Client: WebServ UK
Project: www.webservuksupport.com
To improve customer support and response times, I took it upon myself to build WebServ UK a functional and easy to use support site. The support website is split into 2 different sections: Helpdesk and Status.
The helpdesk section of the website is fairly straight forward from a programming point of view, and is a pretty standard helpdesk. When I’ve got time in the future, I’m looking to rebuild the helpdesk to include AJAX functionality, as to improve customer experience and usability. The helpdesk also features a knowledgebase, which contains hundreds of frequently asked questions by WebServ UK customers, with their corresponding answers. We’ve found that the knowledgebase has cut down support tickets and phonecalls by a huge 90%, so it’s definetely been worthwhile so far!
The status section of the website is a bit more complex than the helpdesk. It’s designed to allow users to keep track of the status of the services for which they have paid for, whether it be hosting, email or domains. Most server status scripts work by just pinging the port which the service to be checked operates on. However, I know that even if the port is active, the service might not be functioning correctly. For this reason I wrote a script which sits on all the WebServ UK servers, and checks each service in great detail, before sending a response to the support website. Although we’ve hardly had any downtime in the last year, when a service does go on the blink, we’ve found customers really appreciate being able to find out quickly exactly what the problem is, and when it is likely to be resolved.
Tags: application, build