New Support Center // Support Ticket UX Update
Summary
We introduced a side flyout panel that users could dynamically resize, which also presents the user with knowledgebase articles that change depending on what area of the product they're in. We then used that to incorporate poorly designed forms in modals, such as the support ticket form and update the experience of each one. We approached this project in stages. First, we improved the dropdown menu to include search capabilities to see how that performed before we introduced the panel; then, once we were confident in the results the search produced, we added the panel. The panel took some inspiration from Slack's support centre and provides a platform in the future to showcase new features, learning opportunities for the user and help articles, and potentially be used for user onboarding checklists and similar functionality.
Exploration
Team
- Growth Product Manager
- Growth Engineering Manager
- Growth Product Designer (Me)
- Frontend Engineers
- Backend Engineers
Problem to solve
Our users heavily rely upon our support team to solve problems in-app and often need to provide thorough information before contacting support. Users struggle quite a lot during their trial, not knowing what to do when they get stuck. Users often do not know where to get help and do not know we have a community and a well-documented knowledge base. User onboarding is a larger project on the roadmap, but there are some minor changes we can make now to set the stage for that work later.
Opportunities
- To give users a way to help themselves much more quickly during trials as our product has a high learning curve, therefore improving activation rates
- To reduce the load on our support team
- To increase the visibility of our knowledgebase
- To aid users and help them not just find the answer but learn through timely suggestions within the app
- To improve the overall experience of getting help and support
- To create a platform that we can use later for other functionality
Outcomes
We saw a ~30% decrease in support tickets after implementing these changes, which was a huge success and validated our initial hypothesis (38-40% of the submitted support tickets can usually be answered by checking the docs, which indicates that customers can often get an answer to their questions faster but don't know that there are resources available for that specific question). We received feedback from the tech writing team that usage of our knowledgebase increased, and we found that users who used search first tended to avoid creating a ticket as they found their answer and helped themselves. We also received feedback from the support team that tickets were much more thorough and could help users quickly and in fewer responses.