First Aid for Your Problems: the PROAD Forum

We recently improved the design of our forum and launched a completely new version. In this post, Michael Schmiechen, Head of Customer Service and a Member of our Management Board, provides an insight into the improvements made for users of the forum...

Michael Schmiechen, Director J+D International, Customer Relations & Consultancy

The fact that you, our customers, work with PROAD on a day-to-day basis means that everything, of course, has to work perfectly when using our software. Nevertheless, questions or problems may indeed arise when using PROAD products. Our forum support team is therefore available to help all customers so that they can quickly obtain answers and find solutions in order to refocus their full attention on the important working processes.

A knowledge database and free support tool

In order to make our forum as beneficial as possible for you, we use an approach that focuses on two main objectives: on the one hand, our forum is designed to act as a comprehensive knowledge database. Our PROAD Customer Service team regularly publishes white papers, information on updates and important facts and advice on using PROAD software, for both PROAD Professional and PROAD Sky, in our forum in order to keep you up to date at all times. Another important advantage of our service is the fact that we record all of our webinars and place them online for you to access free of charge.

The second objective of the forum is to provide a free PROAD support community. Do you have questions concerning topics such as document creation? If so, our forum is the ideal place for you. Both our staff and the entire forum community are happy to help you.

Support from our moderators and the PROAD community

10 members of staff in our support team now work on answering questions and queries submitted by our customers in our forum. Our support team is comprised of both employees from our Customer Service department and staff from our Development department, which is responsible for our software programming activities. The advantages of this mixed team are clear to see: it helps to ensure that a competent contact is available for all questions and queries and provides customers with first-hand information. In return, the programmers in the team are able to gain a better understanding of our customers' wishes and incorporate this into the further customer-oriented development of our agency software.

Users of our forum normally receive an answer within 24 hours. The more frequently customers ask about or request a specific feature, the more likely it is to also be included in later versions. We use our ticket system to keep track of all questions and queries and are able to provide users with direct feedback if changes are made that affect them.

When running our forum, we particularly aim to support and promote an exchange of information and advice among users themselves: have you seen an open question in the forum and do you know how to help? Do you maybe have experience in the best way to create a form for writing tenders? If so, don't hesitate to speak up! We are delighted when our customers also get in touch and help each other via our forum.

We hope that this information has increased your interest in our forum and made you want to get involved. We certainly look forward to seeing you there soon. Come and have a look!