Building DISCO Desk: Customer Support that Isn't a Nightmare

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DISCO Desk has been live to our clients for a few weeks, and it looks like we’re on our way to becoming the gold standard for support experiences. Here’s an inside look at the design and build of DISCO Desk, and why we believe it’s a game-changer for our users.

  • DISCO Desk is a one-click option to access both software and services assistance, without ever leaving the DISCO platform.
  • Users can easily request technical support, ask for product help and training, submit product feedback, and enlist the help of our professional services or managed review teams.
  • After reviewing hundreds of support tickets, our new interface helps users quickly describe their situation so they can get right back to work.

Imagine this scenario: It’s the evening before your production deadline and you’ve hit a roadblock with your search syntax. No matter what you tweak, you keep getting the same error message. You’re starting to go cross-eyed and realize that this is how the phrase “ripping your hair out” came to be. The support articles you searched for aren’t helpful because they aren’t telling you why you’re getting an error message. You don’t want to hit the “chat now” button because last time you wasted hours in a queue, only for someone to tell you to contact your service provider. You also don’t have time to sit on hold with support, while having to explain your specific issue over and over again as you’re bounced around from agent to agent.

Unfortunately, this kind of suboptimal support experience often outnumbers the positive ones (looking at you, cable provider). What you really need is a seasoned set of eyes to actually look at your search syntax and tell you why that error message keeps haunting you, and what you can do to fix it. Here’s how your situation should have played out:

  • The support channels were clearly defined and easy to locate, and you got to choose how you wanted to ask for help.
  • You were quickly connected to a real person who only asked for basic information like your name and phone number once (or better yet, not at all).
  • The agent understood your question or problem without too much explanation.
  • It took minimal steps to provide a solution or connect you with someone who could (by the way, that error message you kept getting was because you forgot to close one of your parentheses).

DISCO Desk is our solution to end all levels of support frustration or confusion and make positive interactions the norm. DISCO Desk streamlines all of our support channels and resources into one interface and gives our users the power to engage how and when they want. 

Of course, with every innovation we produce at DISCO, a lot of thought, research and development occur before you see it on your screen. With the goal of creating a new standard for great customer support, here are a few reasons why DISCO Desk gives our users new reasons to love DISCO. 

A single home for all of your support needs

We wanted our support experience to be as easy as clicking a button. 

To design a thoughtful home for all of our support channels, we needed to understand how our users were currently engaging with our support channels to ensure our new experience would meet their needs. To name a few, users could email our support team, call our support line, start a chat on our website, peruse our knowledge base articles, or reach out to a project manager or client success manager. However, each of these options lived in a different place, and it wasn’t always clear who you should be reaching out to, and for what, especially if you were looking for extra help via our professional services or managed review teams. 

DISCO Desk alleviates this confusion. DISCO users only have to remember one place to directly enlist product experts who can help them with technical, product, and professional services requests, while also allowing them to choose how they want to engage. 

  • Are you the type of person who likes to explore articles to learn new things along the way? Click on our Knowledge Base via DISCO Desk and search away. 
  • In the middle of running a huge production and you hit an error message you weren’t expecting? Click DISCO Desk and contact support. 
  • Did you just learn that your client surfaced another 80,000 documents that need to be reviewed and produced by the end of the week (and it’s already Wednesday)? Click DISCO Desk and extend your team with some of our reviewers. 
  • Feeling like you’re spending more time organizing documents than actually reviewing them? Click DISCO Desk to enlist the help of one of our project managers.
  • Already have a great relationship with your project or client success manager and a process for getting help? No problem — keep on keepin’ on. All of the ways you currently ask for help have not changed!

Easily communicate questions (and only once)

When you’re asking for help, it’s frustrating when you have to give information you feel like they should already know, like your name, email, and phone number. It’s even more annoying when you have to give any information more than once. For DISCO Desk to truly enhance our user experience, we needed to design a product that assigned user inquiries quickly to the right teams but without asking them to (repeatedly) give us a lot of detail.

What makes DISCO Desk truly magical is that we do not ask our users to spend time entering in their contact information or specifying which matter they’re working on — we already know their email address and the matter ID, which are sent over when they submit a request. This not only creates a magical user experience but also routes requests faster by minimizing the need to ask for follow-up information.

We wanted DISCO Desk to feel as easy as filling out a simple form, while still giving us enough information to make sure we matched our users to the right expert in as few steps as possible. We analyzed hundreds of support tickets to understand the most frequently asked questions and common requests to create a concise list of drop-down choices. With the most pertinent information about the inquiry captured immediately, we know exactly which team to send it to, without the typical back and forth you may have experienced with other providers’ support teams. DISCO Desk allows our experts to focus on providing solutions instead of spending time figuring out logistics.

Meeting our clients where they are: our software

If users are configuring searches or running productions and have a question, why should they be launched into another tab or go to another website to get assistance? With all of our support channels and resources living in one interface, and our ability to seamlessly capture user context while they were working in the product, it only made sense to meet our clients where they are and make DISCO Desk an in-app experience.

So if you have a question about your search term report, you can quickly open DISCO Desk and submit your request, instead of having to open another web tab and navigate to our website, or open a new email and bounce back and forth from our product to the email to make sure you’re adequately detailing your request. Instead, all you have to do is submit your request and let us match you with the right expert. And while we’re working our DISCO magic, you can focus on finding the right documents to win your case.

Make magic with DISCO!

We come to work every day looking to take previously complex or annoying tasks and make them easier and hopefully more enjoyable. I love working at DISCO because I’m empowered to be super thoughtful about my designs and I’m given the resources to build great products. A lot of that is making sure that our product is intuitive and fun to work with, but we also make sure that we have experts with diverse backgrounds to ensure our clients are covered with whatever challenge might come their way. If you’d like to share your expertise and help us build the next generation of legal technology, join us!

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Haley Bonn

Haley is the Group Product Designer at DISCO focused on the DISCO Ediscovery document viewer. As a designer, she is a strong advocate for user research, and loves finessing over the fine details. She enjoys collaborating with her team to solve DISCO’s complex user problems by crafting thoughtful, clever, and clean design solutions.

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