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Watching cases in Dovetail – 2014 edition

August 4, 2014 A couple of years ago I posted about watching cases in Clarify / Dovetail. The idea is still a good one, and I’ve recently combined the idea of watching a case with the new tagging functionality that’s available in Dovetail Agent 5. Overview It’s not uncommon that we want to keep up with what’s going on with certain cases – specifically cases that are being worked by others. For example, a high priority case for a new customer may have been recently created, and even though its being worked by someone else, I still want to keep abreast of what’s happening with it. Or perhaps the customer I’m going to visit next week has a case open that I want to stay in the loop on. Or I want to follow how one of my guys is dealing with a…

Charting case trends

June 12, 2014 Recently I was looking to put a report together that would track the total number of cases that are open on a daily basis, and graph that as a trend. This is fairly tricky to do with baseline data. It would be easier if I had a query that ran every night and simply recorded the total number of open cases at that point in time. All I need is the count, not the actual data. Then I would have a set of records that I could build a report with. My first thought was to create a simple script that would run the query, then set this up as a Scheduled Task to run nightly. Then I could store the results somewhere in the database. Then I realized that this all sounded familiar – this is Trend Tracker. Trends…

Quickly start a Google Hangout with a customer from a case

June 10, 2014 Google recently launched a Hangout start button that can be easily embedded within any app or website. From their post:That's why we recently launched a Hangout start button that can be embedded in any app or website. Whether you’re a sales rep working in a CRM app or an engineer in a project management tool, it only takes one click to launch a Hangout and your team will automatically be invited. You can even improve customer service with the ability to quickly launch into a video Hangout with a client to resolve an issue. (emphasis mine)This is pretty slick.There are a ton of remote support options out there, many that are expensive, and the integration with these can be pretty involved.I like Google hangouts because it’s simple and free. And Google has made it super easy to add a button…

Case Reviews

June 4, 2014 FT Works recently posted In praise of the support scrum. In it, she discusses: the joys of the support scrum (or huddle, or case review, as I usually call it) A case review is a regularly-scheduled, structured meeting between support engineers designed to share difficult cases and exchange troubleshooting suggestions.   Back when I was a Tech Support Engineer at The MathWorks  (where I first started using Clarify), we used to have these meetings. I forget exactly what we called them, but they were a great way to have a roundtable of senior engineers assisting us junior guys with difficult cases (i.e.  calculating the FFT of quaternions, dealing with endian conversions with floats on a VAX, etc.). Sometimes we were able to get answers, sometimes we handed off the cases to a senior engineer. I also liked them because I…

Integrating Clarify / Dovetail with Delighted to track Net Promoter Score

June 2, 2014 What is NPS (Net Promoter Score)? The Net Promoter Score, or NPS®, is based on the fundamental perspective that every company’s customers can be divided into three categories: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. By asking one simple question — How likely is it that you would recommend [your company] to a friend or colleague? — you can track these groups and get a clear measure of your company’s performance through your customers’ eyes. Read more about NPS. What is Delighted? Delighted is a new application that makes it easy to gather feedback from your customers to determine your NPS. How does it work? When a case is closed, we’ll call the Delighted API. Delighted will then send an email to the customer. Customer clicks their answer (0-10) Answer is recorded in Delighted Customer can optionally enter some comments We can view…

Web testing using Canopy

March 26, 2014 With Dovetail Agent 5 and SelfService 2, we’re using Canopy for acceptance testing. We even ship our test suites with the app, so if you customize/extend the application, you can run the tests to be sure you didn’t break anything, and you can add in your own tests for any custom functionality. So far, Canopy has proved itself to be the nicest web testing framework we’ve used – it’s simple and stable. Scott Hansleman recently kicked out a nice blog post talking about canopy and the F# language. In it, he provides some links to playing with F# and a simple Canopy example. Great stuff! So check out the tutorials that Scott links to, and then for our Dovetail Agent and SelfService customers – be sure to download the latest versions of those apps and check out the tests in…

Case History enhancements in Dovetail Agent

March 4, 2014 We’ve done a lot of work recently to improve case (and subcase) history within Dovetail Agent 5. It feels much cleaner, is easier to read, and just feels pleasant. Plus there’s some cool new features. Here’s a few highlights.     Avatars Avatars for users, applications, and customers are shown. Notice that there is an avatar for Annie (who is a employee/user), Scott (who is a contact), and for Dovetail SelfService (an application). And the avatars are clickable links. If the avatar is for a user/employee, the link goes to the employee page. If it’s a contact, it goes to the contact page. Reverse Chronological Order Notice that the history shows the newest entries at the top, similar to many current social apps (facebook, twitter, etc.) More context - via Application When an entry happens via an application, we show…

Adding additional properties to a task manager task definition

January 28, 2014 One of the modules within a Clarify system is Task Manager. In support environments, it’s typically used to automatically generate subcases. Task Manager can be kicked off by using the Jobs button on a case, or by having a business rule call the taskmgr executable. A task definition defines the specifics of the object that is to be created (in this case, we’re talking about a subcase that gets created). Out of the box, Clarify allows you to set the following subcase properties when a subcase is created via Task Manager: title description required date priority status severity elapsed time But, like most things in Clarify, we can setup additional properties. Custom property – subcase type For example, lets say we want to be able to set the subcase type. The valid subcase types are General and Administrative. By default,…

Dovetail Hiring DevOps Engineers

January 21, 2014 Dovetail Software is hiring developers to work on our HR Case Management SaaS app. We're looking for smart people to help us work on some cool stuff on cutting edge technology hosted in the AWS cloud. Help us write some code, automate some servers and push updates to happy customers!We're currently looking for:Developers and Senior DevelopersDevOps Engineers (this post) Company DescriptionDovetail Software is a leader in web-based HR Case Management software and Customer Support solutions that enable organizations to provide effective support for both employees and customers. Dovetail is an open, dynamic, and collaborative environment with a focus on innovation and creativity. We operate on the philosophy of "treat people right" & let our team of professionals do what we hired them to do: build & sell industry leading products.We don't punch clocks or micromanage redundant processes. Dovetail is an open…