For knowledgebase articles it is not uncommon to put images or even video on specific answers. Most of the articles we use have iamges associated to them. I think it would be great to have a document library specificly for images and/or videos that are displayed in KB Articles. In our industry, it isn't uncommon for our web site to be updated. When this happens, images need to be updated so the images are current and relevant. Many times, we'll get messages interally say "theres an out dated image on article... " Having a dedicated media library would help manage this workload.

 

In RightNow, there is already a library for uploading images used for the Analytics Console, I image this would be something similar to that.

 

A media library would allow all the images or video used to be hosted on the same server the KB articles are hosted and managed in the same tool. If hosting images is too much space, maybe this library could just capture the source ofthe image and generate a virtual library, displaying the URL where the image is actually hosted.

 

I imagine that a media library would have document control (who is allowed to upload files) and version control, so if an image is updated, it can replace the old file but there would still be access to all previous versions (like subversion or even sharepoint document libraries).

 

When an image is added to a KB article, the Media Library updates that item and records all articles that the image is displayed.

For Answers, having a "Quick Stats" tab that lists date created, date last updated, Last Access date, total hits, ranking, feedback, # of incidents avoided and links to incidents solved would be a terrific help in evaluating the state of that Answer. 

 

Example evaluation uses:

• An Answer on an older product that hasn't been accessed in over 30 days, but has a high positive feedback and # of incidents solved in the past, may be worth keeping instead of archiving.
• An Answer that is 7 days old and has a high hit rate, several links to solved incidents, but low feedback and incident avoidance, needs to be rewritten or simplified for a lower technical audience.

 

This would be a powerful reference tool when combined with a Review On date.  Since the Review On date pre-selects answers for review, all the stats you need for evaluation are right there without having to generate reports separately.

We would like to have the ability the require Products / Categories when creating and editing Answers (KBs) whether this is an option from the Answer Workspace Designer or as an option when setting up Products and Categories. While the message that is displayed when the Answer Status equals Public is beneficial it still allows the staff member to cancel out of this and still save the KB with no Product or Category, which then causes issues with searching on the End User pages. We would like to avoid the additional incidents that are being submitted due to this issue.

[Edited to include less hyperbole - that part is not constructive ]

 

Concept:  I think everyone knows that I'm a RightNow Enthusiast, but I have to say the editor used to create and edit Answers is the bane of my existenace.

 

• The spacing is often off
• The font/style type sometimes doesn't match what you ask it to
• The numbering and bulleting doesn't space properly - specifically if changing back and forth between the two
• If you insert an image between numbering to highlight a point, the numbering always starts from 1 again
• Inserting images is a multi-step process, depending on where you are storing the images

 

So, a few suggestions for updating:

 

• Allow pasting in images and text all at once, and let the applications parse out the images and store them (charge me for storage, I'll pay extra).
• Convert from Word and PDF - yes, its hard, but our lives would be so much better with this feature.  Add a button like 'Import from File', and allow us to select file formats that you've figured out how to convert.  Don't convert word into the silly mso style html, but really convert it .
• Update to a better Rich Text Formating system to resolve issues mentioned above, with spacing/numbering, etc.

The Knowledge Syndication Widget - aka keyword search widget returns a list of links to 'external' pages.

 

What I propose is to make a widget that displays the 'body content' of an answer inpage.

 

Use case:

Driven by a URL query string parameter or JavaScript onload() which can force the state of a widget to pull specific answer content inpage.

 

With permission Playstation could embed content branded by and attributed to EA , Activision or UbiSoft etc, regarding a software title to provide a user with expert knowledge in the place they need it. 

 

Consequences:

 

Customer Support Partnerships to provide a unified and seamless service across domains where appropriate.

In the case of Sony Playstation it makes sense to have hardware specific answers hosted by us and disseminated to our partners at EA, Activision, UbiSoft etc and vice versa.

 

This saves on maintenance across the board and limits the user-frustration at being directed to an external site.

 

This means that instead of a multiplicative effect on support cost and a potentially negative value on satisfaction due to inherent confusion and also potentially conflicting information.

 

Some collaboration would be needed to establish lines of responsibility in leveraging subject matter expertise.

Collaborative increase in customer customer satisfaction ecosystem wide.

 

The ability to maintain user's eyeballs even though the partners support sites are feeding branded information with a stock disclaimer.

 

Prevents wasted time fielding the same issue and 'passing the buck' and creating an incident storm and a negative experience.

 

Empowers the social web by allowing for expert, legally approved content to be embedded inpage on a forum or blog rather than just a link.

 

_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+

 

More than happy to discuss the idea further but I believe it may be possible with a small tweak and referencing the correct database field. Still haven't gone through much widget training other than the limitations of KSW which seemed to say that it was able to do what I needed.

 

Thanks,

Benji

In a word "Versioning'. That is 'Answer Versioning'.

 

I know a CMS would be nice but we just need to be able to stage updates to Answers and be able to release them into production on a certain day.

 

We too have software releases.  In addition to a slew of new Answers we need to be able to stage updates to existing answers with new information and have those changes reviewed. 

 

Scenario:

  Anna from (Technical Publications) has a set of updates to existing answers that are effected by a software release next week.  She opens the Staging version of a current Answer and edits it.  She sets the 'Replace" date appropriately but knows that it still has to go through the approval cycle so she sets it to "Review".

 

Mary Lee in QA reviews the doc and approves it.

 

Lou in Support reviews the doc and approves it.

 

It is set to 'Ready" and on the appropriate date it the Answer text is swapped with the production text and I get to sleep in.

Hi all,

 

One of the restrictions with using the Answer management functionality in the solution today is that every time you open a new answer for editing - the editor defaults to a font and font size (Times New Roman 16pt). If you want to control over the fonts and styles used within an answer (and don't  have access to the CSS file controlling the display of content on the web) you need to set up those choices every time you edit new content. We have a templating concept in other parts of the solution (Marketing, Feedback) that allows you to setup fonts, font styling, and other formatting options and we are very interested to see what you would like for Answer Management.

 

What capabilities would you like to see added to the solution to allow all of your answer content to be consistently formatted?

 

Should content owners have the ability to edit a 'template' or should that be up to an administrator?

 

 

 

Looking forward to your input......

Our keyword report continually contains customers typing in various forms of number expressions (i.e. order number)

 

It would be FANTASTIC if we could apply IF -- THEN statements for the Knowledgebase where we could apply regular expression rules.

 

Ex: If our order number typically contain 9 numeric values, we could in simplistic terms apply something like:

 

IF customer types in search box the expression: [0-9]{9} 

THEN: Suggest FAQ ID XXXX

 

 

 

Have the option to gather feedback from an Answer without requiring an email address.  Since the answer is not helpful the customer is probably picking up the phone or emailing us anyway.   Or they think we are going to answer thier feedback.   The knowledgebase Editor will probably gather more feedback if the customer doesn't have to give up an email address and could just type in their comment and go on.  Because we do not answer back the customers when they submit the feedback, we are currently giving them an expectation they will be contacted (because we require an email address).    Give us the option to require the email address. It it is not required, then this field would not be present.  Also, we do not have our customer's sign in and we do not display the 'my stuff' tab on our sites.

 

We'd like to be able to have an equivalent functionality to agent scripting on the end user pages.

 

This would take the form of a "decision-tree" flow to help guide customers/contact users of end user pages to solve problems (e.g. find the answers that they should find based on their actions in the decision tree)

 

I think this would benefit product troubleshooting for other customers

We'd like our authors to be able to highlight an area of the answer and mark it as "toggled", e.g. the answer would collapse, a "+" or other indicator would appear, and the end user could click/toggle the "+" indicator to expand or contract the text.

 

This would allow us to dramatically lower the real estate used by a long article and improve the readibility of these articles.

 

This is how we would implement this in HTML, but this solution is self-reported by authors as "too complicated" (attached)

We would like to be able to manually subscribe contacts to certain Answers and Answer Categories

 

Scenario:

  A new version of IE is released and it breaks certain functionality with one of our module. (I know, what are the odds of that happening   )  We need to proactively notify contacts that use that module not to upgrade and to stand by for further announcements and we want to do that through Answers. 

 

Admin user Mike (the valiant) queries up all of the contacts for all of the orgs that use our unique Twit module and does a multi-update on the contact records and adds the Twit Module category (or product if we used that ) to the notification.  He then Adds and Answer with the news.

The spellcheck functionality is established in the workspace designer. However, the current product design uses different options for incidents vs. answers. Incidents can be configured to check spelling as you type; answers do not have that option. For answers, spell check is either off or on and occurs only when the answer is saved, if it is enabled.

I would like to request that the same options are available for the Answer workspace that are available for the Incidents workspace.

Our users want the ability to come back to the portal and execute a search they may have done previously. I can think of a few use cases where this would be helpful; answer number, model number, error code text or number, or keywords that are not in the normal vocabulary.

 

I’d like to brainstorm some ideas so please leave comments and kudos

 

First Idea – Copy the popular search engine that starts with G and ends with e. Below the search box begin to show previous searches the end-user executed during previous visits. (Not just this session)

 

Second Idea – Actually prompt the user if they want to save the search, or a button for saved search. Then show the saved searches in My stuff where the end-user could execute again. One advantage / disadvantage with a user prompt is we would only save on a users action, but that does add possibilities for things like saving what was searched and possibility the results returned.

 

Third item is really possible features:

-          Yes/No in Mystuff to enable/disable saving search data (some folks don’t like tracking software)

-          Add a drop down containing the saved searches so the user could just select

-          Add a user friendly name to the search

-          Expand on Idea #1 – Let the user select in advanced if the drop down contains my searches or all user searches

We often put links in our Answers to other Answers.  When we then localise our content, we find ourselves spending a lot of time going through all these links and localising them for the Answer ID of the Answers on each interface.

 

This seems absurd, as it should be possible to enable linking at a Meta level.

 

For example, if we could draft an Answer in UK English, and create a link to another Answer - but instead of using the UK Answer ID, we would use the Meta ID.  When translations come back, we don't need to edit the link.  When the link is used, the application would know the source interface, and send the user to the Answer version on the same interface.

 

This would save us a LOT of time.  :-) 

Hi everyone,

 

With the proliferation of the latest generation of smart-phones we appear to have reached a point where the power and capabilities of the mobile device are starting to match those of a typical desktop computer. iPhone is a good example. As well as a full feature browser (supporting scripting, AJAX, cookies etc), users have the ability to purchase, download and embed apps onto a desktop workspace. Similar touch-screen devices have appeared from Blackberry and Palm. We expect to see further proliferation in similar technologies from other manufacturers, particularly as operating systems for mobile devices get more powerful and ambitious.

 

So, those of you serving a mobile demographic, what types of support experience would you like to deliver to customers through a mobile device? Are you looking for a support experience delivered through a browser, where a consumer can search for their need through Google, identify an answer delivered through your self-service site and work through the browser in a page-set optimized for a mobile device? Alternatively, would you prefer to be offering your own support App from the mobile desktop - with a set of features and functionality that expands beyond conventional self-service? 

 

There's a third option - a little more revolutionary - where RightNow builds an App of its own - that exposes all hosted public content on any rightnow site - and gives consumers the ability to do a federated search across the entire knowledge set that we host - and for RightNow to act as a broker and distribute assisted service requests coming through that channel to the appropriate customer support organization (the owners of the content).

 

How do you see the maturation of the mobile market impacting your support operations and what are your thoughts on the three options outlined above?

 

 

 

Add an Extended Search and Replace for Solutions to search and replace items within multiple solutions at once. Often times, we have links to change on our website and online store. Several of our answers have links embeded with in them to direct our customers to those links. If a product link changes or if one of our online store links change and we have 500 Answers with that link embedded, we have to go thru each solution to change the href link. That can be time consuming.

I know we now have a link checker within Answers but I find it very limited since you can only apply it to the answer you're viewing. It would be great if we had this functionality across the entire knowledgebase or if you could apply it to a particular answer report. The results could be displayed in a generated report with the Answer ID, broken link, etc, with the ability to fix the link directly from the report or drill down into the answer.

 

And since we're rubbing the golden lamp here, a feature that nice to tie into the link checking feature would be find/replace. While I could certainly see this as a stand-alone feature for non-hyperlink content there are times when we make directory changes within our website and then have to individually modify each answer that contains references to the site. It quickly becomes a lesson in pain and suffering.

In a university environment, many activities happen in cycles.  In the Fall, there are move-ins and in the Spring, there are move-outs and many other things in-between, not to mention Summer.  Which means there is certain information that is more prevalent at certain times of the year and certain information that is only relevant at certain times of the year.

 

It would be very useful if we had the ability to schedule certain answers to toggle between 'Public' and 'Private' based on a schedule and toggle between different 'Display Positions' based on a schedule also.  Right now, there is only the ability to 'Publish On' a certain date and there is no ability to set a fixed position for answers based on a schedule.

 

When you have thousands of answers, its a daunting task to go through and individually change these parameters a few times every year.