SmarterTrack 9.x BETA Now Available

January 24, 2013 by 2 Comments

We’re excited to announce the BETA of the next version of our popular help desk: SmarterTrack 9.x. Over the last few major releases we focused on providing a Web interface for SmarterTrack that agents, managers, administrators and end users would find as simple as it was powerful.  With this latest release, we kept the same look and appearance but rewrote the underlying architecture with the latest Internet technologies to dramatically improve the speed, reduce the size and increase compatibility with all the latest Internet browsers and tablets.

In addition, SmarterTrack 9.x brings several new features, server side optimizations and fixes that continues to make SmarterTrack compatible with the latest Internet trends.  As with all releases, we worked closely with customers and partners and while we couldn’t incorporate everyone’s ideas into this release, we prioritized our users’ wants to create a new version of SmarterTrack that we think you’ll really like.

So let’s take a look at what’s new…

Tremendous Performance Increases

We spent a great deal of time benchmarking SmarterTrack and then making changes to increase the level of performance across the board. In many instances we’ve seen increases of 70% or more in the speed and responsiveness of the SmarterTrack 9.x interface. We’ve also seen huge decreases in memory and CPU usage, even under extremely heavy loads. All of this means that the product runs much quicker and much more efficiently than previous versions. Some of the changes we’ve made include:

  • Re-factored and completely re-wrote many areas of the web interface to reduce the amount of JavaScript code, CSS and HTML, making the entire web interface much faster, much more responsive and much lighter weight.
  • CSS files have been converted to LESS, making stylesheets much smaller and more efficient.
  • The button bars were re-factored to be lighter weight controls.
  • The context menus were re-factored to be lighter weight controls.
  • The date pickers were re-factored to be lighter weight controls.
  • The tree view controls were re-factored to be lighter weight controls.
  • Greatly increased performance of the Web interface.
  • Replaced the message editor control with a more lightweight control.

As we mentioned in a blog post late last year, we feel efficiency IS a product feature, and SmarterTrack 9.x really proves that point.

color_customization

Simple Customization for the Portal and Management Interface

SmarterTrack 9.x introduces a much simpler way for users to customize the look and feel of their management interface as well as the entire customer-facing Web portal. Now, rather than having to access system files to create custom styles, users can simply override existing SmarterTrack styles with their own variables or, more simply, by modifying the overall color scheme of the primary, secondary and hyperlink colors. Users can even drastically revise the look of the management interface. For example, by moving the navigation icons to a horizontal position versus their default vertical position. Of course, if an Administrator prefers the defaults, customization at the user level can be disabled, thereby preserving branding and corporate identity. Regardless, with these changes to the customization experience, web developers can more fully integrate a SmarterTrack help desk into an existing Web site.

kb_suggestions

Streamlined Knowledge Base Suggestion Process

Both live chat and ticketing are integral parts of any company focused on customer service. However, they shouldn’t be barriers to customers finding out information on their own. In fact, companies can cut support costs by better positioning self-help resources, making them more apparent and easier to use for their customers. With that in mind, SmarterTrack 9.x better integrates self-help options for issues prior to a live chat being sent to an agent or a ticket being submitted from the Web portal. After an end user types in their initial query they are presented with a new page that lists suggested knowledge base articles based on keywords and phrases that are contained in the live chat or ticket text. End users can then see potential solutions before communicating with customer support agents and possibly resolve their issues themselves.

spell_checker

Improved Spell Checking

No one likes to send replies to tickets or live chats with spelling errors. SmarterTrack 9.x offers a completely revised spell checking engine that greatly increases the accuracy of the spell check as well as adding in grammar support. The new spell check also ignores things like URLs and email addresses and allows agents to add words to their own personal dictionaries.

Better Mobile and Tablet Support

SmarterTrack was architected so that the experience a user gets from a browser on a tablet mirrors their experience in the browser on their desktop. With this latest release, the experience is even more fluid and enjoyable due to a complete revision of the HTML editor used to create and/or reply to tickets, create knowledge base articles and more. Now it’s even easier, and more efficient, for agents to work from anywhere, at any time, using the laptops or tablet devices. And of course, the mobile interface is still available for devices with smaller screens, like smart phones.

Greater Support for
International Customers

SmarterTrack is a truly international product. With customers in well over 120 different countries, support for languages other than English is a priority. In addition, as SmarterTrack’s adoption across the globe continues to rise, support for non-Western character sets is also essential. With SmarterTrack 9.x we’ve not only included support for right-to-left languages in the management interface and on the portal, but we’ve also gone through the entire product and greatly simplified our language strings to make things much easier for automated translations and for customers who create their own translations files.

17 Different Spell-check Dictionaries Included

In addition to the improved spell checking, SmarterTrack also includes dictionaries for 17 different languages. The languages supported include:
configure_dictionary

  • English (US+UK Combined) – DEFAULT
  • English (US), (Australia), (Canada), (UK)
  • French
  • German/German (Switzerland)
  • Greek
  • Hungarian
  • Italian
  • Norwegian
  • Polish
  • Portuguese/Portuguese (Brazil)
  • Russian
  • Spanish

These dictionaries are fully editable as well, so agents who speak multiple languages and use the dictionary of their choice and add words as needed.

Is that it?

Of course not! SmarterTrack 9.x has many more features and improvements. You’ll find them in the release notes we’ll post in the SmarterTrack 9.x BETA forum, but here are a few more that might be of interest:

  • Phone numbers now carry over from the login and user creation external provider.
  • Incoming or outgoing tickets created by agents can now be pinned to an agent when they are created.
  • Status messages and tip text now drops down from the top of the page and no longer disrupts page flow.
  • Language strings have been simplified so that they are much easier to translate.
  • SmarterTrack Communicator users can now designate calls, either incoming or outgoing, as “Personal” in order to prevent automated call logs.
  • Canned replies are now inserted into a ticket or chat wherever the cursor is located.
  • Duration now appears in the ticket grid so that agents and managers can see the total time a ticket has been worked on.
  • All default system emails were reviewed and rewritten to make them easier to understand.

Getting started with the BETA

To get your hands on the BETA simply visit the SmarterTools BETA forum, where you’ll see how to:

  • Sign up for the BETA
  • Get a special BETA license key
  • Download the latest BETA release (we update it regularly)
  • Communicate with other BETA testers and the SmarterTools development team
  • Stay up-to-date on the latest release note and BETA news

Sign up for the BETA

Filed under SmarterTools, SmarterTrack, SmarterTrack.com Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Welcome Windows 8, Microsoft Surface, and the Future

October 26, 2012 by 1 Comment

Microsoft is releasing Windows 8 this week, their latest desktop operating system, as well as the Microsof Surface, their first tablet computer. This will be closely followed with the next versions of Office, their mobile platform and even Xbox advancements and improvements. All of these releases signal a significant change for Microsoft, one that, as experts and analysts have discussed at great length, will either make or break Microsoft moving forward.

As a software developer that specializes in Windows technologies, we couldn’t be more excited for these changes. We pride ourselves on staying up-to-date with technology and in ensuring our products work across as many platforms as possible. We do this so that customers who stay current with their software, either by keeping their upgrade protection current or by reinstating expired versions, can reap the benefits of the work we put into each release.

So what did we have to do?

Windows 8 presented its fair share of issues. If changes to their primary desktop operating system wasn’t enough, we also have the new Surface tablet to deal with as well as the recent release of Windows Server 2012. Therefore, it wasn’t a simple matter of just making our standard adjustments and releasing new versions.

The first challenge was that the security levels in Windows Server 2012 are much higher than in previous Windows server versions. This fact meant we needed to focus more on ensuring our installations didn’t throw odd security exceptions for administrators. Therefore, we needed a bit more finesse and attention to how our products install and how they interact with both our installers and the operating system in general.

Another issue was dealing with changes in Internet Explorer 10. Microsoft changed their Web browser just as much as they changed their operating system. While it was easy to make all of our products work by running IE 10 in compatibility mode, this in not the best solution. Therefore, we had to make changes to our interface as well as the inner workings of all 3 products in order to run them natively in IE 10.

Another challenge was Exchange ActiveSync. Windows 8 includes an email client, a calendar application and contact system within the OS itself. Windows Mail provides a user with a few options, one of which is Exchange ActiveSync. We had to re-work our EAS implementation to accommodate this as we noticed that the default applications tended to continually request updates rather than request updates on a specific interval. This caused problems with connections and impacted server utilization.  We made changes so this is no longer an issue.

Finally, we take pride in ensuring that all of our products work “right out of the box.” That means that we include a default Web server with each installation so that customers can get their applications up and running as quickly as possible. Getting that default Web server to install and run correctly under both Server 2012 and Windows 8 presented a unique set of problems that required an extensive amount of time to revise and test. While we were at it, we updated the Web server to be more robust, stable and faster.  Keep in mind, the internal Web server is still not intended to be a production Web server like Internet Information Server (IIS), but we had to make the adjustments to make it easy for customers to begin using our products.

All in all, we’re always up for a challenge as it helps keep us on our toes. We are excited to see how Microsoft’s new operating systems, not to mention their foray into tablet computing, are received and how they will help keep Microsoft on the cutting edge of personal and business computing.

All that being said, what are your impressions with Microsoft’s products or our integration? We’re always interested to hear your opinions, so comment away..

Filed under SmarterMail, SmarterStats, SmarterTools, SmarterTrack Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

The Importance of SEO Friendly Help Documentation

May 21, 2012 by

When was the last time you went to a manufacturer’s website to search for answers to a question about a particular product? If you’re like most people, you don’t. Instead, you head to Google and type in your question, then start clicking on results. If you’re lucky – or, more likely, if the manufacturer is lucky – one of the top results is from the maker of whatever product you have the question about. Otherwise, you see results from forums and blogs, and maybe Google+, Facebook and Twitter feeds, which address the same, or similar, question you have.

When people use other outlets than your own to find answers to questions about your products or services, that’s traffic, not to mention authority, that you’re missing out on. So, how can you keep your site and your company at the top of organic search results when people have questions about your products? The answer is really pretty simple.

Make sure your helpdesk offers SEO friendly tools

You put a lot of time and effort into creating website content that is keyword rich and that will draw you tons of organic traffic. Make sure your helpdesk offers the same opportunity. Many knowledge base systems on the market don’t offer things like:

  • Article content that can actually be searched by search engines
  • The ability to tag articles with valued keywords
  • The ability to create summaries of articles that are keyword-rich
  • The ability to create keyword rich article titles
  • The ability to generate URLS based off your keyword rich titles
  • The ability to create HTML content so you can add keyword-rich ALT and TITLE tags for images, create keyword-rich links to your website and more.
  • Sharing of knowledge base articles across a variety of social networks, including Twitter, Facebook and even Digg.

If your helpdesk can’t give you these essential tools for creating search engine friendly content, then you’re in danger of losing valuable traffic to sources that aren’t as authoritative as your own. Worse, you could be sending traffic to your competitors.

View and react to customer search history

Your ability to craft valuable knowledge base content is only as good as your ability to tell whether you’re answering your customers’ questions. That’s where being able to see what your customers are searching for in your knowledge base comes in handy. Even better is the ability to see what search queries return no relevant articles. Maybe a query returns articles, but those articles have few, if any, views relative to the number of searches.

If your customers are looking for information that can’t be found, that’s a huge problem. If you can’t bridge that gap then you’re losing traffic, and you may even be losing customers, especially if information they’re seeking can be found on a competitor’s website.

Search for yourself to find areas of improvement

While it’s best to follow what your customers are searching for when you craft helpdesk content, it’s also a good idea to do your own reconnaissance. That means diving into your helpdesk and performing your own searches and seeing what comes up. Follow customer searches to see what articles, if any, show up. If an article is relevant for a particular search term, but it has no views, see if you can figure out why.

You may even want to perform the same search on Google and see what comes up and analyze the results, then use that information to craft your own articles. Heck, see how competitors address similar questions in their own help systems and follow their lead – but only if they’re returning relevant results. You’ll be amazed at what you find by getting your hands a little dirty.

Use relevant keywords whenever and wherever possible

This is pretty much a no brainer but it’s worth mentioning anyway. You need to make sure you hit relevant keyword content in all of your articles, even if it’s simply in the article summary and tags. You don’t need to have them all over an article or its title, but if you’re answering a question there’s no reason you can’t include relevant, related keywords in an article’s summary or in the tags associated with the article. The more important point is to address the issue. Keyword content is a close second, though.

Allow users to share your most important articles with their friends

The rise of social media always reminds me of that famous Faberge Organics shampoo commercial. Since social media is all about being social, about sharing information and links – as well as videos of cats – with a network of friends and associates, you need to make sure your users are able to share your key articles across whatever social network they want: Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Reddit and others. The ability to share your information not only allows for social interaction of your brand with the friends of your users, but also gives some added SEO power to your information.

Of course all of this is only possible if you have a helpdesk that supports it all. If Google or Bing can’t access your helpdesk content, including any news items or RSS feeds, then it’s time for a new helpdesk. Remember: your helpdesk is a huge repository of information about your product or service and it’s just as important to the success of your company as your primary website. A helpdesk can easily double the amount of relevant and searchable content about your company, so it’s imperative that you have that resource in your hands. You can bet your competitors do.

Filed under SmarterTools, SmarterTrack, SmarterTrack.com Tagged with , , , , ,

Speeding Up Your Response Times – Ticket Resolutions

April 24, 2012 by

A key to providing a high level of customer service is the ability to get information to your customers and end users quickly and efficiently. You may have the best system in the world for gathering important information for end users, but if it still takes your agents hours to reply to tickets or live chats then the amount of information you have becomes rather irrelevant.

There are a few simple tools that can assist with both the accumulation of important information as well as facilitate the distribution of that information, quickly, to end users and customers. With today’s tip we’ll focus on one way to make sure your users are not only well informed but that they receive their information in a timely manner.  Over the next few weeks we’ll cover other time-saving tips, so stay tuned.

Ticket Resolutions as Time Savers

Perhaps one of the lesser-known features of SmarterTrack is the ability to add resolutions to tickets. What that means is that an agent can add instructions, be it a simple explanation or step-by-step walk through, on how a particular issue was resolved. That resolution is then stored with that ticket.

The bigger benefit is that these resolutions are fully indexed, just like ticket content. That means that ticket resolutions, along with KB articles, are available as resources to assist agents who are troubleshooting similar issues. Agents can see any and all potential ticket resolutions that are associated to the contents of the ticket they’re working on. By using a pre-existing resolution, agents can greatly reduce the time it takes them to reply back to customers since the agent doesn’t have to spend the time looking for a way to solve the customer’s issues – it’s already been done for them!

A recent real world example can help demonstrate the power of using ticket resolutions to save time.

As you many know, Microsoft released an update to Office for Mac about a week or two ago. This update included changes to Outlook for Mac that happened to break SmarterMail 9.x’s implementation of Exchange Web Services.  Once we got a ticket in from a customer experiencing issues, it took one of our support agents about 90 minutes to work through various scenarios until he concluded that the recent Office update caused the problem.  The simple solution was to simply roll back the update.

However, during that time, a second ticket came in. As that second ticket was being worked on, the original agent heard the new agent talking about the issue and asked if the second customer had installed the Office update. It turns out they had.

This caused our agents to work up a resolution for the issue that they added to both tickets. When additional tickets started coming in, that resolution was instrumental in our support agents getting responses and resolutions out to our customers quickly. Adding the resolutions to those two tickets literally saved upwards of 40 hours of troubleshooting.

Had this issue been more widespread, had it affected an incredibly large number of customers or if it required a longer-term solution, the issue resolution could have easily been turned into a canned reply, a news item post on the portal or a knowledge base article. It could even have been turned into all three, thereby making sure customers received a consistent, concise and easy explanation for issues and their resolution, regardless of how the customer was communicating with agents.

So there you go, both a simple time saving feature and a current, real world example of how it was used. Of course, here at SmarterTrack.com we’re using the latest version of SmarterTrack so we have the added benefit of seeing issue trends using the trend cloud. Having that AND the ability to apply previous ticket resolutions is an even greater time saver, but more on that, and other time saving features, in future posts.

Filed under SmarterTools, SmarterTrack, SmarterTrack.com Tagged with , , , , ,

Microsoft’s Problem(s)

April 17, 2012 by 15 Comments

Everyone knows Microsoft has lost its vision and direction in the consumer market and is years behind most industry leaders, with the Xbox as the possible exception.  But few know that Microsoft is facing the same loss of vision and direction with its server and enterprise business.

Microsoft is losing the battle of the Web

Microsoft's IIS is in red

Lets start with a little shock value: At the start of 2009, Microsoft’s IIS software was responsible for hosting about 35% of the websites on the Web. As of March 2012, Microsoft is now at approximately 13.5%. This is a 62% drop in the last 3 years and has had, and will continue to have, a significant impact on Microsoft’s future. This drop is even more dramatic when you consider the history of the Web and Microsoft IIS. As a former hosting provider myself, I remember starting my hosting business back in 1995 running Windows NT 3.51. It’s true that over the last 17 years, IIS suffered a number of issues. Today, however, it is a VERY solid and stable Web server platform. So why is Microsoft becoming as obsolete in the hosting industry as it has in the mobile phone and tablet industry? (Yes, Windows 8 shows some promise for tablets, but when it is released it will still be years behind iOS and Android in terms of availability and adoption – those are years it can’t make up). Microsoft has done a number of things to make Microsoft a viable platform and has overcome a lot of obstacles. However, in many cases each change for the better seems to precipitate a change for the worse.

Changes for better and worse

  • While Microsoft was slow to adopt open source development technologies such as PHP and Perl, they DID adopt them into the IIS/Windows realm, which is something you can’t say of the open source community with relation to Microsoft technologies like .NET.  (The MonoProject does exist but has not been well supported).
  • They introduced the Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA), which made all hosting and service providers pay monthly royalties versus one-time expenditures. SPLA itself isn’t bad but there were some pricing blunders, like one in 2009 that could have doubled the costs for hosting providers (anyone remember the authenticated/non authenticated license fiasco?), that really put the fear of God into many Microsoft hosting partners. Some proposed upcoming changes may have an even greater effect on the viability of hosting Windows products, like changing SQL Server 2012 SPLA pricing to be based on the number of processor cores a server has versus the number of physical processors.
  • They had security vulnerabilities that made it difficult to isolate many customers on one web server for shared hosting. Over the last several years they have solidified the Windows server OS through the ability to set .NET permissions on app pools and made it easier to manage multiple single app pools sites on a a single server as well as mange resources by site, thereby increasing security and performance in higher density environments.
  • They were initially slow to respond to hosting companies and the hosting model. They tried to force their own ideal of Windows hosting onto the community without listening to existing Windows hosts. For a few years, however, they actually made an effort to start a conversation with Windows hosts. Nevertheless, I get the impression from talking to partners that his conversation is, once again, turning a bit one-sided.
  • And more recently, they started competing against their hosting partners with Office Live, Azure, Office365 and more. Microsoft always had a semi-contentious relationship with hosting partners. On the one hand they did what they could to make it easier on hosting providers but, all the while, many providers knew that Microsoft was going to benefit most from whatever changes were made. Whatever positive change Microsoft made for partners was closely followed by some other announcement, like when they announced that with every Office Live sign up users received a free website and free hosting for it, that was in direct competition to what partners were offering.

Many of these obstacles still exist but what Microsoft really seems to lack is a hosting division that really wants to commit to winning the “website count” battle. At one time the hosting division at Microsoft was VERY focused on this goal and we were often told that was how funding for the division was determined. I get the impression that this is no longer the case.

Hosting as a channel to the SMB

The hosting industry is an important channel for Microsoft as it allows them to access small and medium sized businesses, web developers and designers, and a number of enterprise customers. With a continued drop off in website count there will be a transition from not only IIS-based web servers but also many other server roles that are crucial to the hosting industry. This includes things like mail servers, application servers, cloud servers, virtualization servers and more. With the drop off, the impact on revenue for Exchange Server, .NET and Visual Studio, Hyper-V and Windows Server is clear but, bigger than that, will be the lack of a channel to reach the small and medium sized businesses and the design and development community, which is huge.

And I don’t think that Microsoft can make up for this loss by transitioning their focus to services like Office365. Microsoft is having an incredibly difficult time reaching small and medium sized businesses through their online services. Many SMB’s like the ability to have choice and go to hosting companies that may be local and close to their offices (or at least in their same city), that speak their language, that offer professional services beyond just hosting a website, that offer live and accessible customer service and support, and more. These are areas that Microsoft can’t compete. By focusing on the hosting market and by focusing on their hosting partners, Microsoft was spreading their technology and not only securing and increasing revenues on the server end, but they were also protecting their phone, tablet and desktop prospects.

What happened to “developers, developers, developers“?

The developer also plays a huge role in this. Microsoft has always done a great job creating opportunity for developers to build businesses around extending Windows and its overall platform. As Microsoft dwindles in its popularity the desire to work with Visual Studio, .NET and Windows in general will also decrease. As it is, many developers want to make the shift to OSX and want to avoid having to code to multiple machines and platforms. By moving to open source technologies such as Ruby, PHP, Perl, etc. they have this flexibility.

What does this all mean for Microsoft? Well, they are losing from all angles. Although their enterprise division is reporting growth, these “website count” issues will start to impact that business over time. In addition, it will impact the development division and eventually their desktop and consumer divisions will feel the pinch. As it stands, Microsoft’s own online services are years away from replacing their hosting partners and the personal and customizable services that hosting providers offer to small and medium sized businesses.

That’s my take, anyway. What are your thoughts? What does Microsoft have to do to start regaining market share in the hosting business and avoid becoming obsolete?

Filed under SmarterMail, SmarterStats, SmarterTools, SmarterTrack, Technology Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , ,

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