Support Center; my first major project at Vercel, it's been a blast working on it and it's now out. 🎉✨
Check it out vercel.com/changelog/support-center
BTW, I joined Vercel 🎉 ~6 months ago...
Well anyway...
Support Center is a modern tool for viewing and communicating with Customer Support at Vercel. Built for enterprises to improve the customer support experience while retaining the practices and tools that the Customer Support Team at Vercel had built up over the years. From what customers and the Customer Support Team have told us we've achieved that goal.
For some background. Before Support Center, customers had to email support before they could get any help 😬, it was clunky and prone to "**email got sent to spam errors", and "**I didn't check my email problems", realizing that the experience wouldn't do, the dev team drafted up the idea to connect the current Salesforce based ticketing system with a UI/UX customers would enjoy.
The main hiccup we ran into during development was the excessively complex (and archaic) work of integrating with Salesforce and the performance of the support center, of which the solution is caching (the bane of all Software Engineers everywhere).
📚 Fun fact: Salesforces uses a SQL-like syntax for querying data that's similar to SQL but yet very far away from SQL, it's called SOQL, and working with it can be very frustrating
The problems boiled down to:
How do you keep the cache always up to date?
How to keep the support center fast, responsive, and reliable with the most up-to-date info?
How to make working with Salesforce easier?
The solution to the first 2 problems... 🥁 are webhooks of course.
In essence, whenever a change is made on Salesforce we call a webhook and have that webhook sync with a cache that we use for the support cases 🤯.
We can then expand how long the cache should securely hold case data, and add a cache warm-up for when on the main page.
The last issue was dealing with the complexity of working with Salesforce, we just powered through and though frustrating, I think the results are pretty fantastic.
Working on this project was awesome, and I'm grateful for being able to work with such a capable team of designers & developers on this project.
✌️