{"id":3021,"date":"2010-03-26T11:40:50","date_gmt":"2010-03-26T11:40:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.simple-talk.com\/uncategorized\/help-yourself-if-you-like\/"},"modified":"2016-07-28T10:49:55","modified_gmt":"2016-07-28T10:49:55","slug":"help-yourself-if-you-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/blogs\/help-yourself-if-you-like\/","title":{"rendered":"Help yourself (if you like)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At Red Gate we enjoy talking to our customers. Really! If you&#8217;ve read recent blog posts by members of some of our customer-facing teams, you&#8217;ll have spotted the pleasure they take in their work.<\/p>\n<p>In case you missed those posts, here they are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>From our Finance team: <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.simple-talk.com\/community\/blogs\/redwork\/archive\/2010\/02\/19\/89955.aspx\">Finance: Friends, not foes!<\/a><\/em> <\/li>\n<li>From our reception desk:<em> <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.simple-talk.com\/community\/blogs\/redwork\/archive\/2010\/01\/22\/88095.aspx\"><em>The Front line of Communication<\/em><\/a> <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>However, we recognise that sometimes our customers would like to be able to solve their problems or answer their questions without talking to us &#8211; they&#8217;re in a hurry, it&#8217;s outside office hours . or perhaps they just prefer not to pick up the phone and call. <\/p>\n<p><strong>Self-service customer care<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>So we&#8217;ve begun a programme of work to enable more self-service; whether it&#8217;s finding the answer to a &#8220;how do i.?&#8221; question or getting access to a record of what product licenses they own, we want to make it much easier for our customers to get hold of this information for themselves. If they want to.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phase 1: make it easier to find information<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We decided to start by tackling findability. We&#8217;ve got loads of useful information on our website, but it&#8217;s sometimes difficult to find, so we&#8217;ve been working on improving our site search. Step 1 has been to replace the search engine, clean up the search UI, and make it consistent across the site. We&#8217;re nearly there!<\/p>\n<p>The idea is that if we improve the site search it will be easier &#8211; and much more pleasant &#8211; for people to find the information they need. The new search will go live some time in April, and then we&#8217;ll be gathering feedback, looking at web analytics (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.simple-talk.com\/community\/blogs\/rachel\/archive\/2010\/01\/29\/88859.aspx\">more about this in an earlier article<\/a>), and working out what improvements we still need to make. We&#8217;d love to hear what you think, so do give your feedback or drop us a line. Or pick up the phone and call, if you like.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What do you<\/strong> <strong>think?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>While I&#8217;ve got your attention, I&#8217;d love to hear what people think about self-service customer care. <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Do you like to call, email, live chat . or do you prefer to dig around and find out answers yourself? <\/li>\n<li>Who&#8217;s getting it right: what self-service sites do you like? <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>p.s.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Watch this space for news of phase 2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Red Gate we enjoy talking to our customers. Really! If you&#8217;ve read recent blog posts by members of some of our customer-facing teams, you&#8217;ll have spotted the pleasure they take in their work. In case you missed those posts, here they are: From our Finance team: Finance: Friends, not foes! From our reception desk:&#8230;&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161417,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-3021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161417"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3021"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41871,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3021\/revisions\/41871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3021"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/simple-talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}