Being engineers and programmers, we like to help people and solve problems. For many companies, this starts with a standard support ticketing system that is designed to answer a specific problem. Technical support then gets to work through the issue, find the problem, solve it and close it. Once a case is solved, for the most part, it’s then tucked away hidden in the system. We asked ourselves why are we hiding all these solutions? We love digging into a problem and finding a solution for our customers, but when the same question is being answered repeatedly it is inefficient and tedious. We also see copy and paste answers as impersonal and bleak. As more and more people use our products they end up asking a lot of the same questions and are looking for the same information.
One solution to this problem is continuously updating the manual to our products or creating a white paper. These both take time and don’t answer all the questions that users may be asking. Efficiency was one of the primary goals when creating HMS.how. We aimed to shrink the feedback circle for creating documentation. To create a white paper or update a manual is a strenuous process. Before a white paper is written we must first notice a need for it. This could mean answering many support cases before one is written. Once a trend is noticed you need to pick a specific example that solves the problem. Then you write to document and publish it. The publishing process is an undertaking all on its own with the need to convert in into to multiple languages and have it configured in different formats. All the while the team is still handling support cases that need to be answered. If something along the way is wrong the process goes back and the content must be regenerated.
Being a one-way street of information does not allow us to truly understand the needs of users and limits interactions. When someone doesn’t find exactly what they need in a white paper they simply submit a support case. It is nearly impossible to create documentation that covers every case a customer is going to come up with especially with our versatile products like the Flexy.
At HMS Industrial Networks we want to put information out there to help people save time, find an easy solution and learn more about our products. This allows the users to have the power to solve their own issues. As engineers and programmers, we did what we always do which was to look to the internet for help. Every good programmer knows where that led us to; we ended up at stackoverflow. If you don’t know what Stackoverflow it is a site designed to connect programmers with other programmers to help each other solve their problems. Jeff Atwood one of the founder’s of the site explained it in one of his blog posts. He said, "Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal." (Read full article)
Why does stack over flow work? It works because people don’t know everything, but they know someone else will. This person, in turn, does not know everything but they can add to the conversation. So, put enough people together on a platform that allows them to ask questions, discuss them, then share answers soon you start solving a lot of problems. Since it is all done on a website designed around this idea, you end up with an easily searchable database of questions and answers. Pulling from stackexchange, a sister site of stackoverflow, a user posted a question asking why stackoverflow works. One of the answers does a fantastic job answering. The writer wrote “the biggest reason is entirely selfish. I want Stack Overflow to be there when I have my hair-tearing-out problems, and I want the maximum number of eyeballs to look over my oddball question and really give me shot-in-the-dark answers, if for no other reason than confirming my beliefs that this is indeed an oddball problem.”(Read full post). Stackexchange works because people want to help each other whether they are asking the questions or giving the answers.
HMS.how allows people to post issues, get answers, and creates a database for other users. This database is searchable by our support team and the public. Since it is a public site this also includes being searchable by Google. This saves everyone involved in the process alot of time. The customer does not need to wait for an answer and our support staff is solving new problems. Users are also getting more than just a question and a response, in some cases they get the troubleshooting steps performed to get to the solution. This gives them things to try without waiting and without asking. If the post does not fully answer the question the user can simply post their additional question or, depending on how similar the issues seem, a new separate question.