With Quandora 1.7.5, up and running as per today March 25, 2013, we’ve made a step further on the integrations path. As we are regularly saying, it’s one of our most important goals to offer integrations with popular applications, that organizations (especially technology focused) are using on a daily basis. This provides a streamlined experience, give people access to answers fast, and bring value to the third party tools by enriching them with knowledge.
For this release, we’ve added integrations with two tools that we (and lots of other people :-)) love and use: Zendesk, the customer support software, and Campfire, the beloved chat service from 37Signals.
Related questions from Quandora in Zendesk
When working on a customer service ticket, agents are often confronted with issues where they need help from their colleagues. On the other hand, thanks to Quandora organizations build valuable knowledge bases including practical questions people have asked over time. What if the support system could leverage this existing knowledge and give agents instant, automatic hints on the ticket he’s working on?
Organizations using Zendesk and Quandora can now do just that via a Zendesk app that we’ve developed. When the app is installed, an agent consulting a ticket’s page can see a list of questions from Quandora that are related with the respective ticket. This list is automatically created by our search engine, using the “more like this” functionality. It is available under the “Apps” tab provided by Zendesk.
Moreover, if the agent wants to explicitly search Quandora’s knowledge base for specific keywords, he can do so by using the search form provided on the top of the tab.
Regardless of how the list has been built (“more like this” or specific search), the results are presented in a simple way, showing the title, an excerpt from the description, and the author, but also, number of answers, votes, and views. For convenience, agents can see the question and its answers directly in Zendesk, by simply clicking on the title. Or, they can choose to open the question in Quandora for a more complete experience.
We are looking at publishing the app into the Zendesk marketplace soon. Meanwhile, if you are interested in the app, send us an email at contact@quandora.com and we’ll be happy to provide it to you.
On a side note, our team found Zendesk’s framework for apps really awesome, kudos guys!
Instant notifications to Campfire
When we announced the introduction of the Activity Sharing Service at our last release, we’ve mentioned that adding implementations for third party activity feeds was a matter of hours. But implementing Yammer and HipChat‘s feeds must have trained us, since it took us less than an hour this time :-). We’re looking forward to doing more of these and beat our own record at each time.
Organizations using the chat service can enable the Campfire sharing in the Activity Sharing tab of Quandora’s admin panel (you’ll be asked to provide an authorization token and room URL). If the sharing is enabled, notifications about new questions, answers and comments will be pushed to the chat room, enabling people to be instantly aware of new content.
Improvements to the REST API
One of Quandora’s strengths is its ability to provide most of its functions via API, for easy integrations with other software. We are keen users ourselves: it’s what we used for implementing our mobile application, and for the various integrations we are providing. But it comes very handy for our users as well, enabling them to provide an experience that’s seamlessly integrated into another application. At one user’s request, we’ve added more options in the REST API, enabling updating questions (notably their tags). Interested in additional functions in our REST API? Email us at contact@quandora.com.
Enjoy the new features, stay tuned for the following ones, and happy knowledge sharing!
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