Fanatical Support is our primary value proposition for Rackspace. It's the backbone of everything we do. However, at the time our support infrastructure consisted of two customer facing ticketing systems (use depended on which products were purchased, some customers had to use both) and two ticketing systems for support Rackers. At a minimum, these disparate experiences were causing a lot of customer and Racker pain.
Beyond that, we also had a ton of customer research that pointed to ways we could improve our support systems. This included things like:
I was primarily focused on the customer facing vision for the project. To get started we identified a few typical current state user flows and then used those to determine potential ideal flows. We ended up landing on the following workflow to base our designs. We decided to focus on improving a couple of the most painful aspects of the work (designated with grey stars).
There are many dev teams that integrate monitoring platforms and other tooling into Slack. In this design the user can create a ticket via Slack. They can even include information from another Slackbot alert as part of the ticket.
In addition to our own infrastructure, Rackspace also provides support on top AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. For the most part our customers still login to those native portals to create and manage infrastructure (if they don't do it via code). This design shows a browser extension that could work on top of certain websites. It would allow for searching of our Knowledge Base and ticket creation without having to go into the Rackspace portal.
Providing customers with a mechanism for creating tickets anywhere in our portal using a drawer or some other contextual pattern would give them a lot more flexibility. In addition, we could assist in the process by making assumptions about the ticket topic or other data based on what they are currently viewing. It would give our customers the ability to gather all the data for the ticket without having to switch back and forth copying information from one page to another.
Providing customers with a mechanism for creating tickets anywhere in our portal using a drawer or some other contextual pattern would give them a lot more flexibility. In addition, we could assist in the process by making assumptions about the ticket topic or other data based on what they are currently viewing. It would give our customers the ability to gather all the data for the ticket without having to switch back and forth copying information from one page to another.
When the customer recieves a response from Rackspace they would receive the full contents of the message in their email (if desired) and have the ability to respond via email.
Alternatively, if they login to the portal, they can see the full conversation which may include automated alerts, messages from a Support Racker and checklist items for approval.
