Challenge |
Solution |
How did it help? |
| When I started my role as a website content administrator on an internal development team Microsoft, they were tracking requests from clients over email. It’s a team that manages 19 internal web tools, so we needed a better system for intake of requests, as emails often left out a lot of the details the developers need to investigate bugs or build out new features – not to mention that requests got dropped if the developers were’t diligent enough. | Using our web form tool, I developed three forms for our clients to submit: one for technical support and bugs, one for feature requests, and one for onboarding. I consulted with developers to ascertain the details they would need to investigate reported issues, and with the project manager to figure out the information needed for scheduling, like impact and severity. The technical support form is responsive, so depending on the type of issue or the tool, different questions appear: the user only fills out what is relevant to her problem. Upon submission, the tool executes a workflow that I established, creating a ticket in our tracking system, sending an extra email to our developers if the submitter is reporting an outage, and sending the submitter a confirmation email. I also created an email template to send to our clients if they fall back on the old process, making them aware of the new resource. | The forms decrease churn and improve accountability by our team. The forms ask for the details we need but are also short and flexible enough to capture a range of requests without exhausting clients with the process of filling them out. Since I managed these forms for a year and a half, I also refined the forms over time, responding to changes the project manager made to track the team’s work as well as observations of how people filled out the forms. |
I completed this project for Microsoft. It is internal and belongs to them.
Kate Pluth 