The words “Customer Service and Support Portal Estos” with the Confluence and XALT logos on a blue landscape of triangles and mesh lines

Case Study · Software vendor

Customer Service and Support Portal with Confluence and Scroll Viewport

estos sells communication software to over a million users – and receives a correspondingly high number of support requests. With Confluence and Scroll Viewport, support.estos.de was born: a public portal showing the same articles the developers write internally.

hard facts about the project

Products used

Confluence, Scroll Viewport, Scroll Versions, Scroll Translations

Solution and methodology

Building a support portal on Confluence and Scroll Viewport, evaluating apps, user permission management and editor concept, corporate branding for estos, introduction and workshops on editorial use

About our partners

About estos

estos GmbH is an independent software vendor founded in Starnberg, focused on developing fast and straightforward communication software for use in companies.

Since starting out in 1997, estos has continuously delivered products in an extremely dynamic market, now used daily by more than a million users at companies of all kinds.

Designing support.estos.de with Confluence and Scroll Viewport

As a provider of software products, estos faces a high volume of support requests. To keep organizational effort in check while still delivering excellent support to customers, a support portal was set up for users of their software.

Compared to the website, the support portal, built on Atlassian Confluence, is updated with new information on using the software multiple times a day. It serves users not only as a support platform but also as a knowledgebase, giving access to important information, resources and documents.

The content is managed directly in the same tool as internal development, so it can be moved from the internal to the external area without any format conversion. Through the support portal, users can independently acquire guides, best practices and workarounds, regardless of location or other people.

With the support portal, many requests could already be answered in advance, before they even reach estos's support hotline or ticket system. In the ticket system, the content is offered again during ticket creation, to answer further requests by embedding the content as a knowledgebase.

Nothing is more frustrating than getting a generic answer to a support request. The portal tries to provide this in advance through machine learning. The concept of the portal and the layout configuration were implemented by estos and XALT through a custom theme developed specifically for estos, based on the K15t Help Center theme.

Homepage of support.estos.de with a search field, a banner for important announcements, and four product tiles: ProCall Enterprise, Meetings, Analytics and One

In addition to the custom theme, our team made further individual configurations in coordination with estos. These include, among other things, a specific homepage, custom page headers and footers, an announcement banner for important messages, and content categorization via labels and categories like installation, commissioning or similar. The latter feature supports content maintenance and makes editors' work easier.

To improve the search function, the filter options in the search bar were also improved, letting the knowledgebase deliver more precise results to users.

Category page of the portal: tabs from installation to good-to-know, below it the most recently updated articles and a help bar with a phone number

Additional Features and Benefits

The implementation with Scroll Viewport makes navigation between individual documentation articles easier and better. This gives users a simple, fast way to find content in the portal, which in turn increases the satisfaction of customers and users of the software.

By using a support portal, estos was able to create numerous advantages for itself and its users. Their own staff are relieved and have more time to focus on serious problems. There is also a noticeable reduction in effort and cost in communication with customers.

Portal article "ProCall 7 Enterprise System Requirements": navigation tree on the left, table of contents on the right, table of supported Windows servers

The support center also offers estos the following advantages:

very easy content maintenance via Confluence
fully custom layout with little effort
lower administration costs through fewer support tickets
positive presentation of the company through transparency

Alongside Scroll Viewport, our team also built two other K15t plugins into the support portal, Scroll Versions and Scroll Translations, which allow multilingual and version-based maintenance of the articles and content.

Opportunities for Further Development

estos's support portal is publicly accessible and can be found at support.estos.de – take a look around and see what your own help center could look like!

Using Confluence opens up extensive possibilities for further expanding the portal. Custom features can be built in, new layout options created, or additional tools and software connected to the support portal. As an additional service, our team offered further development of the layout for the support portal as well as estos's website.

Design draft for the support portal: a light homepage with the heading "Welcome to the support", an input field and portraits of contact people

First, two design proposals with light and dark mode were presented for the estos.de website. Second, our team delivered a layout proposal for the support portal.

For support portals in particular, an appealing design is important to give customers the feeling of being professionally supported.

The new design can be implemented on top of the existing solution with Confluence and Scroll Viewport, giving the support portal a modern, elegant look. XALT is supporting estos in creating and implementing this new design.

more information

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