Mission: Diligent Support

While Dolphin Pro 7.2 work is being finalised, we decided to focus on our support system. We are a small team working with lots of clients, but we believe that there are things that can be improved anyway. Sometimes we miss important requests or fail to reply in time. Documentation is getting outdated and somewhat disorganised. A lot of clients have to rely on Forums for support from our awesome community, which is great, but not something we should bank on. 

Therefore, our short-term mission (for the next 3 weeks) is to put in place a "Diligent Support" platform and policy. Some improvements have already been done and we're going to do more.

Already working well:

1. Support Messenger in the bottom right corner. We are online whenever we can and when we're offline all messages go to support@boonex.com. The live chat looks like this:

2. The support@boonex.com email is now connected to a new Help Desk system, which we manage meticulously. It's been up for 2 weeks now, and our stats are as follows (and improving):

3. Forums have always been around, but in recent months we see a really good response rate from the community. Long-time members, developers especially, are doing great job helping newcomers. It's a win-win scenario when developers offer their products as solutions in appropriate situations, and also take time to just give a hand. BoonEx team now committed to checking Forums twice daily, and participating whenever needed. 

Working, but needs improvement:

1. Documentation in our Help Wiki. We have a lot of great useful manuals there, but as we move forward with new versions some of them are going to be outdated. Some screenshots already often look confusing. We plan to go through all pages twice - before and after Dolphin 7.2 release, and refresh the content. Any help would be much appreciated. It's a wiki, see.

2. Documentation in Social Software Wiki. We have launched this resource in hope to provide an independent knowledge base not only for Dolphin, but also for any other social software. Anyone can chime in and edit it. We believe it has great potential to give a wider perspective for Dolphin users and also offer advice that we couldn't host here at Boonex.com for various reasons. SSW is working well, but it requires more content, naturally. 

To be added/changed:

1. Knowledge Base (KB)

Although we have FAQ pages in the Wiki, they're not used much. Mostly this is because they are not presented as part of support-case flow. So, we may shortly be launching a KB connected to our Messenger and Help Desk, so that common questions could be looked-up before (or, hopefully instead of) writing to support email. 

2. Languages 

The new KB should be translated to a few popular languages, not just English. We couldn't do it effectively with Wiki, so this is another go.

3. "Custom Services" Page

We don't provide custom modification services, but many great developers from Boonex Market. We would like to list the best ones on a special page and refer to it when asked. Suggestions welcome. The page will go online along with 7.2 release.

4. Our Help section is likely to get a bit of a trim. Quality instead of quantity. 

5. FAQ blog - we will be separating a special Blog section with FAQ posts. One question - one post. It'd be different from Documentation or KB, because posts would be relevant for the time of posting (with the current version and situation on hands), and would depreciate gradually. It would also allow community comments for clarification. The most prominent posts would make it to KB. 

Policies:

- We provide full pre-sale/post-sale support for licenses, registration, activation, paid-installations, BoonEx memberships, evaluation, hosting recommendation.

- We provide limited tech support for common and known issues, or issues that can be handled within 20 minutes with known outcome. 

- We do not provide any tech support for 3rd-party modifications. Ask the Providers/Vendors instead.

- We may refuse support for issues arising with modified sites when 3rd-party modification is a likely cause.

- We will refer the client to their hosting provider whenever the issue is caused by improper hosting setup.  

Other Ideas:

Here's what we think we could add...

- Community Chat. We have always been reluctant about this one, because chats normally have no way to re-use content, and therefore are difficult to scale. We might introduce one now, if we stick to the principle of adding valuable answers to "permanent" support sections. We'd most likely utilise "Slack" platform to power it. 

- Video Tutorials. We could make a dozen of basic tutorials. About a minute each. What topics do you think we should cover?

- Paid Custom Support. Another possible addition is a paid (timed) support for cases where custom work is required. Say, when a technical issue arises not from the software bug, but from lack of experience or due to 3rd-party mods, etc. What do you think could be a good way to time and bill it?

This is it for now. Please, review these plans and ideas and let us know what you think. What would you add? What would you remove? What would your change?

Thank you!