Integrated access to information for customers and partners
The Altitude Software portal
ABOUT THIS SUCCESS CASE
Altitude Software, in partnership with Xpand IT, implemented a scalable solution that unified customer support and document availability. The project included a knowledge base integrated with Jira Service Desk and a portal to facilitate access to manuals, support, and other tools, improving efficiency and internal collaboration.
SCOPE OF THIS SOLUTION
Portal integrated with Jira Service Desk
Central knowledge base
Support with chat and
- Single-Sign On apps
The challenge: simplifying the support process
Altitude Software wanted to unify the way they communicate with their customers and partners, simplifying the entire support process as well as the documentation of their product releases. The main requirement was the implementation of agile, scalable solutions, which could work as a single point of access to their entire information/application universe.
In addition, this bet on a solution was also intended to encourage collaboration between helpdesk operators, making producing content an easier task for employees. And so, the challenge presented itself to Xpand IT in two distinct but complementary ways:
Implementation of a Knowledge Base
In order to centralize all knowledge and information.
Development of a customer portal
With the goal of providing better support.
The solution: a combination of UX/UI and software development
UX/UI & functional analysis
The UX/UI team started by gathering the needs, motivations and goals of the platform users in order to deconstruct the challenge and discover the essence of the product.
Meanwhile, the functional analysis focused on collecting business requirements, identifying new needs based on them, identifying risks, adding suggestions and describing functionalities in a way that was understandable to everyone.
We then moved on to the creative phase: designing ideas and creating solutions with thelp of various functional prototypes, which allowed us to test the previously developed concepts and communicate with the client in a manner very close to the final product. By exploiting this tool, valuable user experience was gained and it is now possible to produce a final UX/UI solution.
Using our agile methodologies proposals were refined, requirements were finalized, interactions were solved, and the whole interface was defined.
Finally, all the technical specifications needed by the development team were prepared, and the UX/UI team followed the entire implementation to ensure the consistency of the validated design system.
Developing the customer portal
In partnership with Altitude, Xpand IT began by surveying existing needs in the business, and a review of the architecture of the systems involved. The solution needed to allow for growth and scalability over time, in order to match the potential for use.
The applications executed in the standard of micro services architecture aim to simplify the development, deployment and maintenance. The decomposed nature of the application allows the teams responsible for development to focus on one problem at a time, and the necessary improvements to be implemented individually, without affecting other parts of the system.
Considering the variety of information sources, Xpand IT chose to bet on an architecture based on micro services, developed on the Spring Cloud framework, being the front end developed in Angular.
In order to grant access to other applications without additional authentication, single sign on was implemented with Oauth2, using the Keycloak platform as identity provider.
The application was hosted in Azure, in PaaS logic, using various services provided by the platform:
- Azure File Storage to host the user manuals provided by the portal;
- Azure PostgreSQL (a managed database that supports the portal information);
- App Services, a PaaS (Platform as a Service) solution that supports the execution of the various services that make up the solution.
Knowledge base implementation
A knowledge base was created that integrated with the Jira Service Desk solution allowing customers to quickly access manuals, articles and technical alerts.
The knowledge base has allowed a greater sharing of knowledge between helpdesk agents, as they can now create articles from the Jira Service Desk, sharing later with other employees. The functionalities inherent to the Knowledge Base created also allow the use of predefined templates, as well as all content approval control.
By browsing the knowledge base it is possible to optimize over time the results presented to the end customer, offering more relevant suggestions. This functionality is enhanced by the built-in machine learning mechanism (the Smartgraph).
The benefits: process optimization and information centralization
Scalability and elasticity
allowing the ability to easily increase or reduce the number of instances in every service.
The use of Azure PaaS services
led to reduce costs of managing infrastructure and to improve ease of integration of the various services.
Increased capacity to resolve support issues autonomously
by consulting the suggestions made.
Optimization of the content production and approval process
delivering consistent content effectiveness through the reports provided.
Guarantee of proximity to customers and partners
through a solution that offers intuitive, simple navigation processes.
All the information is now concentrated in a single portal
guaranteed on a single aggregating platform, with a functional design planned for ultimate ease of use.
In collaboration with Xpand IT, Altitude Software provided the Altitude Customer Portal, with a collection of self-service tools for our customers, partners and employees. Users find in this portal the first line of support and a constant sharing of knowledge, which leads to higher autonomy when using our solutions.
Catarina de Brito Gomes
Knowledge Management Director, Altitude Software
Main Technologies
About Altitude Software
Portuguese IT company that focuses on software development in complete solutions for Contact Centers.
- +25 years of experience
- Offices in 18 locations
- 1100+ clients in 80 countries
Mission & values
- Innovation with purpose
- Commitment to the customer
- Excellence and ethics
- Collaboration and sustainable impact
Type of solution
- UX/UI with functional prototypes
- Azure scalable client portal
- Micro services with Spring Cloud
- Angular and Keycloak frontend
- Knowledge Base with machine learning
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We believe in partnerships that deliver results
This success story shows what’s possible when collaboration happens. Shall we talk?