Homestead Blog

Some of our members have written in to this blog asking questions about their services. We take customer service very seriously here at Homestead, so I thought we’d have Jon, a long-time manager of our support department, share some news with you about recent changes and enhancements to customer service. - Rochelle

Everyone needs help occasionally. I’ve been a member of Homestead for as long as I’ve been working here, and even I have questions sometimes! So I know what it means to be confused or need help with a problem. Some of you have written in to this product blog about questions or problems you have. When I’m in the same boat I have the luxury of walking down the hall and talking to someone at their desk. But I rarely do that anymore, now that we have launched our new Help Center!

It’s true: now when I have a question, I use our own Help system to get my answers. Partly to test its effectiveness, of course, but I’m finding that the new system is efficient enough that I can find out the answer faster than if I walked down the hall!

Homestead’s old Help system worked, but to be honest it was a bit unwieldy at times. The searches weren’t perfect, and often returned so many results that sometimes it took just as long to sort through the answers as it did to figure out the answer for myself! Another problem I would have was when I did send in an email for support, I was never sure of where they were with my case until I received a reply. Maybe not the end of the world, but it could definitely be a bit frustrating.

Fortunately - for you and me both - we’ve recently launched our new Help Center. It’s designed to provide a better way of helping and teaching our members. The first major improvement is a better search algorithm. Now when you search for answers in the Help Center, it returns the most appropriate results, based on a combination of the terms searched for and the amount of time the Help Topic has been viewed. So today, not only do the words used matter, but the popularity of the Help Topic is considered as well. Maybe the most satisfying function of the new Help Center is being able to view the status of any Help request made. The way it was before, I had to send an email in to Support, wait for a response, then sort through the message thread to find out how that new response fit in with the question I originally asked. I always found that to be a pain, especially because I had to keep flipping back and forth between the Help and my email. Now the Help Center lets me create a “Help Ticket” that contains my question or problem. By logging in and checking the Help Center, I can now check on the status of my ticket (and the answer to my questions). The Help Center not only shows me the current status of that Ticket, but it also gives me a list of all the Help Tickets that I’ve created before. This is especially helpful when I’m trying to find an answer that I know I was told before, but couldn’t remember. Now the Help Tickets remember for me! And these are not machine answers; the customer service specialists you get when you call in are the same ones answering the Help Tickets that you submit through the Help Center.

So feel free to try the new Help Center out. It’s a lot more fun to use when doing your own research, and the Help Ticket system makes it easy to track progress on your problem or question. Plus, it looks a lot cooler than it did before. Give it a try!