User Support with UserEcho

UserEcho is a third-party support service for web sites and applications. It provides three major functions:

1. Hosted Community Forums. Traditional web forums tailored for user support.
2. Help Desk. A trouble ticketing system for user-initiated support requests.
3. Live Chat. A chat application that can be embedded in a web site.

In these notes customer refers to a customer of UserEcho (e.g., the OAE Project) and user refers to an individual user of the customer’s site (e.g., a single OAE user).

The following sections provide an overview of the service, its customization options, and how it can be integrated into the OAE web site. Additional commentary can be found in the 3akai-ux issue #3729.

Service Overview

Community Forums & Help Desk

UserEcho supports three types of community forums—standard, knowledge base, and helpdesk. The number of each type that a customer can create varies based on that customer’s service plan. All three types have the same interaction model; the differences between them are primarily labeling and access. (Only customers can create knowledge base posts; helpdesk posts are private rather than public by default.)

Users create a post through a multi-step process.

Step 1: Log into the UserEcho site (either through a social media account or, with single sign-on integration, via the customer’s site.)

Step 2: Start typing in the “Enter your idea or search term here…” form. After an initial delay, the input box expands as in the screen shot below.

Note the emphasis on voting.

Step 3: Click the button to add a new post, at which point a new modal appears soliciting more details.

Step 4: Select from the “Post in” options. (The default is “Ideas.”)

Step 5: The post appears in the forum.

Note the actions available on the right side bar.

Step 6: Subsequent searches can find the newly created post.

The user experience for the forums is not especially polished as there are many (non-functional) problems. To cite one example, the voting buttons are shown and enabled for posts written by the user, but attempting to vote on one’s own post causes an error.

Hosted Chat

Hosted chat lets customer support personnel interact with users in real time. The service is rather basic but performs quite well. There is no integration between the chat service and the forums/helpdesk. The following screen shots show the interactions and flow for a single chat session.

Step 1: Customer logs into the UserEcho site and accesses the Agent Interface, at which point they will automatically become available as a support agent.

Step 2: User access the customer’s web site. At this time the only way to trigger a chat session is through the “Chat” button that the UserEcho widget can be configured to provide. The chat button is only shown when a customer agent is available. The button is in the bottom right of the screen shot below. Note that the user does not have to log into the customer’s site nor the the UserEcho site. (It is possible for the customer’s site to hide the chat button for anonymous users.)

Step 3: The user begins typing into chat window that pops up from the button.

Step 4: The customer agent is notified of a new chat.

Step 5: The customer agent responds to the user request.

Step 6: The user sees the agent’s responses.

Step 7: Immediately (not kidding here!) after the chat session terminates, the customer’s administrator account receives an email message that includes the chat session transcript.

Here’s how that same email message appears in a modern email client with HTML support.

Customization

The level of customization depends on the service plan, but UserEcho does allow customers to modify the experience for their users. Customization options include:

• Changing the layout and key parameters (e.g. how many recent posts to highlight) for the modules that make up the forums page. Those modules are
  • Custom JavaScript
  • Facebook
  • Formatted text
  • Image
  • Knowledge base
  • Latest updates
  • Poll
  • Search and add
  • Stats
  • Topic list
• Premium plans allow the inclusion of arbitrary CSS styles.
• Premium plans support custom domain names for the UserEcho site.

Integration

In addition to providing hosted web pages for user forums, UserEcho can be integrated directly into the customer’s web site. That integration can take place in a few areas.

The UserEcho forums can be directly embedded in customer web pages. Although the implementation of this feature is nothing more than an <iframe> to the UserEcho site, the service does tailor the embedding by, for example, stripping out the extraneous user interface elements. The user interaction, however, is identical to the main forum page as described above. Embedded pages also support the same customization options as the main forum page. (Specific customization values are maintained separately for embedded and standalone pages.)

UserEcho provides a JavaScript snippet to enable embedded pages. An embedded page can be made always visible on the customer’s page, or it can be triggered by custom JavaScript code, or it can be triggered by a standard button added to the page by the UserEcho JavaScript snippet. The screen shot below shows the trigger button in the lower right of the page.

Note that live chat sessions can only be triggered by the UserEcho button.

The trigger button supports limited customization: it’s position on the page, color, text content, and language (from a limited set of choices). The customization options are insufficient to make the trigger button fully integrated with the customer page.

In addition to embedding pages, UserEcho support integration with the customer site in a couple of small ways.

1. The customer can insert their own Google Analytics tracking code in the UserEcho forum pages.
2. Premium plans allow the customer to use their own domain name for the UserEcho forum pages.