Tech Support Search
Enabling Tableau Tech Support to spend more time solving customer issues by providing one unified search in the case workflow.
Problem
Over time, sources of information needed to solve support cases at Tableau had multiplied. Support agents had to repeatedly search in many places to find answers, duplicating effort and switching interfaces and search syntaxes. Various searches were perceived to have low relevancy but it wasn’t possible to change them to improve results. Time spent on search was slowing Support down and taking time away from helping customers.
Goal
Support wanted a unified search that was integrated in the case workflow UI with the ability to monitor, tune and improve relevancy so that agents could spend less time searching and more time resolving customer issues.
My role
On the project I was the Information Architect, Program Manager, Interaction Designer, and User Researcher and collaborated with Technical Project Mangers, Developers, and a Visual Designer to plan and implement the search.
Timeline
Unifying the content collections
In order put an end to repeated searches with different filters, I designed a common set of metadata fields for the most important information needed to identify correct technical solutions and then defined how each source should map to it. I worked closely with the Coveo developers to extract and test the information and, when it all came together, for the first time Support could search by vital factors in a customer issue like product, date, version, and operating system across all sources like Help and Knowledge Base articles at the same time.
Smart default groups of sources
Although there were numerous different collections of information Support used to solve cases, some information was used more than others. The case process followed a funnel from common to rare issues. At each stage, results for other stages could be distracting noise.
I designed the search interface to group sources on different tabs so they could instantly be searched following this winnowing process as a case progressed instead of having to regularly rebuild the same filters manually.
Flexible search workflow
The old search had a rigid workflow that required starting from a customer case in order to attach articles as solutions but it provided no indicator of which case the search was associated with. In practice, this meant wasting time with lots of confusing open search windows and no easy way to do a quick search to help a colleague.
I designed the new search to allow for a free standing search, an indicator for case context with descriptive information, and the ability to clear or add case context from the search.
Support full search
Search Result Block Usability
The content source has an icon so the type of the result can be quickly understood.
Search terms are highlighted in the title to show how the item relates to the query.
The attach to case control enables fast marking of a result as the solution to the issue.
Date or version appears in the corner to compare to what the customer is using.
Snippets convey a sense of aboutness without having to open an item.
A source subtitle adds indicates the product to compare to the case context.
The quick view pops up as an overlay so results can be previewed without leaving.
The collapse/expand links panel reduces visual clutter for links to share with customers.
External and translated links makes it easy to access sharing links.
Monitoring
To track the success of search algorithm tuning for improving relevancy, I created a Tableau viz to monitor standard search quality measures of click rank, click through, and query volume.
We also added a Give Feedback option in the interface so users could easily share how things were going.
Results
Although there was not a baseline for the sentiment about the old search, it was by reputation a top painpoint. With the new search, the majority were satisfied with only 14% reporting dissatisfaction.
By subjective measure, search agents also estimated that they were spending less time searching and more time working cases.
Positive feedback
“I love the new interface and the fact that we do not have to leave the case in order to search [Support Articles]”
“I like that I can sometimes find bugs more fluidly”
“It’s incredibly useful being able to search multiple sources of information at once. Having devhelp, tfs, community, product help, etc. all in one place is really helpful and saves me a lot of time”
“I like that there are icons that tell me what type of result it is. Case, Article, Help, etc.”
“It’s nice to be able to search cases and TFS from within the same dialog. I also find the filtering options more useful than the native salesforce filters.”