CHAPTER 11 Supporting Your Product
the world. Even where English is a first language — which isn’t the case
for many of our customers — there is still scope for cultural differences to
create confusion when discussing issues in support.
Our most extreme example of this came from a support ticket that
Drew responded to. The customer was having difficulty with some part
of the software and in one reply Drew referred to having a mental model
of how something worked. This response made the customer furious and
Drew couldn’t see why. I read the thread and also couldn’t understand why
the customer had got so upset, and then it dawned on us: the customer
thought that Drew had called her a mental model! Perhaps she was a model,
we don’t know. But we are not in the habit of calling our customers names.
Most areas of confusion are not as extreme as that, but it pays to use
language that is as clear and simple as possible in support. The person
you are responding to may have English as a second language, may find
following written instructions difficult for whatever reason, or may simply
not understand your sense of humor or colloquialisms from your part of
the world.
One of the challenges of being a business offering a digital product is
that you essentially become an exporter from day one. Traditional busi-
nesses will often be quite well established before they start to export to
new markets. When selling a digital product, you have the advantage of
being able to sell worldwide with little extra outlay, but it does mean that
you have to learn very quickly how to cope with customers who may not
speak your language well, or have different expectations of you based on
what is normal in their culture.CuSToMeRS who ReallY neeD a DiffeRenT PRoDuCT
We have a few customers who are not from our target market, and are not
the sort of person we have in mind when we make decisions. Perch was
always aimed at professional Web designers and developers, so we assume
our users know HTML and CSS. We don’t assume they understand PHP, or
how to set up a database or any of the more technical parts of using a con-