Creating a Mobile Customer Service or Help Desk App with Magic xpa Application Platform

Writing a basic Magic xpa Customer Service or Help Desk app for a mobile device could make a great weekend mobile app development project for a Magic xpa developer.

Magic xpa does a good job of making it easy to handle the huge variety of data types, by insulating you from the details of the implementation.  Magic xpa reduces the number of data attributes (often referred to as data types in many programming languages) that you will need to work with -- alpha, numeric, date, time, BLOB, logical, etc. are the most common. The Magic xpa programmer also does not need to specify how those variables are actually stored in memory or in a database as the application platform itself manages these repetitive and inconsequential details for the developer.

To create a mobile app for customer service or an employee help desk, a few tables that might typically be required are the user table, the ticket table, the solution table and the solution response table. Many other variations are possible, of course, depending on the complexity of service/help app required. We’ll take the time to detail the fields used in the user table and the ticket table. But keep in mind that the tables will all have relationships.

For the sake of efficiency both in data storage and application performance, you should avoid creating duplicate data. So if, for example, the solution proposed relates to a specific ticket, there is no need to store all the ticket details in the solution table. You can simply point to the unique identifier of the ticket table. This is the principle of data inheritance. The data inheritance or data model relationships in our example are shown here:

Now let’s look at the User Table and Ticket Table.

Typical Customer Service App fields – User Table

Field name*	Field attribute	Field description
PrimaryID	Numeric	The unique identifier for the record.
UserFirstName	Alpha	The first name for the record
UserLastName	Alpha	The Last Name for the record
UserEmail	Alpha	The Email for the record
UserMobilePhone	Alpha	The mobile phone number of the user or device.
UserEmployeeID	Numeric	An integer value containing the employee ID for this record
DepartmentID	Numeric	An integer value containing the department ID for this record

Typical Customer Service App fields – Ticket Table

Field name*	Field attribute	Field description
TicketID	Numeric	The unique identifier for the record.
Status	Alpha	The status of the service ticket, for example, this could appear to the user as a drop down list offering open, closed, pending, overdue, etc.
Severity	Alpha	The status of the service ticket, for example, this could appear to the user as a drop down list offering open, closed, pending, overdue, etc.
Subject	Alpha	Brief subject of the problem described in the record.
Description	BLOB	A detailed description of the service issue.
CreateDate	Date	Date record was created.
CreateTime	Time	Time record was created.

* The developer can use any name for these fields, the field names here are just examples. In addition to the above, you’ll want to think about tables that contain the problem, description, and BLOBs containing the communications between the service rep and the user (the solution and response table), as well as tables containing service rep information, etc.

The challenge in creating a mobile help desk or customer service app for end users is that screen space is very limited on most mobile smartphone devices. The user information should be entered once, and then it need not appear to the user again unless they request to change it, for example, the user may need to change their phone number or email address. If you wanted to pre-populate the UserMobilePhone field, in theory this can be queried using a user defined function such as  ClientOSEnvGet ('device_udf| UIDevice currentDevice’) on iOS, for example, or the user can simply enter their mobile phone number.

Once the user identity is established, the home screen for the mobile app should be the list of tickets with open tickets bolded or listed in red at top in order from most recent to oldest. Only two columns are needed, Ticket and Subject. The user can select a ticket and then the detailed ticket tab opens with the ability to scroll down through solutions and responses. On an iPhone, these could be displayed as colored speech/conversation bubbles whereas on the android you may choose to display in the more conventional android style.

I think its fair to say that creating a Mobile Customer Service or Help Desk App with Magic xpa Application Platform makes for a great intermediate level programming project. What will set the good CS apps apart from the bad ones? Creative features such as customer self service knowledge bases could create real differentiation. When the type of service involves parts and repairs, location information of the device becomes even more relevant. How might you utilize location knowledge in your app to locate parts? to locate service centers?  

What sets the great mobile enterprise application platforms (MEAP) apart from the others? Integration, unified development approach, enterprise-class scalability, security and reliability.