Articulate Support Site Repeats Win: Best of 2008

I’m incredibly proud to say that for the second year in a row, our support site has been named by the Association of Support Professionals as one of this year’s Top Ten Best Web Support Sites in the 11th annual competition, which is “a prestigious award that showcases excellence in online service and support.”

Last year was our inaugural win in the small company division, and we’ve repeated that success again this year.

According to ASP executive director Jeffrey Tarter:

“As these ten sites demonstrate, Web support has come a long, long way in the past decade. The industry has learned how to deliver a huge amount of information and support services in a form that delights customers — and every year, the standard of excellence rises even higher.”

A big part of the scoring in the contest comes from “the biggest challenge” portion of the application. This year I chose to highlight implementation of our Google Mini-powered Articulate Universal Search as the biggest challenge of the past year, and how it’s helped us to scale our support department by empowering our customers to search across nearly 6,000 documents from four different content sources, powered by four different technologies.

Some highlights of our universal search project by the numbers, which I included in our 25-page application for this year’s contest:

• 22,770 total searches in 3-month sample period (10/1-12/31/2007)
• 7,590 average searches/month (same period)
• 100 hours of internal staff time (estimated)
• 17 months from conception to rollout (4/2006-9/15/2007 launch)
• 15 hours of consulting time from 1 Google-authorized consulting firm
• 10 customer beta testers
• 7 months of internal setup & QA testing
• 4 RFPs to data centers considered for hosting
• 3 rounds of design mockups
• 1 director of support
• 1 designer
• 1 major site relaunch

Along with highlighting our universal search, I also outlined all of the great new support offerings we’ve added in the past year alone:

• Articulate 101
• Custom in-person & Web-based training
• Case surveys
• Monthly live community chat
• Status site (heartbeat.articulate.com)

I’m obviously very proud of what we’ve built and we look forward to continue helping your elearning development efforts with the best elearning software support site and team in the world.

Congrats to the Articulate support team for helping us earn this honor two years in a row!

By the way, I happened to catch Captain Smiley — in recognition of this 2008 award — posing proudly with our 2007 Ten Best Web Support Sites trophy: