As an agency, we’ve lots of sites “out in the wild”, all of which need regular support. This can be simple stuff from passwords being forgotten, through to complicated questions regarding which channel does what. We’ve a support team at Strawberry who look after all of our clients and provide handover documents and help guides but it dawned on me that nobody was reading them. The support team do a great job (and let’s be honest, it’s not an easy one) but I want to make it easier for them.

The Help button in EE is rubbish

I’m going to qualify the above statement - it’s fine for developers but it’s not soft and friendly enough for a client. It’s generic, non client specific and is practical advice rather than sympathetic, hand holding advice.

So I got my thinking cap on - how could we support our EE2 clients better?

The Strawberry Team - consistently good

Confession - right now, I’ve not written a line of the code which makes this idea work. I’m lucky to have a great team of developers (thanks Adam, Stu, Simon, Jamie and Matt) and they’ve taken my initial idea and made the first implementation of it. They’re bright and funny guys and it’s a real bonus having them at Strawberry.

Introducing Supportee

Supportee adds a “Support” button to the menu bar (actually, the button can be called anything). The button pops open a page in a modal window (lightbox), which presents the client with a knowledge base and a form to request support. An admin area lets you, the developer, add questions which are specific to the client or general EE questions and responses.

This isn’t a ticketing system - and deliberately so. Ticketing for my web agency is overkill and unfriendly. I want us to be real people at the end of an email address or telephone and I don’t want our support to become regimented and automated. Supportee though is a softer approach to client questions within the EE control panel, and an easier way of requesting help from our support team. I think it does what I needed it to do.

We’re only at an alpha stage!

I’d like some help please - we’re looking for other EE developers to test, suggest and guide us to what Supportee should do and how it should do it.

We might release Supportee as a paid for service (we might just release it into the wild free for everyone), but obviously if you help us now, whatever we do decide to do in the future, we’ll reflect your help now somehow.

If you’re interested, please drop me an email - drop me an email too if you think the idea is complete garbarge. Seriously. I want to know the EE community opinion regardless of that being a good opinon or not!

Thanks for reading - now go and drop me a mail….