Support.com technology doesn’t only help your support agents do more consistent, efficient work. It can also let your customers help themselves and avoid calling support entirely.

What is Self-Support?

The Self-Support feature is an embeddable interface to your written self-support content and guided paths. When you create content, you can choose whether it is for Agents Only, Customers Only, or Agents and Customers. All of the content that is marked as Customers Only or Agents and Customers appear in the Self-Support interface for your customers to use.

Where can you embed Self-Support?

The embeddable interface means that you can surface the same content in multiple places. For example, you can give your users access to your help through channels such as:

• Your company’s corporate brochure site
• Your product’s user interface
• Your online community
• Any place online where your users to go find information about your product

The places you can embed your Self-Support aren’t limited to the desktop experience. Users can read your self-support content on their mobile devices as well. Just embed the Self-Support feature wherever your users look for information about your company on their mobile devices.

Does embedded Self-Support make more work for me?

Since you’re embedding the interface to the same content in all these places, you only have to maintain one copy of your content. There’s no need to worry that the copy on your website will get out of sync with the help in your UI when both are actually the same embeddable content.

Plus, the content that is marked as being for Agents and Customers is even consistent between what your users see online and what they hear from your agents. That reduces redundant effort for your content creators and prevents embarrassing problems of inconsistent messaging about your products’ capabilities.

Customizing the Self-Support Feature

You have a lot of control over the look-and-feel of the Self-Support feature. The Self-Support Branding configuration screen lets you specify a CSS file to use with your embeddable Self-Support interface. It also lets you customize a lot of the words that are used on the interface to make it reflect your company’s voice.
 
Follow these steps to get to the Self-Support Branding configuration screen:

1. Log in to your Support.com account.
2. Select Admin in the Navigator bar at the top of the screen.
3. Select Settings>Self-Support Branding.
   The Self Service Configurations screen appears.

In the Themes Customization section on this screen, you can enter the complete URL of a CSS file in the Theme URL field. This link must be secure (https). Alternately, you can click the Upload icon to upload the CSS file directly to Support.com Cloud. Check the Enable theme in mobile applications checkbox to apply the CSS styling to the mobile application.

In the Strings Customization section, you see a list of words that you can customize on the interface. But you are not necessarily limited to just plain words in your customizations. You can also:

• Add links using the standard HTML a href command.
  
• Use words in other languages.
• Use variables by enclosing them in double brackets
  For example {{ variableName }}
  

To use variables, enclose them in double brackets. For example {{variableName}}. The following variables are available to use:  

• {{topicCount}}
• {{reviewCount}}
• {{stepNumber}}
• {{stepName}}
• {{companyName}}

If you have questions about the Self-Support tool or need help to implement it, contact the Help Desk.