New Help System

Posted Mar 21 at 10:40 CDT by Richard in General, Help  - 7 comment(s)

Remi has just pulled the big lever marked "rollout the new help system" and sure enough it's live and ready, nay eager to help will any and all questions, queries and musings you might have about our service.

Now admittedly that's a pretty grand introduction for what boils down to a slightly different ticketing system and a rather empty knowledge base, but as they say "from tiny acorns..." This is just the first step towards a much better support experience for all of our customers. Over the coming weeks we will be building on this new system to provide more (much needed) documentation, even faster support and one or two surprises.

For now the only real change for you guys is that all new tickets should be entered into the new system. There is a link to the old system on the front page of the new system in case you have existing tickets there.

If you have any comments on the new system or suggestions for how we could improve our support then please leave a comment and let us know.



7 comments:



David Sissitka said on 2007-03-21 11:19:21:
Hrm, logging into the control panel just to be linked to SupportSuite where you have to login again is slightly inconvenient. I know of a few other hosting companies who do it but WebFaction has never followed the crowd, why start now? :) I noticed that the login information for the control panel works in SupportSuite but it would be nice if they were integrated. Since the control panel and SupportSuite are completely separate it would be nice if updates to open tickets were displayed in the control panel.


Remi said on 2007-03-21 11:56:59:
David: Good point about having to login twice. We've made a change and now the "help" link from the control panel logs you in the support system automatically so you don't have to login twice :)

The reason for the switch is that the new support system will allow us to do a lot of things (more on that in the next few weeks) that weren't possible with our old system and that would have taken too long to develop ourselves. Once our new help system is fully in place I think that everybody will be pretty happy with it.

About following the crowd: if the crowd is using good tools (linux, RHEL, SupportSuite) then we happily follow them... We can still innovate in other areas (control panel, API, mounting apps on URLs) :)

Cheers,

Remi.



jessica said on 2007-04-06 13:00:55:
hi, just using the new help system for the first time today, and one thing occured to me. if we could navigate more easily back to the control panel once we're done entering or browsing the help system, that would be great. can you include the control panel navigation in the help system site? right now, the only link i could find was in the breadcrumbs, and it wasn't very obvious. keep up the great work!


David M. Besonen said on 2007-04-06 14:24:08:
what ticketing/help system are you now using?


David Sissitka said on 2007-04-06 23:45:09:
Jessica: Please complain about this in the forums, design and page flow could really be improved.

David M. Besonen: Kayako's SupportSuite.


David Sissitka said on 2007-04-07 07:11:05:
Jessica: Maybe this will help?

http://forum.webfaction.com/viewtopic.php?pid=1879#p1879

:)


Remi said on 2007-04-08 14:13:36:
Jessica: Good idea. I added it to our TODO list (ps: I know I say that a lot these days but I promise that we do get a lot of work done behind the scenes :) Maybe we should publish our TODO list so that people can keep informed of what we're working on and maybe vote on things to get certain features done more quickly ...).

David: Damn, we were trying to hide the fact that we were using SupportSuite and you gave it away ... Just kidding ;) We evaluated a few options and SupportSuite seemed the best one to us.

Remi.





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