Hi there

in my posts i will be as short as possible, i will not start or end with dummy and content and standard procedures

at this time its more than 4 years as I’m working as a customer happiness specialist, in my career i helped more than 50k customers, (Yes 50.000 customers) and during this time i learned their behavior, how they see the problem how they reporting it and behave in problem resolution period. if you are one of the customers who needs help and wants to ask support question make sure you consider this suggestion, please note, this is from my experience and im not using ideas from other sources from the web, here we go:

Before asking a question

Make sure you there is something big and you don’t have enough level of knowledge to fix it and only after this thing about to open a support ticket. there is a standard procedure about how to troubleshoot WordPress problems, everything is included in this 1-minute video:

Troubleshooting WordPress in 60 Seconds

After we done this and we can’t identify the problem we can think about to open a support ticket in the support board, i will bring several examples of very bad starting and good starting of the support question,

things to consider:

How to not start support question:
1. “I have the same question” – this very often starts of the support question or customers are jumping in others ticket with this question, simple this is the very unprofessional and dummy starting, why?

  • in 80% cases, customers do to have the same problem, they simply don’t know what problems they have
  • this requires another more attention from the support guy, the ticket is extending and it becomes more complicated, imagine what happens if  3-4 customers jumped with this question?
  • this is very bad for the ticket initiator, someone started his own ticket and this is really not good if you are eating on someone’s table, so go ahead and open your ticket

2. Asking a question without necessary details – very often customers is coming with the only question and nothing more something like this “on my website CTA not working” … i want to say for this customers:

  • We don’t know what is “CTA” for you, or what you mean in it
  • We don’t know where your problem is and how to reach it
  • Lastly, we are not magicians and we don’t have supernatural power to understand what is in your mind,

3. Providing a history of the earth and your problem – starting your ticket about how you started web design, how you deployed the project into the server, then how you installed WordPress and tried the first theme and plugins and then how you pointed the real domain to the project….. good stop, please … all this things is really not necessary, moreover it makes your problem even more complicated and its sometimes very hard to understand you where the actual problem is, so please consider, tell only about your problem and nothing more, no need how you started or finished, we only need brief description of the problem

4. Can I use the different symbol in milestone counter? or can I add one more element? or is it possible to change image here? and more – yes, there comes tons of similar questions when customers is asking about something like this “can I switch of light in this room”, the answer is very very simple, “Go ahead and try” the earth will not stop if you break something

and so and so, there is no end for dummy questions :)

so, How to start support question in a proper way? here is some good manners and best practices from my experience

  1. First of all always try to search – this is first thing you need to do before asking something, most probably your question is already resolved and you just need to find it, so instead of spending days on problem resolution you can save a lot of time
  2. always be as short as possible – indeed, it’s not necessary to start how this happened or when this started, simply tell your problem, just a brief description
  3. don’t include more than 3 or 4 question in one ticket – some people things support engineers are like robots and they can do anything in minutes, this is not true, reading and analyzing problem requires really big attention and if you put everything in one ticket most probably your support guys will not realizes his professionalism by 100%
  4. always include necessary links or screenshots – simply telling your problem is not always enough and will be good if you include a link to your website (Not homepage, link to the actual post/page) and a screenshot of the section or element you have a problem with, this will saves your time actually
  5. dont use others ticket – even you have “same problem” its better if you open your ticket and not dsother threads,

 

there is one small template of how to ask question, here is it:

i have this problem [problem description goes here] on this page [url of the page] you can see attached screenshot [here]

thats it nothing more, i hoppe you found something usefull in this blog and it helped to resolve your problem,

have a good day