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Good news for people everywhere!

Thursday, 27 May 2010

New, improved, internationalized help center
Twitter’s user support team is a small group of 14 people and 4 engineers dedicated to helping people use Twitter. As Twitter has grown, so has the importance of making it easy to find answers to questions, updates about known issues, and the right path to escalate a problem to someone who can help. We’ve been working hard to improve the help experience for people everywhere, and today we’re excited to launch the first iteration of our new and improved Help Center!

So what’s new?
When you click help from twitter.com, you’ll find the following:

  • International help resources: we’ve translated our help documents into Spanish, French, Italian, and German. Japanese coming soon! Thanks translators, for all your hard work!

Good news for people everywhere!

  • New Look-and-Feel: we’ve organized articles by topics and groups to help you find what you are looking for faster. We’ve integrated better with Twitter, and a fresh look-and-feel makes for a happier browsing experience.
  • @anywhere integration: you’ll notice hovercards in article comments in your tickets! This makes it easy to follow a user, or retweet what others are saying.
  • Improved Search: we’ve worked with Zendesk, our third-party help desk provider, to improve search response times and results.
  • Regular updates on known issues: all of our known issues are listed here, updated every week by our Support team. We’ve also linked to Twitter’s Status blog, a great resource for service updates when things have gone wrong on Twitter.com.
  • Mobile help section: find out everything you need to know about using Twitter on your phone!
  • Business help: answers for questions about Twitter’s upcoming business features- more coming soon!
  • Integration with @support and @safety: easily find updates from our @support and @safety accounts, as well as the internationalized versions of those accounts.

How it works
Twitter’s support team has a cadre of engineers constantly working to improve the help experience and infrastructure. These talented folks work every day on making it easy for the support team to help people through a combination of tools and integrations.

To make it as easy as possible to find an answer without sending an email, we seek to provide all of the information you need in our Help Center. Our help writers, Emily, Ginger, and Lindsay, have added articles for every question we get so that others can benefit from seeing the answers. They’ve also worked with our translators to provide the same for international users.

Help articles are originally posted in Zendesk, our help ticket system and knowledge base hub. We use Zendesk’s API to pull the articles into the custom pages you see on support.twitter.com. Users search for answers in the help center, and if they have a problem that needs help from a human, we provide easy paths to escalation in the articles themselves.

Specialized forms help us collect the right information to reduce steps in issue resolution, and support requests sent from the help center feed back into Zendesk, where they are categorized and escalated to the right group within our Support team. This (plus more Twitter magic from @sfjulie, @pandemona, @tildewill, @ungulation and @niels) makes it possible for our Support team to answer most requests, including international ones, within 12 hours.

Stay tuned
This is just the first round of improvements, so expect more good news soon! As always, we’re trying to make things better, and we need your help! If you discover a bug or problem, send @support a direct message to let us know. Try searching for something in our help center, and if you don’t find it, send a reply to @support with the question and the hash tag #foshiz, like this:

What is a retweet? #foshiz

We’ll review the questions and work on adding any that we’re missing. Stay tuned for even more improvement in the upcoming months- we’ve only just begun!

Special thanks to Zendesk, with whom we celebrated our millionth ticket in a year’s time. We look forward to more good times!

One more thing…
If building scalable, intuitive help systems sounds like fun, you should join us- Twitter support is hiring engineers and agents!