Service
For the directors and service managers of advice charities, legal networks, trade union legal services and membership helplines who need questions triaged, matched to the right adviser and answered within a controlled, private workflow.
The problem
Where it usually starts
An advice service usually starts with an email address and a rota.
Where it gets harder
Advisers keep their own notes and attachments on their own machines, so when one leaves, the history of a member's question goes with them.
Scope of the service
A custom advice portal build normally covers:
We begin by watching a week of questions arrive and following five of them to their answer: who read them first, how urgency was judged, who answered, and what guidance they used. Those become named stages: ask, triage, assignment, answer, optional consultation, archive.
A membership organisation with an in-house team of four advisers and an external panel of thirty volunteers needs questions in employment and housing to go to in-house staff first, overflow to the panel after a set time, panel answers reviewed by staff before release, and member credits deducted only when an answer is released. The two-tier pool with review-before-release is what makes it a custom build.
Deliverables
Process
Each stage maps onto the project view in your client panel. Durations are set in your proposal, never on this page.
Access to the current inbox, guidance folder, adviser rota and membership list, with a coordinator as the named contact.
Sessions with the service manager, a coordinator and two advisers to define categories, urgency rules, pool tiers and review steps; scope document agreed.
Clickable designs of the question form, the adviser queue, the thread and the moderation screen, tested with a volunteer adviser.
Built in stages: categories and triage first, then the adviser pool and threads, then the guidance library and archive, then credits and consultation escalation.
The service runs a fortnight of real questions in parallel with the inbox and compares assignment, waiting times and answer quality.
Changes to triage rules, workload limits and moderation steps from the review are made and re-checked against the scope document.
Guidance library loaded with review dates, member accounts migrated, archive moderation tested, launch checklist signed off.
New questions arrive through the portal only; optional maintenance and hosting continue under their own agreement.
Integrations
Systems this kind of business usually asks us to connect. Each integration is confirmed during discovery; none is assumed.
How we would approach it
The situation
A membership organisation with four in-house advisers and thirty volunteer panel members wanted employment and housing questions answered in-house first, passed to the panel after a time the service sets, and panel answers reviewed by staff before members saw them.
Why it is a custom build
The reason this needs a custom build is the overflow and review logic; a generic ticketing tool assigns to a queue and stops there, which leaves the service managing the panel by hand.
The scope we would propose
Pricing
Every proposal is priced on scope. These are the factors that move it most for this kind of build.
FAQ
When your adviser pool, access model or review steps go beyond what the legal advice portal package handles with configuration. During discovery we lay your week of questions against the package and tell you plainly whether tiers, overflow rules or funder reporting need custom work.
No. Every answer is written by a human adviser. The system triages, assigns, holds the thread, warns about out-of-date guidance and records what happened; it never generates advice.
Threads are private between the asker and the assigned adviser, with moderators able to see what the service decides they should. Notifications carry no question content. Publishing to the archive requires moderation and redaction, and the asker can be given the choice to opt out.
Yes. The system records when a question entered each stage and who held it, so the service can see waiting time per adviser, per tier and per category. What target the service sets for itself is its own decision; the build reports against it rather than promising a figure.
The organisation does. Source code and data are handed over at delivery; hosting and maintenance are optional, separately agreed and movable to another provider.
Answer a few questions about your business, your current systems and what should change. We reply with a clear, competitive proposal.