The decision to build the new Bonitasoft Customer Service Center on Bonita

We recently released a brand-new version of the Bonitasoft Customer Service Center (CSC), and as lead of Customer Support I was on the development team for this project. One of the main responsibilities I took on in that team was to evaluate the options for the platform we’d use for the CSC. Here I’ll share a bit about how and why we ended up with the decision to use our own Bonita platform - it’s not as obvious as you might think!

The need for a new Customer Service Center

When customers reach out to Bonitasoft Customer Support they are facing some sort of issue. If we make reaching us easy and convenient for them, we are already halfway to helping them solve the problem! Customers facing issues may already be frustrated, and making it easy for them to get our attention goes a long way to not frustrating them further.

The Bonitasoft Customer Service Center had been in need of a major overhaul for some time now. This undertaking started over 2 years ago, and turned out to be a real quest.

What do we need it for? Defining the requirements

Our Customer Service Center is not just a helpdesk platform. It is also a way for Bonitasoft’s Bonita Enterprise users to download the subscription edition and generate licenses. We spent a bit of time reviewing requirements for our CSC and this one turned out to be a game-changer.

Evaluating our choice for the underlying platform

Once we knew what we needed, we began evaluating some of the industry leaders in helpdesk software. We reviewed quite a few - including Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Salesforce Community. When we started the proof-of-concept (POC) we quickly realized that although each of these has great features from a pure helpdesk perspective, a lot of development / customization was going to be needed to make any of the solutions work for us. Our software download and license generation requirements imposed additional development that was either very complex or entirely out of the scope of each of the helpdesk solutions.

This is when the option to develop the solution using Bonita came up. Charles Souillard, co-founder of Bonitasoft, challenged me on why don't we use Bonita. This was a good question!

We weighed the pros and cons of using our own platform and this is what we came up with.

The positives:

• Starting from scratch would give us full control over shaping the new Customer Service Center.
• Bonita is a solid application development platform. (We’ve been using it for over ten years.)
• Bonita experts are already at our disposal.
• We wouldn’t need to rely on external resources for development / customization and support.
• The Customer Service Center can evolve with our business needs.
• With our latest Bonita Cloud offer, Bonita Cloud users will need to have access to its many new features and services through the Customer Service Center.
• This was an opportunity for some Bonitasofters to get involved for the first time in a large project using Bonita from start to finish.
• This experience would also give us deeper insight into challenges faced by our customers as part of the development cycle, and eventually perhaps help drive new features into Bonita.

On the flip side: 

• We would miss out on some standard functionalities that would be available in an out-of-the-box solution, but the goal is to continue enhancing the platform with the features and functionalities we need.. 

Developing the Customer Service Center on Bonita - getting it done

Once the decision was made to build the new Customer Service Center on Bonita, we put a team together of 4 core people. Christophe Dame - the developer, Nathalie Cotte - the ergonomic expert, specifications expert, Laura Balp - the visual Design expert and myself as the Project Coordinator and domain expert. Natalie has written about the team experience, and Christophe has written about the development experience in this project. More good stuff to read!

After about 7 months of intense work, I’m quite proud that we have released the new Customer Service Center. We hope our new Bonita Enterprise users will find it as easy and convenient as we intend, and now of course we will begin our iteration of improvements using the continuous delivery capabilities of the Bonita platform!