CHAPTER 11 Supporting Your Product
He goes on to say, “I’m sure there are better solutions, such as filter-
ing and sorting emails to speed up my work, potentially prepopulating
the most likely response, but with a human verifying that the response is
correct before sending it.”
I think that using tools to ensure people with the same question get
the same answer is a beneficial thing. In addition to saving you time and
preventing you from writing the same answer over and over again, you
can craft good clear responses to common questions. Ideally, these sorts of
questions are also answered in your documentation but, as we all know,
not all users will read the documentation no matter how clear it is.
Like Josh, I wouldn’t want to send entirely automated responses to
people requesting help, but canned responses can save a great deal of time
in typing the same reply over and over again. When the reply requires
looking up some links in the documentation, the time you can save is sub-
stantial over the course of a week.
The system we use allows us to edit the response before sending it, so I
sometimes use the canned response as a starting point and also add some
information that I can see is relevant to a particular customer. A good sys-
tem should let you use your template responses as a starting point, rather
than relying completely on a standard response to each customer.SeleCTing a helPDeSK PRoDuCT
The solution that is right for you must be driven by the type of support
you need to do. There is a wide range of helpdesk systems, each trying to
solve the problems of providing support in a particular way. This chapter
can’t attempt to review all these systems, as any such review would be
projected through the lens of what I feel is important. Therefore, I suggest
that before you start trying out systems, you should consider what sort
of support you want to offer to your customers; you can then assess each
system against those requirements. For example, if you plan to offer phone
support, can those tickets be logged in a system? Some systems assume