1️⃣How to scope a support experience

👋 Introduction

A support experience should be immediate, simple, and humane. It should feel like calling up a friend or an expert, and getting your solution in a minute.

A support experience typically has 4 parts:

1. Discovery of Support from various pages in the product

2. Support centre to guide users to resolution

3. Self-serve content like articles and FAQs

4. High-touch options that involve a support agent

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1️⃣ Support phases

👀 Discovery

Getting this right will reinforce the user’s trust in your product. If Support is hard to access in a moment of frustration for the user, you risk losing the user.

Entry point	Purpose	Guide
App level	Make Help easy to access from anywhere on your app	https://www.notion.so/How-to-design-discovery-for-support-7620d64cfe7b45c0b0957ee2ed8e6416?pvs=21
Feature level	Surface Help CTA in features where you anticipate issues	https://www.notion.so/How-to-design-discovery-for-support-7620d64cfe7b45c0b0957ee2ed8e6416?pvs=21

❓ Support centre

Support experiences should be designed to help users find their solution as quickly as possible. Finding the most relevant content should be straightforward and intuitive.

Feature	Purpose	Guide
Search	For user’s with a specific query	Coming soon
Recent activity	Activity for which you anticipate issues	Coming soon
Categories	To drill down to the issue gradually	Coming soon

📖 Self-serve

Use self-serve content for simple questions that your users might have—about using the product or understanding specific features.

Feature	Purpose	Guide
Articles	To explain how to use different features of the product	https://www.notion.so/How-to-write-good-support-articles-1e324ab4618c400686ae3b1362ea9234?pvs=21
FAQs	Specific questions and answers to troubleshoot common issues. These are typically crisp paragraphs and much shorter than articles.	Coming soon
Chatbot	If possible, to deflect issues with articles and FAQs. Else if the user is not satisfied, to identify the type of issue before it is assigned to an agent.	Coming soon

🧑🏻‍💻 High-touch

If a query is operations related such as a payment issue or a delivery issue, it might require a person to draw on information from multiple systems.

Feature	Purpose	Guide
Tickets	Asynchronous communication for cases that are less time sensitive, or would require longer to reach a resolution.	Coming soon
Live agents	To connect the user to a real person through a live chat. This option is the most costly and should be reserved for issues that have real-time implications.	Coming soon

☝ Guiding principle: High-touch support is a cost centre (i.e. it does not directly add to profit but still costs the organisation money to operate). So it’s wise to resolve as many issues as possible with self-serve methods, and to be discerning about when high-touch methods are required.

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2️⃣ Map

Align with your team on a map before you start designing.

1. Identify the features mentioned above that will solve issues on your product.

2. If you’re building Support from scratch, map the ideal flow through these features.

3. If you already have a flow, identify the steps that are forming bottlenecks. You will solve for these.

Let’s zoom in to the chatbot feature:

1. If the user gives poor feedback on an FAQ, they enter the chatbot flow.

2. The chatbot asks questions to identify the issue.

   1. If the issue can be solved by an FAQ , the chatbot responds with the FAQ content in a message.

   2. If the issue requires human intervention, the chatbot collects information from the user that will allow the human agent to hit the ground running.

      1. If the issue is time-sensitive, it is routed to a live agent for immediate resolution.

      2. Else, a ticket is raised for asynchronous resolution.

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