Getting help from a person

Support is the last item in the sidebar and it does three jobs: it points you at the guide that answers the question, it opens a ticket when no guide does, and it tells you whether the thing you are struggling with is actually broken. Four tabs, and the page head is the same one every other screen in CleanFlo uses.

The four tabs

Finding the guide you need

The search box on the Help Centre tab is labelled Search the guides and filters as you type. It matches titles and keywords, not the body text, so it is fast and it is narrow on purpose: results appear as a short ruled list with the topic named under each one. Six at most.

When nothing matches, the app says so and offers Search the whole Help Centre, which carries your query over to this site and filters the shelf here instead. That search reads the full text of every guide, so it finds things the in-app index cannot.

The command palette knows about the guides too. Press ⌘K and help results appear as their own group alongside your clients and jobs. Choosing one opens it here rather than navigating away from what you were doing.

Raising a ticket

The Ask us tab is two fields and a sentence explaining what happens: we open a ticket with a reference on it, and the first line of your message becomes the subject.

The category select opens on "Select a topic..." and offers six, in this order: Billing & Subscription, Bug Report, Feature Request, Account & Login, How-To Question and Other. Leaving it alone is refused with "Choose the topic that fits best."; an empty message is refused with "Tell us what is happening so we can help."

Send it and the form is replaced by a confirmation naming your reference: "Ticket CF-1042 is open", with the note that the reply will appear in My tickets inside CleanFlo and that we answer within 24 hours. Two buttons follow, one to open the ticket and one to write another message.

If the ticket cannot be written for any reason, the form does not lose your message. It falls back to opening an email draft to support@cleanflo.io with your text in it, and tells you it has done so with a link to the draft in case nothing opened. A support message is never allowed to disappear because the nicer route was unavailable.

Following a ticket

My tickets is headed with the line "Everything you have asked us, and what we said back". Each row leads with its reference in the red margin, then the subject, then the category and when it was last updated, then a status badge. Because the references are monospaced and fixed width, they form one straight column however long the subjects run.

Opening a ticket shows the correspondence: each turn is a ruled entry headed either CleanFlo Support or You with the time beside it, and ours sits on a shaded ground so the two are easy to tell apart at a glance. A closed ticket can carry a block headed "How it was resolved" above the thread. At the foot is a reply box labelled "Add to this ticket" with the placeholder "Anything else that would help us…", and a Send button that stays disabled until you have typed something.

With nothing raised yet the tab reads "You have not raised anything yet" and points you at Ask us.

Checking whether it is us

The Status tab is headed "What is running" with a Check again button. It is not a status page fetched from somewhere else: it runs four checks from your own browser, right now, which means it also tells you something about your connection.

Each row shows one of five badges: Checking..., Operational, Degraded, Unable to check or Outage. The verdict above them switches to "Partial service disruption" when something is degraded and "Service disruption" when something is down.

This website, and what is new

These guides are the long form and now the only form: every screen, every field, every replica drawn out, and the UK bits explained. Nothing is duplicated inside the product any more, so there is no second version to disagree with this one.

• cleanflo.io/help is this help and how to section. It is public, so you can send a link to a cleaner or a client without them needing a login.
• cleanflo.io/whats-new is the changelog: what shipped, when, and what changed on the screens you already know.
• Both are reachable from inside the app: the question-mark button in the top bar, the Help Centre tab on Support, and the help group in the ⌘K command palette.