Feature Request - Better Contact Forms

[sgruby]

I currently use the Open Ticket section of the support center and have a bunch of follow up questions. What I'd like to see is a decision tree such that an answer to one question drivers another question so that I can lead users to the KB instead of completing the open ticket form, i.e. "Have you already read the KB article about xyz?". If yes, then continue, if no, say "go away, read it". Also, branches such as "is your issue about a scanner?". Yes, ask questions about a scanner. No, ask other questions.

I know that some competing products have this as well as the ability to parse the question and offer suggestions prior to the user submitting the request. My goal is to drive down support and get people to help themselves (which we all know is almost impossible :-)).

Thanks.

[joegeck]

I went ahead and added this as a "feature request" to our bug tracking software JIRA. This sounds like an interesting prospect to me, the developers should hopefully get a chance to evaluate it in the near future.

http://www.wgmdev.com/jira/browse/CHD-426

[jstanden]

I like this idea. You have my vote!

It wouldn't be too difficult to set up a parenting system to the questions. Code-wise it's trivial -- the only trick is making it intuitively clear in the UI when setting up the Support Center instance.

...parse the question and offer suggestions prior to the user submitting the requestYeah, we tried a couple strategies for that in the past with NLP heuristics like bigrams and trigrams. A lot of those implementations end up being gimmicks.

Associating keywords with tags (and tags to content) is a more successful approach. The trick is getting enough context from multiple keywords to give decent suggestions.

Unsurprisingly, I'm sure, I prefer our Fetch & Retrieve approach of making it simple to search the inevitably fragmented knowledge resources like KB/FAQS, forums, wiki, documentation and blogs from a single form. It's a really good way to introduce customers to those resources, even when their question may not be answered directly by the top result. It's a more rational approach. As a bonus, Fetch & Retrieve defers to each resource's domestic search engine (as those developers have spent time tuning their results' relevancy scoring).

My goal is to drive down support and get people to help themselves (which we all know is almost impossible :-)haha! Yeah, that's the eternal dream, isn't it?

Knowing how impossible it is, and how unreliable heuristics can be, is why we went the Fetch & Retrieve route. We make it as easy for workers or customers to scan all the available resources (beyond the resident helpdesk FAQ -- which is really a redundant and needless concept). When a customer side-steps the self-help, at least your workers can use F&R to find the high-quality answers you've spent time authoring on the blogs, forums, etc. We focus on saving you from having to constantly write high quality answers, knowing that's a more achievable goal than dumping the burden of research on the customers.

The KB/FAQ concepts work out pretty well if you're looking for a specific error code or something. But when you get into natural language, it takes years of programming to perfect what a 5 year old can grok in a couple seconds.

[sgruby]

One of the things I need to do better in the current scheme is put better tags, but still, some of my customers are too clueless to click on the right tag and comprehend what the articles say. So, walking the users through questions is the only way to get the customers to answer their own questions.

I don't have any idea how to present the UI to create them, unfortunately.

[SchwannyT]

Associating keywords with tags (and tags to content) is a more successful approach. The trick is getting enough context from multiple keywords to give decent suggestions.

So did the tags disappear a few weeks ago? Along with the authoring permissions and other stuff? Is that coming back?

[Hildy]

Tags were replaced by the (highly-requested) return of categories. At this time, there are no checks or even stubs for them in the code related to permissions on article creation / editing. I don't know specifically what the plans are in that direction, but I'll check and post up.

[SchwannyT]

Tags were replaced by the (highly-requested) return of categories. At this time, there are no checks or even stubs for them in the code related to permissions on article creation / editing. I don't know specifically what the plans are in that direction, but I'll check and post up.

Thats really too bad. I will admit that when I first saw the tags I didn't like them. Then once I set them up I really liked them. So I was kinda surprised to see them go.