A rebrandable support and ticketing system
The project
WooWise Ltd required a system to help them support their million plus members distributed across a broad range of website and brands. At that time mail was "managed" in Outlook. This
required support staff to constantly log in and out of different mailboxes, one for each brand. WooWise urgently needed to replace this with a ticketing system, allowing Web based
management of all support requests and responses. Supporting members was made even more difficult because each site had its own FAQ, and each FAQ, although similar, required brand
related customization. The existing FAQ did not support images or video restricting the quality of support content. WooWise needed a system that would allow them to manage information
in a central knowledge base, allow that information to be customized programmatically real-time for each brand, and provide a customizable knowledgebase portal for members.
Solutions
Woowise did not need a website at the Supportify.co address, just a login box. The real functionality would be behind this login wall in two back-end systems. After spending time
discussing their required functionality it became clear that there were not two classes of user of Supportify (consumer and WooWise administrator), but many, with different
administrators having different permissions. Some would be able to respond to tickets, others would have editorial permission allowing them to build and manage knowledge bases; others
might be in charge of rebranding, etc... So we built in a management administration layer allowing staff and high level site decisions to be managed, and a multi-tiered permission
system giving these top administrators fine grained control over the access levels of all support staff.
Once support staff had been allocated their tasks and given the appropriate permission levels they could then login to their backend where they would have a self-contained application
providing everything they needed to do the jobs. Previously email support staff had been shuffling between Outlook accounts, then into Word to find a stock reply for some common issue,
back to Outlook, etc... Now the stock replies were available in a single click, and automatically inserted into the ticket reply.
FAQ management had its own management system, and was restricted to text only. We built a system within Supportify allowing all FAQs, or more generically Knowledge bases, to be managed
centrally, to share content, to be used as stock replies in tickets, and to use rich text, graphics and video content.
A big piece of the system was the link between the various sites and Supportify. When someone joined one of WooWise’ sites, he would have to be signed up to Supportify in the backend,
and when he logged in to the site, he would have to be logged into Supportify. All that was required to solve this problem were a few security measures (not detailed here) and a
Supportify Web Servicem a data only application that accepted and replied to calls from the WooWise sites, logging members in, signing them up, and removing them when they removed
themselves from the WooWise site. One potentially significant draw back to using a 3rd party service as part of a log in process was that if there was a communication problem between
the site and the service it could stall the login process. We solved this with a super-fast DNS failover mechanism.
The final module was in some ways the most important, the consumer portal. This is what the users of WooWise sites would see when they needed support. We kept this simple. Simple to
use, with Knowledge bases exposed on the front page and a search engine, and simple to rebrand, using a minimalist approach to colour and layout.
Results
Supportify was rolled out across WooWise growing suite of sites, and a new version of it is integrated into every new site that they or their partners launch. It has continued to be
revised based on the feedback of staff and users, and by all reports does its crucial job very well. Additional modules are now being planned. Perhaps the most exciting will allow
users to give public scoring and feedback to Knowledge Base articles, and even to write their own.