Project : The support portal nobody asked me to build

A pattern runs through my career: in most places I have worked, I built something that was not there before me, and often was not my job. Some of it never reached my CV.

This is one of those.

In 2014, at Chargoon, I was a project manager. Every week I heard the same complaint from customers: why does your support take so long to answer.

The company had no team for a customer portal. I had heard that answer before, on the mobile product, so I knew what to do with it.

I wrote the plan and gave it to the support manager, who asked me to help build it. I found an outside contractor, wrote the contract, and we had the first version in four months.

Then we opened an account for every customer, wrote to all of them, and brought their representatives in.

In the first year, calls from long-standing customers dropped by about thirty percent. They raised tickets instead.

Why the tickets mattered more than the calls

A phone call leaves nothing behind. A ticket arrives with the detail already in it, can be followed, and leaves a history anybody can read later.

The visible support record made customers value their support contracts more than they had, and satisfaction rose with it.

The complaint was about waiting. The fix was about memory.