Improvements in customer support

On 2018-02-13 we will be changing our customer support tool. Although the Flying Circus has always been offering high-quality customer support, there is nothing that cannot be improved. :-)

The contact address support@flyingcircus.io is not going to change.

What is going to change?

• You will be able to see the status of all your cases online by following a link at the bottom of every support response.
• Back-office processes will be more efficient so that we will have more time on actually solving customer problems.

In summary, this will lead to a better support experience for everyone.

Background

Historically, we have been using two distinct tracking tools: Request Tracker for customer requests, and Redmine for in-house platform development. However, the lack of integration made it difficult to let customer requests and customer problems guide the development of our hosting platform.

As a next step, we unified outfacing support communication and platform development in Redmine with a customer support plugin. This gave us the level of integration we needed, but the plugin was clunky and always felt like a compromise.

After an evaluation of alternatives we are now switching to Manuscript (formerly known as FogBugz) which has been explicitly designed for this use case. It allows us to shape both support and development processes according to their specific requirements while still having them tightly integrated. Manuscript comes from Fog Creek Software, who did a lot of amazing things, like Trello and Stack Overflow. We are using an on-premise version, not the hosted variant, to keep your data safe with us.