What happens when you leave feedback on our articles

[Heidi]

The PTC Technical Support Knowledge Base contains thousands of articles in English, Chinese and Japanese, all written by our team of Technical Support Engineers.  Every single article in our Knowledge Base has an article feedback widget which you can use to provide your feedback to us about the article, if it was helpful or not and a space for you to leave any comments you have for the authors. I say authors because an article can be created by one engineer but over time be updated by several different engineers.

When you leave verbatim comments using the feedback widget they get sent to our internal systems and recorded against the article. We have a team of “Knowledge Domain Experts”, or KDEs for short, who monitor the incoming feedback. The KDEs have the technical skills and expertise to triage the feedback and determine if further action needs to be taken, either by themselves or another Technical Support Engineer.

If you leave a comment that requires further follow up, the engineer will review your comments and make updates to the article or, reach out to you for further details or clarification. When action has been taken you will be notified via email.

Note, you can also subscribe to a specific article if you want to be notified as soon as an updated version is available – see my earlier blog post “The latest news delivered to your inbox” for more details.

[dgschaefer]

I've left many comments on articles and have gotten into good dialog with many KDEs about improving the articles.  I've been pleasantly surprised with PTCs interaction in this area.

[Marco_Tosin]

I've also left many comments and below you can read to one of them.

Thank you for taking the time to submit your feedback on this article.

We at PTC Technical Support have reviewed the feedback that was submitted for Knowledge Base Article CS81012 and would like to work with you to get this corrected.

Please visit our E-Support Portal and open up a new case using the Link to “Log a New Case” and log a case to have a documentation SPR filed for the dead link. It is not a problem with the link in the article, but appears to be a problem with the online help for Creo 3.0.  The ECAD-MCAD Collaboration Workflows link is at the bottom of the following page (and is also not working):

http://help.ptc.com/creo_hc/creo30_pma_hc/usascii/index.html#page/pma/electrical_design/About_the_ECAD_MCAD_Collaboration_Mode.html

What amazes me is that, after leaving a comment pointing out a problem, I was also asked to open a support call.

Why do I have to do the work twice?

It was not enough the first report?

[Heidi]

Hello Marco Tosin, Thank you for using the feedback widget to provide information to us about an article you recently read. Most of the times that we receive verbatim feedback about article content, our engineers can go right ahead and make updates to the article. However, in some cases, an update to the article alone is not sufficient or appropriate.

In this particular situation, it goes beyond just updating the article because to get the Help Center link fixed requires us to file a documentation SPR. Although it is beneficial to have a case so that you can automatically be kept informed of the progress of the resultant SPR, we can also handle it internally. I have asked the engineer who responded to you to file an SPR in this instance and I will also review our internal processes to make this smoother in the future. We certainly don’t want to create more work for you or ask you to do things twice and we do appreciate your feedback on our articles.

[Marco_Tosin]

Hello Heidi,

thanks for your clarification.

[BenPerry]

Heidi Khetani‌,

To somewhat mirror what Marco Tosin‌ mentioned, I have left feedback on CS228281 over a week ago.  I simply mentioned in the widget that this article should not point the user to create a new product idea.  Instead, the article should direct the user to my existing product idea Add "Vote" and "Comments" to Tasks for Change Process table view‌, and add votes to that idea.

My product idea was created 30-Oct-2014.

I'm not sure when CS228281 was created.  Possibly 29-Jan-2016.  But we can't rely on that date displayed on the webpage, right?  Or did that bug get fixed?

So there are 2 issues here.

1. The "go create a product idea" message is just being added as a rubber stamp to articles without researching if an existing product idea exists.  This is not the first time I've asked for an article to be changed from "create product idea" to "refer to this existing product idea".

2. The feedback mechanism truly does have lag issues.  This is something that could have 24-hour turnaround.  It is a small update to the article.

[BenPerry]

No response.  Article still not updated.  I have created a support case now.  C13006143‌ to get this incorrect article (CS228281) updated.

[Heidi]

Ben Perry  The bug with the Article Create Date is still being worked on by our vendor and we are working initially on a fix for the Article Viewer so the correct Create Date is visible there. I will post an update as soon as I have more news to share.

To address your specific points:

1. Our engineers should be searching the existing product ideas and providing a direct link if one exists, else they will add the suggestion to create a new product idea. I will work with the engineer who created article CS228281 to understand why they did not find your existing product idea this time. The article has now been updated with the existing Idea.

2. We recently implemented a new Article Feedback Widget and we’ve seen the number of feedbacks double so we are currently dealing with the backlog. We are processing the most urgent feedbacks first. We are also implementing some changes internally to improve the assignment of the feedbacks to our engineers which in turn will improve the turnaround time.