knowledge base

How to fetch articles from your uservoice knowledgebase into a Windows Phone app

As some of you might know, I recently switched to uservoice.com for feedback, support and also FAQ hosting (read more here). Of course I want to integrate all those features into my app(s) to make the user experience as native as possible.

First, you need to generate a new app in uservoice.com. Log into your account, click on ‘Admin Console’, ‘Settings’ and finally ‘Integrations’. Then add your API client, you will have something like this:

uservoice_api_client

Today, we are starting with getting our knowledge base articles into our app.

This is the easiest part besides assigning the support mail address to a button.

Here is how we are doing it:

First, we need to declare some constants:

//consumer key and secret are needed to authorize our requests (oAuth)
 //KB articles only need the ConsumerKey
 const string ConsumerKey = "<youKey>";
 const string ConsumerSecret = "<yourSecret>";
 //all KB articles:
 const string KnowledgebaseString = "http://<yoursubdomain>.uservoice.com/api/v1/articles.json?client={0}";
 //KB topic articles:
 //using sort=oldest ensures that you will get the right order of your articles
 const string KnowledgebaseTopicString = "http://<yousubdomain>.uservoice.com/api/v1/topics/{0}/articles.json?client={1}&sort=oldest";

static string articleJsonString;

As you can see, we have two options to fetch our knowledgebase articles – all articles (if you have only one app, you’re fine with that) or topic based.

To get the needed topic id, just open the topic in your browser. The topic id is part of the url:

uservoice_topic_id

For getting authorized to receive the JSON string of our knowledge base, we need to pass the consumer key as parameter “client” to the base url of our request. To get our list sorted, I am using the sort parameter as well.

To receive the JSON string, we are creating an async Task<string> that fetches our article. To make the result reloadable, add the IfModifiedSince Header (otherwise Windows Phone caches the result during the app’s current lifecycle).

//receiving the JSON string for our KB does not need any advanced requests: 
//a basic HttpClient handles everything for us, as we don't need any authentication here
public async Task<string> GetKBJsonString()
{
      string getKBJSonStringFromUserVoice = string.Empty;

     HttpClient getKBJsonClient = new HttpClient();
     getKBJsonClient.DefaultRequestHeaders.IfModifiedSince = DateTime.Now;

     getKBJSonStringFromUserVoice = await getKBJsonClient.GetStringAsync(new Uri(string.Format(KnowledgebaseTopicString, "47463", ConsumerKey), UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute));

      return getKBJSonStringFromUserVoice;
 }

Of course we want to have a list shown to our users – to display our JSON string in a ListBox, we need to deserialize it. To be able to deserialize it, we need a data class. You can use json2sharp.com to generate the base class or use this one (download Link). It fits for both all articles or topic based articles.

First, create a ListBox with the corresponding DataTemplate (I am only using question and answer text for this demo).

            <ListBox x:Name="FAQListBox">
                <ListBox.ItemTemplate>
                    <DataTemplate>
                        <Grid>
                            <Grid.RowDefinitions>
                                <RowDefinition Height="Auto"></RowDefinition>
                                <RowDefinition Height="Auto"></RowDefinition>
                            </Grid.RowDefinitions>
                            <TextBlock Grid.Row="0" x:Name="questionTB" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle2Style}" Text="{Binding question}" TextWrapping="Wrap"></TextBlock>
                            <TextBlock Grid.Row="1" x:Name="answerTB" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextSubtleStyle}" Text="{Binding text}" TextWrapping="Wrap"></TextBlock>
                        </Grid>
                    </DataTemplate>
                </ListBox.ItemTemplate>
            </ListBox>

I am using JSON.net for everything around JSON strings. Here is how to deserialize the JSON string and set the ItemsSource of our Listbox:

            articleJsonString = await GetKBJsonString();

            var articlesList = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<KBArticleDataClass.KBArticleData>(articleJsonString);

            FAQListBox.ItemsSource = articlesList.articles;

You are now already able to run the project. Here is the result of my test app, displaying the FAQ of my NFC Toolkit app:

uservoice_listbox_testapp_screenshot

As you can see, it takes only about ten minutes to get the knowledge base into your app. Using a remote source has a lot of advantages, the most important one is you don’t need to update your app when you add new answered questions.

I am now starting to work on integrating the feedback forum. It requires an oAuth authentication, and will be a bit more complicated than this one. Of course I will share it with you all here on my blog – stay tuned.

Until then – happy coding!

Posted by msicc in Archive, 3 comments

Experiment: using uservoice.com for Support, Feedback and FAQ

On my daily job, I am working as a Mobile Hardware Support Agent of a German  carrier. Because of that, I know how important a good support for customers (=users) is – and also, a little knowledge base where users can find most probably an answer for their  questions.

I want my customers to be satisfied. As an indie developer, I have a little problem: I don’t have a support team that catches all the support questions for me. I need to do this by myself. Until now, I am doing this by using a send-me-a-mail button in my apps. However, due to the fact that I have a 9to5 job and a family besides developing apps, time is a bit limited for me. I searched for some solutions to improve the way I am doing my customer service, and uservoice seems like a good tool to improve my customer service a lot.

As you can see at the feature comparison list of uservoice, the free account already allows you to do a lot of things: https://www.uservoice.com/plans/?ref=top_pricing. It is free for one support agent – perfect for an indie developer like me.

What can you do with uservoice?

uservoice has a lot of features:

  • support ticket system
  • knowledge base
  • feedback system/forum
  • and many more, if you are going for a paid plan

Let’s have a look at the first three features:

Support ticket system

Adding the ticketing system is very easy. You just need a EMailComposeTask pointing to your ticket system. Your standard mail address for that will be: “tickets@<yourname>.uservoice.com”. This is how a received ticket looks like:

Screenshot (289)

Answering to a user is as easy as writing an email – plus you have a ticket history at a glance.

On top of that, you are able to insert a so called ‘canned response’ based on your knowledge base:

Screenshot (290)

Knowledge base

You can build up a knowledge base for your apps.

Screenshot (286)

In the left menu at the bottom at your admin console, you will find the ‘ARTICLES’ section. This is where all the knowledge base articles are collected.

You can create also topics within that KB. I did so for all of my apps:

Screenshot (286)

This way, you can use your free account to support all of your apps with FAQ/KB articles – pretty easy.

Here is how to set up a new article: after clicking on ‘All articles’, there is a ‘New Article’ button on the right side of your screen. Click on that, you will see this on the right hand side:

Screenshot (287)

You can set up the article name, the text and the topic as well as the position you want to show it up in your knowledge base.

You can take a look at my knowledge base here: https://msiccdev.uservoice.com/knowledgebase

How can you use this in your apps? I plan to create an API wrapper for their C# SDK, which is not compatible with Windows Phone at the moment. I will write another blog post for that. Luckily, uservoice as a very nice mobile interface, so you can start off with a simple WebBrowserTask to open your knowledge base:

wp_ss_20140106_0001

Technically, it would be possible to use a WebBrowser control, too. But you would need to code more to get a proper browsing handling.

Feedback system/forum

Some of you might be already familiar with the feedback or idea forum of uservoice (even Microsoft uses this). This time, we look at the other side of the forum, from our admin console:

Screenshot (292)

You have a similar view to what users see, but there are some more parts to control your forum. As a free user, you have only one forum, so it might be useful if you add the app name in front of the title of an idea. You can respond, take notes, and change the status of the ideas:

Screenshot (293)

To integrate the feedback function in your app, you can again use a WebBrowserTask to open the mobile page of your idea forum:

wp_ss_20140106_0002

These are the first simple steps to create your own customer support system with uservoice. Like I said before, I will write a Windows Phone wrapper to get this into an app as native, and will share it here with you all.

Until the next post, happy coding!

Posted by msicc in Archive, 0 comments