What do you like best?
Users have taken the community into their own hands and have been helping each other out. Easing work by our technical support group. We also like the communication we as site administrators have with the engineers and support groups at DZone. We are able to use their portal to submit bug fixes or support requests and they are very responsive and we get quality answers back from them in a timely manner.
The newly designed analytics tools have helped us really hone in on areas that are doing well on our site and where we could use improvement. We also closely watch the analytics to ensure our customer base is getting the responses from us in a timely manner. The Analytics tools help us identify how responsive our support team is by tracking the time to first answer and time to accepted answers. These are the metrics we use to motivate our support staff to offer fast and efficient answers to our clients.
Also, their SSO capability has made this platform easier to use for our customers. Every customer has a profile on our main website and we can use cookies to make sure they are automatically signed in to the answerhub platform. SSO was simple to set-up and the support group was very helpful when doing this initial configuration.
What do you dislike?
The security settings for spaces/users is not very user-friendly. I was hoping with the new update that the site/space/user/group securities would be easier to work with, but they are not. However, I am now fairly versed in them and can navigate them easily. It was just hard when we were starting out with the platform.
The search function was fairly poor in the previous versions of Answerhub. However, in the latest version they have rebuilt the search engine and it is now incredibly useful.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Definitely do some research on competitors as there are some cheaper alternatives out there. However, I am very glad I took so long to review systems as I am confident in choosing AnswerHub. I know I would be upset with myself if I had gone with another system and tried to save some money by sacrificing some features.
AnswerHub is very reasonably priced and has been very important in helping us build a community that is better and more efficient than we even dreamed it could be at it's inception.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
We have eased workload on our tech support group by having a searchable user-driven community. As well as, having 'super-users' who are willing to help chip in and resolve other users solve their problems. We have encouraged and rewarded these users which has only driven them to be more active and helpful in our community.
Our support group was receiving the same questions over and over. This platform has provided our support group and customers the ability to search their specific questions and read through the standard answers we were giving so frequently. Now, we can spend our time helping those with more serious or unusual issues so that everyone is helped in a more efficient manner.
