Embedded Customer Support With Rapportive

A big part of providing good support is making it painless. At Scout, Andre and I handle all of the support requests. Once we’ve gathered the account information, it usually doesn’t take much time to help. The problem is quickly putting the account information together. We don’t want to use a dedicated support application – we usually handle just a couple of support requests per-day.

Why not view all of the account information right from Gmail, where the support request originates? We’re using Rapportive with a custom Raplet to make it happen. When we receive an email from a Scout customer, we see their Scout account info.

A big part of providing good support is making it painless. At Scout, Andre and I handle all of the support requests. Once we’ve gathered the account information, it usually doesn’t take much time to help. The problem is quickly putting the account information together. We don’t want to use a dedicated support application – we usually handle just a couple of support requests per-day.

Building Your Own Raplet

Checkout the Raplet Developer Discussion List for information on rolling your own Raplet. The group homepage lists the Raplets documentation in PDF format.

We use Ruby on Rails, so our controller logic looks something like this:

Our view generates the HTML shown in the above screenshot.

Value of Sidekick Apps

I handle a number of activities at Scout and it’s great to have a sidekick app like Rapportive. It’s a lightweight tool that helps me provide better support.