the results populated below the incident form and typically required scrolling.
This is how we've changed the incident filing page in the new version:
You can see the results are now in a fly-out to the right of the incident form. The results populate as the user provides information in the How can we help? field. There's no more scrolling down to see the results. Also, we've limited the type of content that is displayed in the fly-out in an effort to improve the accuracy of the results. Even with my vague description, three articles were presented that are related and likely to help.
I know what you're likely thinking, "Okay, but how are you measuring success?" That's a good question.
- We'll be tracking how many customers perform a search on the initial Support Page, look at content, and do not proceed to the Create Incident page.
- We'll be tracking how many customers on the Create Incident page look at content and do not file.
- We'll be tracking how many customers look at content, but continue with filing their incident.
We'll also be analyzing the searches that lead to no content appearing (hopefully this doesn't happen, but we'll watch for it) and searches where the the customer does not interact with content at all. We'll track the latter to see if there's a problem with the content, the search, or maybe the customer just wanted to go right to having an incident.
What do you think of the new Support experience?
