We’re currently working on adding support for mobile customers to SimpleHelp and have a few bits to share with anyone that is interested in this development.
We are working in parallel on both a web-based general lightweight device customer support app (phones, chromebooks, basically anything with a browser) where a Technician can chat with the customer and have them upload screenshots of anything they need help with, and an iOS app that will use this same system but also use the new APIs on iOS to capture the screen and upload it to the session.
Here’s a screenshot of the browser based system, we want to also make it easy to offer this as a pre-session web chat embedded in or linked from your website so you can chat to customers about issues before having them start a full session:
This is awesome! How do you see the pre-session chat working? Are you thinking about having the ability to add technicians to a queue to allow auto assignment of chat sessions? Also how would the screenshot upload function work on a browser based session? Are you using WebRTC to allow for this type of functionality? You guys rock! Thanks!
Hi Mike, great to hear you like the look of the new developments
The plan with pre-session chat is that it will look very similar from the tech’s perspective but won’t require a full session and app download on the customer side. So the customer would go to the page, click ‘request a chat session’ and then wait for someone to chat.
The technician would see an entry appear in the support tab, likely marked as a chat session, and can then open a session to chat to the customer. Then the experience from the tech’s perspective will be the same as the technician in the iOS app example video above where they are basically experiencing it like a normal session but with unavailable features trimmed down and the screen view coming from the screenshots being uploaded.
Ideally the tech would have the ability to post an ‘upgrade to a full session’ button in the chat if the customer was on a platform that supported that, then the customer could download the full support app, run it and if possible be patched through to the same session as before (this might not be possible in some cases, we haven’t looked into it yet).
In terms of the implementation we are writing the mobile iOS app in Swift using the iOS APIs and for the web portion we are using JS in conjunction with the JSON based APIs we’ve been adding to the SimpleHelp server (along with a minimal number of other custom bits where these wouldn’t be the best choice like for the screen updates etc).
This is awesome! If we were to have our Ios devices supervised, would we be able to get around having to have the user tap a button to start sharing? In my experience with ios, once supervised, we get god control over the device as if we were physically using it.
I ask because i’ll have some kiosks which I would like to keep track of and see what their displaying without having someone there to tap a button to start the sharing session.
@Jerry I am with you on that. Please submit it as a feature request.
Would love a native chrome app or something that worked well in just the browser for us techs.
As a workaround, you can use the linux beta on a chromebook and run the linux technician. It works well.
If you run 2 separate installs though like I do, you will need to run it from the command line each time.
If you have just one install it works well because it will make you an icon and you can just use that each time after you install the tech client.
I dabbled with the new mobile client in 5.3 when away skiing on my Android tablet. Stopped because a) I was on holiday and b) it wasn’t easy to use. I did raise a ticket to re-visit it when I had more time.
A mobile technician app or just mobile quick support would be a great feature to have, any news on a future release?, road map? I know its been discussed in the past but it seems odd it is not availble yet, you released this nearly 1.5 years ago
This would be a nice advantage. Hopefully we can use API’s to secure access to our servers from remote devices. So we can easily kill them if they get lost / stolen
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