Case Studies

How Microsoft Visio Uses Experts Exchange Community Support

How Microsoft Visio leverages Experts Exchange to keep on top of customer interactions for fast iterations and even faster fixes.

4
 min
August 23, 2022

There are many perks to being an internationally used product. Sometimes, however, once a product is in the hands of consumers all over the world, quality control and issue tracking can be difficult to manage. Read how Microsoft Visio leverages Experts Exchange to keep on top of customer interactions for fast iterations and even faster fixes.

About Microsoft Visio

Microsoft Visio is an advanced diagramming and vector graphics application used to build everything from flow charts to floor plans and timelines. The tool, which is also available in web and iOS for viewing diagrams, also comes in handy with building out company processes, network system diagrams, schedules, and organizational charts, to name a few. It’s used across industries and by departments of various sizes.

Challenges

Due to the expansive use of Microsoft Visio, dedicated teams are created to help identify user problems that could be hurting the product’s adoption.

“Keeping customer obsession as our guiding light, we evolved our product management culture to proactively keep a tab on customer feedback channels and get involved in direct customer engagement.Not only this, our progression into agile engineering has helped us service our customers at a faster pace,” says Shakun Grover, program manager for Visio.

While they actively track Microsoft-supported forums, receive direct feedback from users, and rely on product MVPs to watch community sites, it’s not easy to constantly police reports and user feedback on all sites that users frequent when looking for help and answers.

The Experts Exchange Solution

The strength of the Experts Exchange community can be positioned as a stand-in for a typical customer support site. External users feel more comfortable asking questions and pointing out software problems on Experts Exchange because they know they will receive near instant help, as opposed to being filed into a help desk or bug report queue alongside millions of other users.

“Forums like Experts Exchange can definitely be of immense use to small and large enterprises alike,” says Grover.

More than 1,100 Microsoft Certified Professionals on Experts Exchange step in and help the average Visio user when questions arise. Scott Helmers, an Experts Exchange MVP for Visio with knowledge of Visio product capabilities, noticed a question posted on site describing how a vector or object from one position on a document wouldn’t copy and paste within the same document to the same position on a different page.

He began to dig and realized that after a particular release of updates for Visio Pro for O365, the copy and paste behavior between pages had broken. A user would cut or copy an object from one page to another and the position details of the copied object were not being retained for the paste operation. Instead,Visio would paste the copied object to the center of the canvas on another page. Helmers replied to the question on site, explaining what he discovered, and contacted Microsoft Visio to report

the bug. He included detailed information regarding the version presenting the issue, the time it started occurring, and emphasized the need to fix it soon. Microsoft Visio was able to fix the issue inVisio Pro for O365 as well as Visio 2016.

Quick and Efficient Results

Helmers’ mention of the bug’s particular time frame allowed for great speed in investigating both the bug and its possible causes.Visio’s product team at Microsoft was able to pinpoint changes made at the time of inception to narrow the focus and quickly remediate the problem.

Using the community as a forum to communicate with users,Microsoft Visio was able to quickly connect and let users know that this bug had been isolated and fixed. Without Helmers’ catch of this issue and his thorough reporting to Visio, Grover confirms that theMicrosoft Visio team would have been delayed in identifying and ultimately fixing the root cause of this bug.

“We are thankful to communities like Experts Exchange which are perfect sources of feedback for the product group to be able to continually innovate and improve,” says Grover.