I was tasked with creating a more robust support application for Enterprise. The existing one was a single page that had a phone number and contact hours. I started with some research into the support desk. Having been on a support desk myself years ago, I knew a few things to ask and primarily I wanted to see if any pain points could be alleviated. One major problem in support is fielding all the calls when one major outage occurs affecting everyone. At that point there’s little to nothing a support team can do but relay communications. Major outages are felt by everyone and hundreds of calls don’t do anything to change them.
This project was for their LaunchPad suite of tablet apps.
First I needed to address a few basic communication alerts. They had an existing alert notification dot when a user’s PIN required changing. I would carry that over. Users that would open LaunchPad on any given day would see that alert dot in the hamburger menu, yellow for “updates” such as news or system installs. Red for major support issues, or responses to that user’s support ticket.
The main support page would highlight major outages. The architecture would have to be built to triage those issues that were relevant so the list wouldn’t grow too long, or a scroll bar implemented to allow the user to see all major support issues that might be affecting them. Note on the right screen, a user could expand a support issue that may pertain to them for more options.
The real key on this screen as indicated below for alleviating support calls would to make people aware of the major outages affecting them and allow them to add themselves to the support ticket, so they would be ‘following’ that issue and they would get notification upon the fix of it. Because their device information could be added to the ticket, that could include location information. If a certain outage was affecting one region but devices showing another region were being continuously added, this is valuable for the 2nd and 3rd tier support teams.
Next a revision to what previously was the simple support page. The support request page would allow the user to quickly drill down to the problem they were having. Some problems would triage any given ticket to a different group. Others would, based on conditional logic, inform the user to call the number.
In creating the ticket history page, this would allow a user to look at their individual tickets, including ones they may have submitted via desktop such as software requests and other permission issues. More comments could be added and the user could view the progress log. Because some employees and ticket lists could stretch too long, it would be important to truncate this list to the appropriate number of previous and completed support requests.
The Support Guidelines page was important so new employees could understand expectations, process, etiquette and what information to have ready, etc.
Finally that last set of screens I built would be dedicated to the employee newsletter known as The Wire. This is an important publication especially when new software and new functionality is released. The Wire would arrive as an email but the previous issues could be accessible a lot faster in this format.
