User Support with UserVoice
UserVoice is a third-party support service for web sites and applications. It’s tools include
- Feedback forums. Traditional web forums tailored to allow users to suggest and discuss features.
- A support ticket system. A web-based system to capture, respond to, and track individual user support requests.
- Knowledge base. A web-based, interactive, frequently asked questions list.
In these notes customer refers to a customer of UserVoice (e.g., the OAE Project) and user refers to an individual user of the customer’s site (e.g., a single OAE user).
UserVoice provides a hosted web site for feedback forums (e.g. http://oae.uservoice.com) that can also be accessed via a custom domain name on premium plans, (e.g. http://support.oaeproject.org). The landing page is relatively sparse, but premium plans allow some customization. (Total customization, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, is only available on the most expensive plan.)
As the user begins to enter text for the suggestion, real-time search shows related forum posts and knowledge base articles.
In order to post a new article or vote on existing ones, an email address (but no password or UserVoice account) is required.
In addition to making suggestions on the forum, users can email (e.g. support@oaeproject.org) specific support requests or create them on the customer’s web site. Customer administrators (known as agents can see a dashboard view and drill down to specific analytics.
The integration section below covers an example support interaction in detail.
The knowledge base is a modified version of the standard forums. It is read-only to users, and has slightly different interaction semantics. (For example, users can only indicate whether or not a knowledge base article is helpful; they cannot vote on one.)
UserVoice supports different levels of customization depending on the service plan. At the most expensive level, full customization for the widgets and forums (including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) is available. At more modest service levels customization is limited. Those customization options include
- Colors and textual content for most user interface elements in both the widget and the forum pages.
- Addition of a single logo to the forum pages.
- A custom domain name for the forum pages.
UserVoice provides a widget to allow users to provide feedback directly from the customer’s web site. That widget adds a small question mark icon on the lower right of the page.
The user then has a free-form text field to enter a comment. As the image below indicates, the user also has the option to include a screenshot of the page they’re visiting.
When the user clicks to move to the next step, the widget presents the results of a search of the feedback forums and knowledge base articles, which the user can read in the widget itself.
If the user elects to send feedback and is not logged into the customer’s site, then the widget prompts for (and validates) an email address. Otherwise the feedback is sent immediately.
The user’s support request then shows up as a ticket for customer support agents.
Several features of this ticket are worth highlighting. First, UserVoice automatically searches Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc for the user’s email address. If a match is found, it displays the user’s real name with links to their profiles, recent tweets, etc. (There are none in the screenshot below as the “user” has no social network profile in this case.)
The widget itself can also pass user information as part of the ticket. In this case the information includes data from user.data.me of the logged in user.
The code to add this information is straightforward and customizable, e.g.
// If the user has logged in, add user identity
if (!oae.data.me.anon) {
UserVoice.push(['identify', {
email: oae.data.me.email,
name: oae.data.me.displayName,
id: oae.data.me.id,
type: oae.data.me.isGlobalAdmin ? 'Global Admin' : (oae.data.me.isTenantAdmin ? 'Tenant Admin' : 'User')
}]);
}
Other information about the user such as previous support requests is also shown in the context of the ticket.
If the user elected to include a screen shot, a link is present in the ticket.
Clicking on the link shows an inline view.
The original is also available. Although not an exact replica of the user’s screen, it does capture the main aspects.