Not one company ever claimed "our support is bad." But, a lot of them just built the set-up to store a perfect onboarding for themselves and called it educational.

This is because most B2B software support relies on the simple assumption that the customer will come towards them. Towards the source of the knowledge. They will look it up when its needed for them, they think. The information is then in their language (mostly English) and in the format picked by the support team. The team that has been thinking about the perfectly structured onboarding flow. The well-timed email sequence. Now the customer does this, read this, and off they go!

That works fine when your customers are more or less the same kind of person in more or less the same situation. It stops working when they're from all over the world, from different cultures, different educational backgrounds, and are trying to get compliant with legislation that they don’t understand, constantly changes or is even still being written.

So when we started reviewing support at AWARE™, we knew a classical approach wouldn't work.  AWARE™'s customers are not just one type of user and they are also not the stereotypical tech-user. They could be textile producers, brands, or supply chain managers across Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Americas. The person handling DPP compliance at a manufacturer in Portugal is not the same person as their counterpart at a brand in India. They speak different languages, obviously. But they also work differently, think differently, and when something isn't clear, they reach for completely different communication channels first.

Some want to get on a call. Some will find the answer themselves at 10pm and never tell anyone they were stuck because it’s not in their culture to ask for help. Some go straight to documentation. Some want to type a question in their own words, their own language and get an answer back immediately. A support system that only works for one of those people isn't really support. It's just convenient for the team building it.

So we tried to ask ourselves what it would look like to build something that actually meets all those people where they are and how they prefer to learn. We realized it couldn't be just one thing. We needed layers and options, each one there for a different kind of person, at a different moment. So we pictured them.

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‍For the person who wants to find their own answer

A help centre with AI-powered search, in multiple languages. You don't need to know what the article is called, just describe what you're looking for and the search finds and summarizes it. The articles are for people who read documentation first. The AI search is for everyone else.

For the person who wants an answer right now

We have an AI assistant, available in the Hub and inside the AWARE™ platform via chat. Common questions get answered immediately, in your language, at whatever hour. Anything more complex gets routed to someone at the AWARE™ office.

For the person who wants a human

We start the request with a structured, trackable service desk with ticket numbers and history, so there’s no chasing email threads. But for onboarding and bigger questions: we now have weekly scheduled live sessions where someone from the AWARE™ team is waiting for anyone who drops in during those hours. With direct links to those sessions in the Hub and on WeChat. (link to ‘events’ here)

For the person who wants to be heard

A feedback portal and community forum where customers can submit ideas, vote on what others have suggested, and see what fellow AWARE™ users are working through. A good question or feedback shouldn’t be hidden but shared with the community. We want to hear everyone, good and bad.

For the person who needs to plan ahead

A public product roadmap. Compliance and purchasing decisions depend on knowing what the platform will support in the future, not just what it does today. Our roadmap makes that visible, and keeps us accountable to it too!

Why Featurebase?

We built all of this on Featurebase because it let us bring everything into one place instead of five different tools with five different URLs. The multilingual AI search was our deciding factor. So was having feedback, support, and product direction all visible in the same environment, for the customer, not just for us. ‍

And with that in mind I want to close this with saying that if you're really customer focussed, you keep learning from them, not just about them. Meaning our Hub, as we now call all above, is never done. It's live now at hub.traceaware.io. And if something's still missing; the feedback portal is exactly where we want to hear it. Support should work for the person using it, not the team providing it. That's the idea behind the AWARE™ hub.