Qboard

Combines a Help Desk with Support Queues That Talk to Your App

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Qboard

Qboard combines a help desk with support queues that talk to your app.

Problem

When building a product, lots of support tasks pop up. Following up on leads (SaaS), reviewing flagged content, etc.

These are almost identical to help desk tickets. A real person has to get involved. You want to track status, comments, messages, and resolution time.

But these support tasks need to talk to your application, and so they live in the admin panel, and not the help desk. This means your customer support team spends all day switching between the two!

Solution

Qboard combines a help desk with support queues that talk to your app.

We built a REST API that allows you to create support queues and tickets from your existing application in minutes. If you're using Ruby, we built a plugin to make it even faster.

Once you send a ticket to Qboard, we keep track of status, comments, and resolution time. Your support agents can decide what action to take on a ticket AND do it from within Qboard. Then, we notify your app with a webhook so you can follow through.

You can also directly message your users, and see when they engage with your emails. Very soon, you'll also be able to pipe in your support emails, making it a full help desk solution.

For customer support, it means no more switching back and forth between an admin panel and a help desk.

For developers, it means huge time savings, because you're not building queues by hand for every task.

For managers, it means greater insight into support task resolution, compared to an in-house solution, including a stats dashboard and live feed.

Technical

Qboard is built on Ruby on Rails and has three main components:

  1. REST API - allows any app to create support queues and tickets

  2. Ruby Gem - wraps the REST API to make it even easier to add to your Ruby app

  3. Dashboard - allows agents to log in, manage tickets, and trigger actions that notify your app via a webhook

You can read documentation for our API online.

Partners

We had the awesome opportunity to work with several hackathon partners.

  1. .CLUB - Qboard got a short, memorable URL thanks to .CLUB. Check us out at (http://www.qboard.club)

  2. Sparkpost - Qboard uses Sparkpost. It powers all emails, and their engagement webhooks let Qboard show our customers when their users open a message about a particular ticket. This weekend, we built an open source Ruby gem that allows anyone to use Sparkpost in their Ruby on Rails app in seconds!

  3. FullContact - We used FullContact's powerful People API to show our customers more information about their users when responding to a ticket. In the sidebar of a ticket, users of Qboard can more information about the user associated with the ticket, like social media links, job information, user picture, and much more.

Services

We also used a couple of other services worth mentioning.

  1. Heroku - Qboard is hosted by Heroku

  2. Stream - Qboard uses Stream, a 3rd party service for building timelines based on the ActivityStreams standard. This powers our ticket timeline and account activity overview

  3. Readme.io - Qboard uses Readme.io to host documentation for our API

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