Could your customer support portal use some flowcharts and diagrams to help customers trouble shoot problems? If you're in the Hi-Tech or manufacturing sectors, the answer is probably yes.

Visio has been my tool of choice for several years, but today I stumbled on a web-based flow chart designer called Gliffy that really impressed me.

I evaluated Gliffy by recreating the channel lead registration workflow I published a few days ago, and as you can see from the image below, the result isn't too shabby for 10 minutes of effort.



Gliffy can host the JPEG images for you. I can easily envision using Gliffy in customer portal knowledge base articles to help with trouble shooting.

I also use Visio when chatting with customers on the phone to help remind me of a customers business process requirements or campaign workflows. With Gliffy, I can simply email customers a link to these flow chart sketches to get some quick feedback.

The site says it's in Beta, but you would have to have some pretty high expectations to even notice. The workspace behaves and reacts just like a desktop application. Even the CTRL-Z undo key combination works! Although, I did find it more useful to rely on frequent saves and versioning as a wiser recovery option.

Gliffy definitely follows the Pareto Principle of determining which 20% of desktop features provide 80% of the value.

Very cool.... I give Gliffy a big thumbs up.