Troubleshooting your worries away

Troubleshooting content is provided as an aid to solve problems. The goal of troubleshooting content is to identify the root cause of a feature or functionality not working as expected and how to resolve the problem.

The Challenge

Engineering team had been receiving a lot of cases directed to them from support. There were different kind of issues:

• Issues that engineering teams were aware of and working on fixes for the next release
• Issues that were unknown
• Issues that were reported by multiple customers
• Issues that had a workaround

The issues that caught our attention were the ones reported by multiple customers. Either a workaround was available or some additional information was required to troubleshoot the issue. The challenge raised was is there anything that could be done regarding these cases.

Research

I followed the following approach:

• Review few of the cases in question
• Identify if an actual solution was provided or a workaround was provided for resolving the issue temporarily
• If actual solution was provided, could customer have fixed by themselves if written information was shared?
• If a workaround was provided, will the same steps work for more than one customer? Can the customers complete them without guidance?

Solution

By gathering information and answers to the above questions, introducing the Troubleshooting sections was the logical conclusion. There were workarounds being shared with one customer at a time, which helps the customers but also consumes developer bandwidth. In many cases, if steps were provided, customers would have probably never reached out to support. With all these considerations, Troubleshooting sections were introduced for critical modules (Installation, Single sign on, etc.) and in remaining modules and components over time using the following Information Architecture:

• Troubleshooting Scenarios
  • Problem Statement 1
    • Description
    • Cause
    • Solution
  • Problem Statement 2
    • Description
    • Cause
    • Solution

Result

• Number of customer cases were reduced
• Developer bandwidth was saved

Example

Click to view an example.