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Tips for customer support website design
Answer ID 5614   |   Last Review Date 01/22/2019

How can we make our support site easier and better for our customers?

Environment:

Customer Portals and Community Sites, all versions

Issue:

Adding a support system to your website may seen straight forward, but there are a number of tips that will enhance the user experience, and allow your online support to be more successful. 

Detail:

These points will help you deliver a high-quality Web experience to your customers while optimizing return on investment.

Make Customer Service Easy to Find

  • Prominently show a link to Support or Customer Service from your parent Website.
  • When performing an Internet search with keywords for your products or services, answers from Oracle RightNow Knowledge Cloud Service should show up on the first page of the search engine results.
  • In a main corporate Website search, this search functionality should return results for answer content from Oracle RightNow Knowledge Cloud Service.

Make Your Website Easy to Use

  • Use the Support or Service home page in Oracle RightNow Customer Portal Cloud Service to serve as a landing point for all support information. In addition to a prominent Search box on this page, also show either or both;
    • A list of popular answers without requiring your visitors to search
    • An image-based product or category chooser that then shows top answers within a grouping
  • Branding within Support should be consistent with the rest of your parent Website
    and overall brand.
  • All Web links should be underlined.
  • Make sure that “Answers others found helpful” is displayed on individual answer pages
  • Implement a user interface that makes it clear how to correct the problem if visitors accidentally submit a form with incomplete data.
  • For complex products or services, give customers the option to engage in an interactive Q&A-style text dialogue to gather service or support information and then guide them to the right information.

Understand the Issues Your Customers Have

  • Make it easy to achieve both objectives: find information and get human help.

Provide Clear and Readable Content

  • Provide answer content written in plain language, at or below an eighth-grade (age 12 to 13) reading level.
  • Optimize answer content with formatting and organization to make it easy to read and scan.

Offer Multichannel Choice

  • Provide several channels for customers to choose from. Offer channels to your customers based on your service objectives,so they can select their preferred way of communicating (e-mail, phone, chat, or screen-sharing).
  • Do a Web audit to ensure that only your preferred contact entry points show up.
  • Offer appropriate channels for the nature of a customer’s specific inquiry.

Capture Customer Feedback About the Web Experience

  • Offer the opportunity for answer feedback when a customer views an answer.
  • Use surveys to capture customer feedback about their Web experience.

Optimize the Performance of Your Website

  • Make sure your customer portal pages have responsive Web performance.

Deliver a Personalized Experience

  • Use e-mail addresses instead of usernames for registration.
  • Consumers should have to log in only once to access support, product, corporate information, and other content.

Ensure That Your Website Is Accessible

  • Make your Website as accessible and as usable as possible for people with disabilities. See Oracle Accessibility Program and Administering Accessibility.
  • Consider offering a mobile (smartphone) Website experience to your customers.
  • Improve accessibility by ensuring that your Website looks consistent in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Opera, and Safari.

For further information and assistance, contact your Account Manager to discuss a Tune Up for your current web support system.