Picking the right tools
Over the last few months, we have been implementing a lot of support ticket, development tracking, community building, and documentation systems. We picked what we found to be the best systems for their feature sets, compatibility, and customization abilities. There are no perfect, do it all software packages or services for our requirements, so we had to find the products that were as close as possible, and who had the least amount of unacceptable "features" and behaviors.
The primary systems we have decided on are:
Pulling it all together
Having separate systems for all of these pieces left us pretty scattered while we were solidifying our decisions. Separate logins for the forums and support tickets caused a lot of confusion and frustration for our customers, not to mention having so many different places to look for information!
This week we have consolidated these systems under Community Server at myamericommerce.com. We developed a Single Sign-on system to provide one login account for both the help desk and community areas, and integrated the Support Requests, Requested Features, and Reported Bugs directly into Community Server.
The search box at the top has been replaced with our own custom search system which checks both knowledge base items and forum posts.
The knowledge base and documentation have been added as tabs as well, keeping our customers with consistent navigation for all of our support areas.
We have a lot of additional tweaks, integrations, and features to add to these systems over the coming months, and we will continue to strive for the best customer support possible.