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Ask HN: What would make a great customer support tool?

• JarekS 16y ago
  I was discussing a new kind of support system with my friend the other day. We have been trying to understand current limitations of the support systems and if they can be fixed with technology (not always). I'm looking forward to see some comments from people that are more into this topic!
  • garyrichardson 16y ago
    I feel that a lot of the points made by the original poster are just bolt on features and not actually evolving support systems. Sure, they are nice improvements, but I think I've seen them all at one time or another. Like you said, not all problems can be fixed with technology. At least, not with the base email support systems we have now. I'm more interested in seeing some out of the box thinking. For example, build in some AI to preselect/recommend a base response from a pool of previous responses. That doesn't mean it'll be perfect (and still needs to be personalized), but it's better than starting from scratch or scraping through your wiki looking for a previous response. Also, I want a view that watches an email support queue, public forums and possibly chats. That way my support reps can take the next available request no matter where it comes from.
    • prateekdayal 16y ago
      Great feedback and suggestions. Would it be possible to talk to you more on this offline? If yes, how do I reach you?
      • Be_Silly 16y ago
        I'm not thinking you meant me, but there are a few comments above who've not got profiles with contact details. You didn't say who you called out to! :-) Just a thought! (as someone who finds nested threads difficult to read because of funky word - wrap and believes a shaded color bar is the solution to srting replies from OP / sub posters and has never seen it on any forum) 'nuf of my griping, but shout out who you mean!
    • JarekS 16y ago
      Yesterday we had a discussion and following point we made: - nothing that we can do (simpler UI, faster search for the knowledge base etc.) is good enough to take it to market. People simply will not convert to our app because it will not fundamentally change the way they work - and help them fix their problems. We will still do the same thing, only a little bit better then competitors. Also we joked that if a company want to make a user happy we can setup an engine that will send emails randomly from around 100 different templates assuring user that people are working on his case ;)
      • Be_Silly 16y ago
        You say no-one will convery because your app is not fundamentally changing how they work. How about you get really intimate with what they use, how they use it, and work on simplifying workflow UI, readability, all the human factors stuff which seems to be overlooked once a project gets rolled out because the painful bit of codifying processes too all the budget? I mean, work out what you could overlay as a benefit, in a drop - in app. Ignore bling, save where used to flag data that needs working on urgently, and think about that old hullabaloo of the 70's consultant with clipboard: time and motion. Think how many times a UI context switch is required. Take away frustrations. Obviously i've no idea if what yu're working on is the slightest bit suitable fr this treatment. But if i had a nickel for every time i've seen a support rep slam down their phone (i was going to say smashed, but we're all enlightened PC people now!) because of something as dumb as having to hit the fourth button on their machine to transfer a call, i'd be doing pretty good. It's not fair of me to keep using phone use analogies, but i don't se enough info as to what other people ar trying to solve here, hope you get my drift anyhow. Can you write "helper app"? Remember multifinder or i forget the name but whatever it was on early macs which allowed you to copy and paste to a stack? Id there something functionally simple like that you can offer which doesn't mess with the underlying interfaces, but which still requires some pretty neat writing and likely a fairly deep understanding of the existing apps to make work consistently and without snarling anything? Whenever i get private project time, increasingly rare sadly, i keep sketching out UI models for a desk phone which would be complimentary to the tracking / contact apps i use, not be a awful ugly alterntive. Things like flipping a contact window from the list on the handset to my main monitor. The hard bit isn't so much now i have to work out a way to communicate that from phone to PC, because one way would be to loop the phone data to the PC and use the new USB screen driver tech. The hard bit is working out what you want to really happen. Is that, you finger flip a contact towards your main screen, and you get a fully expanded list of the discussions you've had with them? Can drag and drop work with this in a kind of wacom tablet way, so then hw does movement on the obviously smaller touchscreen translate to your main monitor? If, say, i've a preference for greyscale display on anything which cannot be usefully colored to convey real information, does the "flipped" window stay greyscale? Do i want the flipped window to be large, float or be even a normal window, or do i want it "brought back" / closed by a gesture on the phone screen? How could i do that from a cell phone? That's pretty pie in the sky for a solo project, but whilst there remains good utility from desk bound objects (my favourite gripe is i can dial important customer numbers from memory faster than i can bring their entry up on my very latest processor Nokia) and these objects, like everything else, wear out, and are now nicely converging to voip protocols which are mature enough there's no reason to go for a proprietary type such as cisco, theres a market for these things. Making any of this elegant is no small ambition. But consider this thought, that i remember new employees getting "phone training" because they needed to know how to handle the butt ugly interfaces of pbx attached phones which to this day are not often much better than a bunch of soft keys and if you're lucky those keys are customisable but still very basic features. Why can't i drag and drop a call with my finger whilst i'm on another call? The other thing is with the iphone we really have a lot of people finding new ways to use a telephone, and hat idiom i think will spread to the desk phone. Suddenly it may not be necessary to train someone how to put a call on hold, transfer and pick up the next incoming without muffing it with fat fingers. If i remember, AT&T research got quite far as to graphical interfaces, i think the device was called an I-O or something. It ran on an ATM network for the prototypes. I can;t quite be apologetic about my phone obsession. Companies still buy an awful lot of desk phones, and getting those to work with even simple contact apps is often a total PITA, and not much benefit is derived. Make the right connector, and you've a very interesting straddle market, selling forklift hardware upgrades and the back - end to make them play nice. Ouch, i just remembered that awful word "middleware"! About the time they ran those Apple ads where some exec thought his staff were taking office computers home, but instead was told they were bringing their macs to work, i worked front line call center as a first job, where the productive people brought in their own phones and headsets, and went to extremes to patch them in to the corp pbx. That time, the phone of choice was a AT&T model with a 4 line VFD which we could read even in bright light and at an acute angle, and which you could "alpha tag" your incoming numbers, basic caller identity, but which the official office system supposedly didn't support, but did, and we hacked (nicely) our own caller groups so we could take decent length breaks and be covered by a buddy across the room. Make that stuf real simple, and - apart from the up tight "Office the movie" kind of echoes this gives off, yu have a lot of people in regular jobs wanting your kit badly. Idle random thoughts, really. I think this pretty uncool bit of daily work is simply under cared for. Yet there are an awful lot of very big businesses for which the phone is their primary income point. Maybe if this ageing tech actually worked well, we'd not have outsourced call centers because center staff could actually be more productive. At least in that dimension. I've too many "account managers" at our telco who're authorized to do diddly squat to assist me, which is likely the reason senior mgmt don't care for which pbx / phones they use. Outside of big "old economy" shops, however, this sort of thing could really help small dev shops get their customer relations under control. It's not organization per se - we can all be very controlled as to contact management - but take away just one bit of meatspace logic burden and i know i'd have considerably more time to write. Instead of contact management, i call it "distraction management". I'm probably candidate for most boring post now, so i'll go curse at my phone's voicemail access system now!
• vanelsas 16y ago
  We have just set up tenderapp for our new Beta site www.pinkelstar.com (easy social network integration for iPhone and Android). I like it a lot so far. However, since we've just gone live I can't yet say anything about daily use. But the setup as pretty easy and convenient and the price was pretty decent too.
  • jroes 16y ago
    Seconding Tender. Beautiful and simple.
    • Be_Silly 16y ago
      Maybe just my mass of plugins but FF3.6 isn't loading tenderapp, while chrome just fine. s'pose could be google's search redirect playing funny with requestpolicy, but am confused :~/ Apart from pricing, what's better than FogBugz, in terms of your decision? I can't find a straight features page, though straight to API faq so that's good.Seems to be Ruby, whilst Fog has XML and presumably, being .net a few other interfaces. What confuses me is that OP wanted or hinted at a desire for a expanded feature set that Fog doesn't apparently have. Which are they that Tender gives? (I got the API point, that's good, but Fog being based on the CLR would give more ways to extend it if you took the site licensed version instead of the hosted version. Also nitpicking, but Fog for the site install prices much more nicely than the on-demand version if you've >5 users. I'm just utterly confused as to what was the OP's question was - it's so utterly vague - and led me to ramble off in different directions above. So what's the comparative benefit? I'm a fan of Joel Spolsky's writing, and have evaluated Fog online, from POV of whether it would be useable by non programmer staff as comfortably as i'd like. but i'm not yet a customer as you might guess from my above psts i've interest to do things which aren't standard for a code shop. Basically, i know the value i get is in much deeper planning and i'd have to write a lot of what's desired by my company, meanwhile Fog looks robust enough to use it as a way of pulling together a few things which aren;t totally out of its design intent. Outlook integration is a useful thing not so much for management but for syncing nicely with the cell phones we use, e.g. I mean i'm not shilling for Fog, i just don't know what the criticism is except price. What is the OP disliking about the Fog APIs e.g.? If i put my cynical hat on, i'd just say this has been a "Ask /." kind of experience. I'm interested enough in the subject to engage, but have no way of really replying. Was the Q really "what's not Fogbugz out there are cheaper?" I genuinely don't know, nor can i (presently) find any links to older HN discussion which might be useful. All this management software, whether for bug tracking or whether you make it front of house or anywhere in between is so useful to any helf - evolved business of any size, i seem to remember IBM paying a pretty penny to get ahold of Lotus who sussed the business pitch in the 90s. I suppose that what i'd like is a discussion as to what's state of the art, what companies or systems are really pushing the limits and getting things good and affordable, not a mere comparison with FogCreek which is very well written up for a company of any size. I'll post separately with my confusion points, so please understand i'm probably just missing the point here. best to all.
• sstrudeau 16y ago
  I've thought a lot about this and sketched out some ideas myself. I work at apartmenttherapy.com -- which is primarily a content/advertising oriented business, though we are building toward some more app & community-oriented features in the near future. Most of the systems I've evaluated tend to fall into either a "bug tracker," "help desk" and/or "CRM" bucket, none of which is a good fit for what we need. What we need is more of a "reader communication" platform. We get a LOT of incoming email but we don't have very good tools for really tracking it. Options I've evaluated are generally too rigid and expensive, or flexible but a lot of work to adapt & maintain , and ugly (e.g., RT). Being able to manage the system solely over email, at least for basic interactions, I think is really important for my team. I really liked some of the features of Email Center Pro (http://www.emailcenterpro.com/features/ http://www.emailcenterpro.com/features/) but found their UI a bit too clunky and the inability to do basic management directly in the email client was a killer. A streamlined/updated version of that plus email integration similar to RT would work really well for us, I think. If you want to chat more, please email me scott AT apartmenttherapy.com.
  • sstrudeau 16y ago
    And I do have a bunch of potentially interesting feature ideas: things like "mood" analysis (based on the text, does this person seem upset/angry/happy/etc); hooks into custom/proprietary systems (is this person a paying customer for product X); analysis (is volume of email type X higher than usual? Might want to look into it, you may have broke something / made something awesomer).
  • JarekS 16y ago
    One of the ideas was to create something like a local business social network and use it for connecting employees and customers. You would ask your users to login with their Facebook account to your system (benefit - a lot of info about the customer) and then hook them up to the product they have and deal value they generated. This would give you good info about importance of the call. Idea could be summed up as "Quora for support with CRM integration".
    • Be_Silly 16y ago
• donw 16y ago
  There's definitely room for such a product... which is why I formed a company with a friend and wrote one. :) Our product is currently in closed beta as we squash bugs, but we hit every bullet point on your feature list, plus a few more that we've uncovered as our customers use the system. Of course, we use this for all of our bug-tracking and customer support as well, and it's amazing what having a good support system does for your workflow. So, we're competitors, but don't let that stop you. After all, competition is the crucible in which truly amazing products are formed. :)
  • prateekdayal 16y ago
    Thanks for the encouragement. Yep .. healthy competition is always great and exciting to have :)
• Be_Silly 16y ago
  Below is opinionated, but hopefully worth airing: My view is that the field is over-populated. Probelm is often definition of what's wanted. You end up with overlap between issue tracking and CRM, and if you add in a few outlier requirements you've described half the commercial software i see, from email installs to business automation, ERP and even EDI. That's quite an exaggerated generalization of mine there, but the list of comercial and non-commercial software which can be put to use as you describe is enormous. What are you really missing from FogBugz? I'm not clear why you're having to look elsewhere. Mobile apps integration is simply not mature, or rather elegant, for any product i've seen. Zimbra, Lotus Sametime, come to mind as rather half hearted efforts requiring expensive additional licenses. Developer business sales groups really should wise up to the idea that a good mobile app is the thing small companies (mode 100 employees) i know want to have better systems, it's not a mere extra for new installs, it's the driver. I forget when i first heard about "unified communications" but it wasn't even in the last decade. That promise seems to have been eternal. I feel we are inching closer, though, yet there's nothing breakout good in any category which i've encountered. What i want is products with common rules engines, or something which can overlay that via apis. Smetimes i'd just like a regex to flag a string in an email as signifying a task is done and update a conversation thread. Sometimes i'd like a proper transaction written back to a sals DB. Sometimes i'd like to know my updates are delivered, with a message broker or transaction manager.It's applying consistency to that which makes me want a common interface to software as varied as voive, shceduling, management accounting (e.g. for that last one where there's a showstopper ticket, i want the revenue forecast to be dropped right away for that customer) Right now even trying for that flexibility requires some big bloat installs and a lot of work, some of it pretty low level. As to scope for a new product, i don't think you can design a product out of the box for a large proportion of users in your situation. I believe ther attempt with XML and XSLT to find a common interface for data munging was a good try, but it turned out the only thing more verbose than the XML was the acronym dictionary. And a lot of XML i see is serializing ASN or whatever talks to the outside world of suppliers, basically a patch, not a consistent code base, so you are doing mapping schema for more than just your primary DB. Sure, i'm being very opinionated / hand - waving. But maybe the best anser is to say you should think hard how important your support process is. Is it something which can really make you stand - out? If so, maybe you should invest in time and coding effort to get what you want. There really is no shortage of systems, apps and tools. Just nothing i see which can hook diverse office systems together. Example of this is getting desk phones to be useful. The best i've seen so far is the XMPP calls which SipExec and Aastra kit supports, but still you need some glue, and a lot of thought what you want delivered and why. I'm emphasising voice in my post because no atter how i type, there are so many times a quick call really sorts out a problem in a fraction of the time. In my integration nirvana, i'd have the phone logs transcribed and appended automatically to the ticket. I'd have my desk phone call up the subject last discussed when i dial a number, preferably on the desk phone itself, so my concurrent work windows can be left alone. If there's an opportunity to introduce a new product, i think the hurdle is the mind boggling variety of things any successful product would be wished to work with, and you'll bloat at the end of the day. I doubt that what you want couldn't be done fairly simply on the data front. But UI on mobile devices is a good challenge to put it mildly. Two favourite related moans of mine is the state of Nokia support, when they remain 50% of the smartphone game and are if anything still popular in the EU, for fresh sales, let alone installed base . . and the limits of active sync, which is often as not the best way to get email up for Nokia and Apple. I probably need to delve deeper into active sync to discover what really can be done with it, but i guess i'm looking at a oh so inspiring compatibility matrix if i use a non MS sync server. If you want cheap during startup, mind, and don't have serious adversion to MS product, BizSpark is the best dev programme and you get a comprehensive license set for three years. Sure, it's no panacea, but i think their archittecture documentation is pretty intelligable and provided you want to hook in big name PBXs that would be a serious boon to my view. Since a lot of what i do with contacts tickets and customer data is grunt style data monging, at least you can price a .net dev reliably. Check out LINQ, because it makes for handy glue if that's your environment. Some guys are doing or protoyping "stream" and "real time" BI with LINQ, certainly in some banks. It's not complete or fully mature by some views, but the project i'm looking at this year involved funnelling a lot of context data into priorities for contact follow ups, both externally and internally stimulated. I'd have gone hook line and sinker for this route already if MS would only talk straight as to whether their mobile handset voip integration will ever come to non MS handsets, which they keep hinting at but not delivering. I do keep digressing, but i want pbx integration with screen pops available on a tab. Sybase Anywhere is designed to deal with this. OnRelay, a rare Brit company doing good things with SipExec has a partial solution. But it looks like a lot of work from where i'm standing, and my work lives or dies on customer inquiry handling with a big voice dependancy.To my rather simplified mind, i should not have to manually pass the context of a contact or resolution call all the time. This is specific to cell calls. Why does one have to juggle reading a screen, or finding an email thread, when to concentrate on actually speaking to someone, i need to defocus visually and actually pay full attention to what they're saying? TL;DR version is there probably is a market for new product, but you've not exactly defined it, and for such a product to be truly useful it'd need to play nice with a big range of site installs, hardware (phones e.g. land and cell) and software, and it would be no use to me if the UI wasn't first rate. final note: this is a very mature market in terms of contituent parts, but having so many failed products, so far as i see it (never yet seen a install at any price which approached comprehensive and simple interface or sub year install times) so you have some pretty big barriers to entry. Kind of project i'd love to do if i had substantial capital to bootstrap and a really caring dev / human factors team. Not something i'd like to do in a VC funded environment, because i am suspicious that product like these are not suitable for release early release often models, and that there could be a good deal of customer business domain specific knowlege required to be implemented first to make such a thing installable in a reasonable time. I'm still surprised how little use colleagues make of their high end cells, even though they're congnisant and if not geek, but very savvy, because somehow it never hangs together well when using under time pressure. Another hurdle is Nokia. You can cobble together anything Blackberry does with any recent Symbian phone, and you can write much more interesting things to that stack, but Nokia seem to go out of their way to hide the possibility. A chat i had with their PR reps in the UK was fascinating - no-one even knew of the capabilities, or that a big network operator in the UK thinks it's ok to blame the handset equipment for problems caused by their proxy servers, in writing no less . . . i figure if i attempted a well integrated system, i'd sure want it to work on that installed base as well as Apple. Guess i feel strongly about this, so hope what i've said, if not actually helpful, is thought provoking in one way or another. I'd be interested in anyone whose encountered these problems generally and tried to write solutions, as there's ambition at my company to get serious about our systems in this aspect. kind regards & good luck with your search!
• foxtrot 16y ago
  Ive been a fan of www.kayako.com for some time, its got lots of features and is relatively inexpensive. For a new product what I would like to see: Easy Template System Simple Back-end 1 Click Install (simple to wordpress) Live Messaging 1 area that I do not feel has been explored or taken advantage of is desktop software. I tried a while ago to create a desktop app that would sit in the system tray, receiving status updates and messages from a central system. It would allow customers to stay up to date with system status without visiting a website and it could be used to notify of support replies, which should then reduce the "I didnt get a reply" issue.