Aari Isännöinti Oy is a finnish property management company. In that business, customer service and communication has a major role. In the beginning of 2018, their website, made in WordPress, was lacking much of the customer service features like always available electronic forms. The lacking features put pressure on their phone and email services where the unstructured customer requests required often hard work to first understand and then solve.
Therefore it was time to design and implement many of the common customer service features that help both the customers and service workers to solve problems quickly and without confusion. The features included multiple web forms, local contact information, and FAQ-like guides to common problems that residents often ask. In comparison to phone and email services, the web forms and other resources are available 24/7 and may provide much quicker solutions to acute problems.
I was fortunate to have Mainostoimisto Rauta, an advertising agency, in co-operation with the task. They redesigned the site style and rough navigation. My task was then to implement the design and work out the details. A major responsibility of mine was also to design the web forms.
The forms took surprising amount of work, regardless we found rather good tools to build them. Not all form fields are relevant to all customers and thus many of the forms required some simple hiding logic to make the form filling easier. To enable such use of logic rules within forms, we decided to go with Gravity Forms instead of minimal but free Contact Form 7. It turned out to be a good call, although not perfect. Gravity Forms seems to have its primary focus on American markets and therefore a few features lacked a proper localization. However, it was good enough.
