Customer details
Financial services application development
Business results
Avoided the expense of a ticket support system
“We wanted to stand up a community to get away from having to do a support ticket system, provide a better development experience, and be more sustainable as we scale. Ticket systems don’t do that because you are answering each question individually and sometimes repeatedly.”
When a product is launched, it typically leads to building out a customer support team, which usually requires a customer service ticketing system.
And that leads to complications.
Finastra simplified the process by skipping the customer service ticketing system and moving straight to an online community.
The financial services application development company decided early on that its open source platform would be supported without a traditional support desk. “Our long-term vision is that the community will be self-supporting,’’ says Davide Appiano, Finastra’s partner enablement manager. “We wanted to stand up a community to get away from having to do a support ticket system, provide a better development experience, and be more sustainable as we scale. Ticket systems don’t do that because you are answering each question individually and sometimes repeatedly.”
With AnswerHubTM, Finastra was able to use the SDK to see their changes applied to its environment and stand up the community in one month.
Moving Away From Traditional Support Models
The problem with traditional support, Appiano explains, is that it is one-to-one. A customer calls, emails, or opens a chat with a support staff member, and that one problem is fixed. The support staff member might document the fix or the answer might reside only in their head.
“With a community, any question or feedback (answer) we just pass right through to live on the community site,” Appiano says.
Finastra wanted to introduce a community early for a transparent, one-to-many approach. They chose the AnswerHub solution to get away from an email system and because AnswerHub provides gamification, a Slack integration, and robust analytics. Finastra bought AnswerHub before it launched its application development services. It was a proactive approach instead of what often happens, a company’s product becomes so popular it has to bolt on an online community after the other forms of support get overwhelmed.
Getting the Solution Up and Running
Finastra took advantage of AnswerHub’s SDK. “We got what we needed from the SDK, didn’t have any problems, and didn’t have to do customizations. In fact, we used one of the sample templates.’’ The SDK provides a template for quickly standing up a community and driving a positive user experience. Administrators can easily preview before they publish, test new ideas, and create workflows.
While the community is in the early stage, traffic to the site is growing. The goal is to have the community in place to support the company’s growth as it works with its partners. Meanwhile, everyone, from Finastra’s support staff to the devs building on Finastra’s apps, is getting used to going to the community first to try and resolve an issue rather than sending an email.
“There is still a learning curve. We had partners who were used to emailing us in the past, now we are working to encourage them to use the community,’’ Appiano says adding that he plans to work with Finastra’s marketing team to add additional content to the site and publicize it. He also wants to link the site to push Twitter news into the site (which AnswerHub supports.) “The goal is that in five years the community members will provide all of the answers.’’