Episode Summary
In this episode, our host Zach Malloch is joined by Director of Municipal Support, Cullen Barber, and Senior Support Specialist, Robert Kirk to discuss the new Vermont Systems Support Portal. The group walks through the process of submitting a case, using the real-time chat feature, and searching the knowledge base to get the support you need to better serve your community.
Video
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:07
And we're live. Welcome to RecChat. I am joined today by Robert Kirk, one of our support analysts who many of you have probably spoken to over the phone. Cullen Barber returns our director of municipal services and sport. And I as always, Zach Malloch manager of VSI. Edu. Today, we're going to be talking about support and support portal and trying to give a little bit of history and tips and tricks and make it easier and more effective for everybody to use and maybe show off a little bit of the new features. Are you guys doing today?
Cullen Barber 0:40
Great. Yes. All right. Snowy, for Monday,
Zach Malloch 0:43
certainly is. And you know, we often kind of joke about the the backdrop here, but this is pretty representative of the actual outside or maybe not the view, but atmosphere. So let's see. If you haven't been to the support portal in a while, you might be in for a little bit of a surprise. It's, it's changed a bit.
Cullen Barber 1:05
Yeah. As most of you know, back in July of 2018, we switched from our own kind of homegrown portal, if you will, to an off the shelf package from Microsoft. And we've been slowly adding some things and features to it over time. And we've tried to announce them through some of the VSI Connect, but we thought today we'd show you some of those new things, a little bit of a walkthrough on Yeah, it's the portal is, you know, one of the primary methods of getting support and, you know, tracking cases, using the knowledge base. It also has the very popular newly popular chat feature out there, which a lot of people are taking advantage of. So we do also want to show you some of the hosting options in there for uptime and CardConnect. And credit card statuses and get into some of the task areas element is now showing out there for kind
Zach Malloch 1:57
of a one stop shop for all
Cullen Barber 1:59
right, Yeah
Zach Malloch 1:59
as much as possible. That sounds pretty exciting. You guys ready to show it off a little bit? Robert?
Robert Kirk 2:04
dive right in.
Zach Malloch 2:05
Okay, gonna see ourselves. There we go. There's the website. That's so now. We're on Vermontsystems.com right now. So this is our main website, and then I see a Support Button up there at the top. So are we in anything at the moment or?
Cullen Barber 2:27
Not yet. So here, we're still on kind of the, if you will, the corporate VSI site. And this is open to you know, anybody out there searching for recreation software, etc. If you are a current customer pay maintenance, you have access to the portal. And that's what the gray Button is here that Robert has. One thing I'd like to point out down below if there's a email address the support@Vermontsystems.com. So if somebody does not have access to the portal yet, they can simply email us and a short order will get them set up to have login credentials to get in into the portal. Okay.
Zach Malloch 3:03
All right. All right. So then we would Click access support, as we can tell Goodwin's friendly faces urging us to do, and then we have, I'm gonna guess that to you, Cullen,
Cullen Barber 3:11
that's me, the password. And then we were brought to a home Screen here.
Zach Malloch 3:17
So at this point, this is the portal,
Cullen Barber 3:19
you're actually in the portal. So you are logged in at this point. And now you have access to the features. This is kind of the homepage, it will show a few of the common and maybe most used knowledge bases. And there's some recent articles at the bottom that have been added. We try to add some every week, some weeks are a little better than others, putting what's going on. And then the system starts to rate them as people use them. And they start them for how good they are.
Zach Malloch 3:50
So the more it's used, the better it's going to be more effective.
Cullen Barber 3:53
Exactly right.
Zach Malloch 3:54
Because we so we're getting that feedback from the customers as far as what is actually solving their problem.
Cullen Barber 3:59
Yes,
Zach Malloch 3:59
those will surface higher in the future.
Cullen Barber 4:01
Correct.
Zach Malloch 4:02
Okay.
Cullen Barber 4:04
Right, on this first page down on the right hand corner, there's have a question, you know, Click here to chat. So this is something we launched earlier in the year, and it's really taken off, chat is a great option. If you have a real kind of quick question, you know, you know, looking for a report that can give you this, Hey, when's the next Build or release coming out? Or what else Robert, we'd like to see in there.
Robert Kirk 4:30
In the chat feature, you know, it's more for those quick questions. Don't take too much troubleshooting from our end. So a password reset. If you're a hosted customer, you have when and you want us to take an initial look at something that may be going on, maybe we can get a screenshot if you don't have that capability. We're able to put that into the ticket. So whoever does grab the case, you know, has a more in depth knowledge of what might be going on. but definitely we want to keep it quick. Don't want to bog down the chat line there with the heavy hitting questions that might take a little more research to do.
Cullen Barber 5:09
Yeah, we pride ourselves in the chat to try to respond to you within 10 seconds of you initiating the chat. So it's something new, something real quick. We're there to help you right away.
Zach Malloch 5:20
Okay. So I noticed a couple of things that you were doing when you were about to start that chat. You're determining what Type of support you're looking for. So municipal versus military. And then we had, it looked like you had Parks and Recreation versus University versus a private organization. And I see you're putting in your name. If you're actually going to start a chat, Robert, please let them know that we're on the air, Support kind of likes to pick on each other,
Robert Kirk 5:45
we will not start a chat.
Zach Malloch 5:50
So you just hit submit, and then ideally, within 10 seconds, you have somebody asking you what's going on?
Cullen Barber 5:55
How can we help? And the reason we asked him to military or municipal is just to help guide him to the right technician, behind the scenes,
Zach Malloch 6:03
people with expertise in those particular areas. Okay, great. And it looks like Okay, so right now we're at the portal, we have chat down in the lower right hand corner, we've got some quick links to some of the most popular topics that we've gotten password for the VSI website, some user interface information that he showed us Scrolling down, we kind of see the most recent articles down there. Hey, look, all the symposium videos are up for 2019. Right? What does that look like? If you Click on it, Robert? Very nice. Oh, we've got five star rating on this. Yeah. And this is about you, and 16 or 17 videos, I think, all from the last symposium. And we've got all of them posted here. So anybody that wants to you don't have to have attended symposium, but anybody that wants to can view the recordings of those sessions, and you might hear a couple of familiar voices on there. Okay, so what else can you do when you're in this part of the portal?
Cullen Barber 6:58
Yeah. So if we kind of start from the top there under Support, you can go to case management. So this is where you can create a new case, or try to see what the status is of a current one. It also lists our most recent winner of the maple syrup for surveys and shout out to Gladys from Fort Lauderdale. She's the most recent. So Robert, you want to go ahead and get started case, we can kind of take a quick look there. The some of the advantages of creating a case through this portal is it does try to do some searching in the portal for answers as you Type in a case title. Okay, so it tries to initiate that self help. So maybe it can find something immediately for you. And you don't have to wait for a support tech response. So
Zach Malloch 7:47
it looks like it's doing it kind of as you are typing it.
Cullen Barber 7:52
Correct. Yep. And so this one, came up with a potential solution here. common one that we see. So when he gets a web speed error trying to launch something, and it offers a potential solution.
Zach Malloch 8:05
Okay. Well, before we leave off this, I think that we might want to call out that it looks like you can rate this article. That's as far as usefulness. So the star rating on that. Yep. And that influences how high how high? It goes. Yep. And also, there's two buttons that say found my answer. So that would say that this actually was what was the answer to your case, and prevented you from even having to
Cullen Barber 8:28
correct so creating helps helps the rating. And you know, from a statistical standpoint, it shows it as a deflect case deflection, potentially, the person was able to find some self help.
Zach Malloch 8:38
Great. Nope, that should also show us maybe the types of articles that would be more useful to have. Exactly right. Awesome. Okay, so let's say we, we don't find what we're looking for in that. So it looks like we've got a couple of fields available to us here.
Robert Kirk 8:53
Sure. So, case title, you want this to be kind of the overarching, hey, I have this error as I did before. 6019 is pretty common, but really any error or any in depth information that you can provide there, rather than just a callback or something like that. will let us know kind of what we're getting into, maybe we can take a quick look or ask someone if we that may have seen it, if there's an error message or something like that. But the more detailed case title, the better. So we're going to do user cannot log in to RecTrac. I am partial to putting the version in there 10.3 or 3.1. If you do know that, that way it can get kind of routed to a support technician who might have the most expertise in that area. We'll all be able to help you either version but getting the the correct answer the fastest is what we're looking for there. So no,
Zach Malloch 9:57
I think we have that that information is attached to peoples account, but by having it right there in the title just makes it easier.
Robert Kirk 10:03
Just another spot for us, we don't have to go into the case in case it doesn't get filled out. By chance. It's just right there, we can see it and know what we're looking for great customer name and contact. So who's going to be submitting a sport case there? Are case Type. Is that a question or problemor request?
Zach Malloch 10:24
All right,
Robert Kirk 10:24
so we're going to problem and service categories. So we have quite a few here. We will fill these out when we gather more information. But again, just like the case title, the more that you fill in, when you're creating these cases, the better it will help us assist you. So our credit cards are down, we definitely want that to be CC troubleshooting your setup there. Hosted is going to be for hosted questions, data management for data management, hardware, setup, your printers, things like that scanners may want that selected instead.
Zach Malloch 11:02
Now before we go through just to bring it right back, what's the difference between a problem a question and a request.
Robert Kirk 11:07
So a problem would be something that is actively impacting your operation negative way. Question is just hey, how does this work? Maybe we're looking to do this. And we don't know how it works, setting up something that may have just gotten and a request would be a request for an enhancement. So hey, we would really like to see the software do this. Can we put in this request? And have you take alook at it
Zach Malloch 11:35
and make it do something? It's not currently?
Robert Kirk 11:36
Yeah.
Cullen Barber 11:39
If you don't select the right one, that's okay. Yeah,
Robert Kirk 11:42
we'll fix it. When we're on the phone. It's just, you know, blast we have to do here, the better we can help you requested priority. So low, generally, your your question Type things would be that, you know, maybe we're setting this up for next year. And it's it's not time sensitive. So that would be a low priority. Medium would be yes, this is a problem, we have a little bit of time to take a look at it. Major, it's impacting, you know, your day to day results and critical system down can't do anything. And we do ask, you know, if the ticket gets created, with a medium case creation and your systems down, we're going to look for those critical and major cases first to try to get back to those as fast as possible, since that is impacting your your operations in a pretty negative manner. So we want to get back to those as quickly as possible where the less time sensitive questions or problems or things that you would like to see done down the road, maybe the medium or lowpriority
Cullen Barber 12:46
we do if you scroll up a little bit, Robert, we do have a knowledge base at the top that will I guess it's before the Screen up before this, it will actually show a definition for each one of those critical majors, things like that.
Okay. And you mentioned that if somebody puts something in as a medium, and it's a database down will escalate it to critical you ever go the other way that maybe somebody like Castro is out of balance, and it's a critical thing. And we're not saying it's not important, but we wouldn't necessarily want to cache Rental balance issue to take precedence over somebody else's database being down.
So occasionally, we will change those. So it helps the the technicians when they see the cue, they can know which ones to grab first. So sometimes myself or Goodwin, Moy will will change a priority. If we see it, it makes sense to
Zach Malloch 13:33
so another situation best guess as far as what it's going to be, and then the tech that you have to adjust that, yes, great.
Robert Kirk 13:41
case details here. This will give you a much more large area to put in the details. Maybe some things that you've tried to troubleshoots you know, Vic's not working, we've tried uninstalling reinstalling we're getting this error message, you can attach files down here. So if you have a screenshot of it, if you can't get a screenshot of the error message, typing out exactly what it says, For one of us to look at maybe it's been found in knowledge base before so you can use that tool when when creating but you know, the more details you put in here, the better for us, we can, you know, either direct it to the right person or have a better idea of what you've already done. So we're not sitting on phone with you trying things that you've already done. And you know, especially in the the big major and critical cases there where time is of the essence, we want those results to be as fast as possible. So kind of eliminating the things you've already done and redoing those again, will will definitely help us out.
Zach Malloch 14:46
And I think one of the points that you made earlier as if you have an error, don't just say you have an error, but if you actually have the number or the exact text related to error. That could be the difference between waiting for a callback or getting a quick email with exactly this solution you need, like immediately?
Robert Kirk 15:02
Absolutely.
Zach Malloch 15:03
Okay, so yeah, definitely, the more information, the better we'll be able to serve. But also potentially, the faster you'll get a response,
Robert Kirk 15:11
absolutely any reports or anything that, you know, you mentioned a cash GL on a balance, something like that, you can download those to your system and then just attach those files there, we can take a look at them, you know, kind of troubleshoot, see what's going on. In that report, maybe the criteria is a little different, something like that. And we could let you know by email, and if not, we could hop on the phone, do a Screen share and and go on from there.
Zach Malloch 15:35
Now, my own personal soapbox from doing a lot of financial support cases in my past, if you have an issue with a report, and you're attaching the receipt number is almost the most important thing for any of that. And especially these days, with so many people giving us access to their databases, if we have a report, and we have a receipt number, we can start investigating that potentially, before we even get back on the phone with you, if you mentioned that, that's what you'd like to have happen. And we have that access.
Robert Kirk 16:03
Absolutely. And then from there, you would just hit submit case, and sure I've got all the required fields filled in. So it's going to be a low priority. And Robert,
Cullen Barber 16:24
not a good example of now,
Zach Malloch 16:28
you're probably gonna wait for a little bit
Robert Kirk 16:33
will let you know that a case was created for you. And then you'll see your case, down here and all your open cases will be there. And you can see your closed cases, or all your cases there. So your test cases, things of that nature. So you're close cases, who the assigned rep was when it was created the status, the contact, the origin,your service categories,
Zach Malloch 17:06
so that's showing us a lot of what you can see about the case, we can hear you can you interact with it in any way. was like
Cullen Barber 17:15
a link user, we Click on it, and down at the bottom, you have an option to add additional comments to it.
Zach Malloch 17:23
Okay,
Cullen Barber 17:23
so essentially, what that does, is inside the case, it adds whatever you put in for a comment. It also will email the assigned technician, basically that comment,
Zach Malloch 17:36
let them know there's no,
Cullen Barber 17:37
there's yet something you're, you're you're back on the case, or you found him information, or hey, I'm ready to work on this kind of thing. So they will get that alert in their email box.
Zach Malloch 17:47
Okay, great. And so this would, I think there's probably goes without saying, but for the most part, we want people as much as possible to update cases rather than create another case with more information about something else, it's already
Cullen Barber 18:00
certainly can make it a little easier to get back to the same person. So without restarting and kind of go rehashing some of the things maybe we've looked at already.
Zach Malloch 18:11
Okay, it looks like you can close and cancel the case there as well. What would those do?
Cullen Barber 18:17
Yeah. And if for example, somebody offers a solution, Robert, offer somebody a solution, email you back or call you back? And you have to maybe try it out first? You try it out. Yeah, it works great. You can go ahead and you can close the case yourself. Okay. Without having to email Robert back or anything, you can just close it. And he'll he'll get the notification that has been closed. And you can move on to the next case. You can also cancel the case, maybe it was maybe it wasn't something that you needed to report. You were looking for the FTP password, and long behold, it was on the Screen before this, and you got it. Okay. And you can just cancel it will get notified. It's been canceled.
Zach Malloch 18:56
Great. Okay. Well, that looks pretty useful. For sure. Yeah. And so this is the only thing we can do to actually create the cases. And get more of that initial work done before the tech actually starts working on it. And the more streamlined everything's going to be for the entire flow of the case.
Cullen Barber 19:16
Right. Nice thing about the case again, too, is it you're logging in, so the system knows exactly who you are, there's no trying to figure out which Robert Kirk it is and where exactly you're coming from. So definitely can speed up the process.
Zach Malloch 19:30
Great. And Robert, so he went back up to that support menu at the top and there are a couple other things there.
Cullen Barber 19:39
Yeah, so there's the knowledge base. You know, in actually the homepage to will search the knowledge base, but if you want to specifically just look at the knowledge base, not other things on the site, you can come right here. You know, this is a little bit of a work in Progress, if you will. We've been been trying I need to update some of the categories, we still need to go back and link a lot of the knowledge bases back to some of these categories. But generally, you can Type in your search and should get some results. And just this week, we added the quick tip onto the Screen.
Zach Malloch 20:21
Yep, absolutely. All right. So there's all your knowledge bases, and you can like okay, sorted them by how recent they are, whether they've been rated or not. There's one from the past week. All right. So this would be more if you want to do a little bit of research or poking around before you decide it's worth creating a case for just to get some of that extra background information.
Cullen Barber 20:45
Yeah, or maybe it is after hours. Some of the West Coast is working late weekend, and they're trying to figure out what's going on with a certain situation, this might be a good spot to go poke around, see if you can find your solution.
Zach Malloch 21:00
Right. So we're actually we're talking a lot about this. And we're we're coming up on 20 minutes already, time flies when you're talking about something so exciting is this. So up in that support menu, also, I noticed something pretty intriguing. So I hope this doesn't tear a hole in the universe to talk about RecChat and want to RecChat with you The archives are the archive of this session isn't quite there yet. That's understandable. So I'll talk about this one for a little bit. But this is where we're going to try to have at least the next rec chats registration link. So you know, we always try to send those out the week of with the VSI Connect. If ever you have issues with that link, or you don't know where that email went through, you deleted it for whatever reason, you can always come into the Support Portal, go to RecChat, and then find the most recent link information. And then we also have all of those archived versions of RecChat. And where appropriate, we have a combination of any of the questions or the hot topics that were discussed during the session so that you can review those if you don't necessarily want to go through watching the entire video, though, I recommend that they're very entertaining. Okay, and I think there's the other. I think because of our time, I'd like to maybe get into one of those new features we were teasing.
Cullen Barber 22:14
Yeah, let's take a quick look under the Customer Success Center. Robert, there's a couple of links here that are fairly new. One of the one of the hosted services, this is great for those that use Vermont systems for hosting their databases. And it the one of the newer things, there's actually a map that can show kind of the status of, of your instance environment. So if you Click on your state, it will, it'll show, you know, your current status, kind of shows each day of the week, how things are, what the uptime is. And any reported issues they will show there. Down below. This is really important too is these other resources, you can check the status of CardConnect and PlugnPay. Here, for example, looks like CardConnect has something going on today that have an issue causing intermittent co pilot slowness. So maybe we have some of the finance folks in the back end trying to log in and do reports, maybe there's some sluggishness there. So it's always a great spot to check. You know, before you maybe put a ticket enter with us, or call them directly, they may post something here. Same thing with PlugnPay Looks like they've posted something too for one of their processors. RBC has had an outage today. So definitely good to check out.
Zach Malloch 23:38
What's at the bottom there?
Cullen Barber 23:40
There's also a product roadmap. So this is something they might be trying to take away from here and see what happens. There we go a little better. So currently, we have our 2019 roadmap, I know they are working on the 2020. And you should have that out by the end of the year, or first week or so of the new year. And it will be broken down by quarter. And it'll show you know some of the major areas that they're gonna be working on. With RecTrac and WebTrac.
Zach Malloch 24:16
Just real quick, I saw something come up here. It's kind of a an ancillary topic, but for listen to you asked about clicking on the RecTrac Lab link under the support. So we'll consider that part of this discussion. I think that we need to double check your license information. So we'll have somebody follow up with you on that. I think the last thing we wanted to look at was maybe about the tasks,
Cullen Barber 24:38
yeah, just tasks. So under here, you can go in and look up task number. So these are maybe if you've reported an enhancement or a defect, and you were given the task number from a support representative. You can go into here and you can do a search over in that Field. And it'll at least you know, give you some Type of status of where it's at. You got to give a little time, once it's reported, it has to go through a few steps come through support gets written up, goes through a review process, which could take, depending on the severity can take hours, days or weeks. And then it moves on to the product owners that which will then categorize it. And that's, that's approximately when it would appear on here. Once the product owners have evaluated it determined, you know, what's, what can happen with this?
Zach Malloch 25:30
Great. So I see there are some tasks already here with these be the ones that you've already set a filter for, for yourself, or is that things that you have submitted? Personally?
Cullen Barber 25:39
No, these are, these are actually just overall tasks from all the customers right here that we're looking at now. Okay, so just mine,
Zach Malloch 25:47
Joe at the top.
Cullen Barber 25:48
Yeah,
Zach Malloch 25:48
few.
Cullen Barber 25:48
Yep.
Zach Malloch 25:49
Okay.
Cullen Barber 25:50
Yep.
There's here, because Robert, just kind of going through some of the different filter options.
Zach Malloch 25:59
So you can Type in part of the text you'd assume would be in that task or
Robert Kirk 26:04
task number Tabs. We have continuing doesn't.
Cullen Barber 26:09
Yeah, so it's really looking for the task, identify our task number.
Zach Malloch 26:13
Okay. And so this is a little bit of a way that, because we don't we do get a lot of calls that are kind of like, well, I submitted this a little while ago, where is that in the process? So this could potentially
Cullen Barber 26:24
check that themselves. You know, there is also a set of released tasks. If you go back up, Robert, to the Customer Success Center. There's the release tasks. And this is this is helpful. If you, you know, maybe you've heard that a there's a Hot Fix out there for three one, you can go down and find out what's contained in that Hot Fix really, really easily without having to download a PDF or anything like that. So to create options and take a quick look and see what's been updated.
Zach Malloch 26:58
So basically, everything that came out in the last release, right, very nice. Okay.
Cullen Barber 27:06
And do we have any more time to show one more quick thing? Yeah,
Zach Malloch 27:10
I think we can go quick. For anybody that does need to leave, feel free to do so we will put the whole video on the archive, so you can review it at any point you want to. But yeah, let's go ahead and
Cullen Barber 27:20
real quick up in the right hand corner, just the Profile area, if you Click on your name, if you add a Profile. On the left hand side, you can control your VSI Connect and email subscriptions with Vermont systems. Okay, so that's relatively new. So it's good to check those out. You can subscribe and unsubscribe through here very easily. Pick and choose, you know, how much content you want to get from us.
Zach Malloch 27:45
That's what sort of areas you're interested in. So if you're not a MainTrac user, you'd probably turn turn that off.
Cullen Barber 27:50
Yeah, you're not you're a three, one user. You don't want to hear about 10 Three, or vice versa. You can do that right there.
Zach Malloch 27:55
Okay. Well, that's great. I don't see a ton of questions at the moment. Well, so Sherry asked if there's a place to locate a JIRA task. And that's basically what that task look up, was for.
Cullen Barber 28:07
Right, Yeah. So it would be, you know, one of our techs would have to provide you with that number, or it would have to be in the case. Once you have that, then you can do the lookup here.
Zach Malloch 28:17
Okay. And then there was just one other question I saw a pop up about, once again, it's not exactly related to this. But since we don't have any other questions, we do have the date and time for the 2020 symposium, they're going to be in Vermont again, same place they were this year at the Delta hotel in Burlington. And they're going to be in October and August, I believe the third week of each of those don't quote me on that, we will post it in the fact afterwards frequently asked questions with the exact dates and we will circle back around and we also have some other symposium information, but we will leave that as a teaser for right now. So stay tuned and watch for upcoming topics. Other than that, any last items that either of you want to talk about Robert any please for detail or specifics that you personally prefer to see when requests come in?
Robert Kirk 29:14
The more detail the better, especially if it's an error message, just you know, either a screenshot or just typing out what it is that really helps in our ability to kind of troubleshoot get back to you quickly. Otherwise, most people are you great with that and anything we need to fill in, we'll fill in after the fact so
Cullen Barber 29:37
and keep checking the portal. We've got a couple of new things that we're hoping to get produced and launched out there. We're talking about a VSI Community Forum in the portal. And also we're working on the chat bots.
Zach Malloch 29:53
Treat free
Cullen Barber 29:54
Yeah, to help automate some of the searches and find information a lot easier, potentially. So
Zach Malloch 29:59
Very nice.
Robert Kirk 30:00
So fill out your surveys for chance to win maple syrup.
Zach Malloch 30:04
Good point. All right. So that's another good teaser there. So stay tuned, the portal is under development and will be updated and improved as we continue. So I think that, Robert, go ahead and stop sharing your Screen. There was a special request to see our pretty faces as we turn off. Thank you, Bret. That's a great compliment to receive right here at the end. We're all smiling. All right, thanks, everybody. I'm gonna go ahead and end the meeting twice or three times, and we'll see you next week.