CHAPTER 11 Supporting Your Product
Another issue we found was that if a customer replied to another with
incorrect advice, the original poster wasn’t always aware that the response
wasn’t official support. As we try to craft a good support experience for our
customers this was a concern to us. Our current system has a forum and
a separate ticketed support area. We encourage implementation requests,
CSS problems and feature requests to be posted to the public forum where
we and other Perchers can respond. Quite often, if a request is really to do
with a third-party jQuery plugin or a certain editor such as Dreamweaver,
other customers know more about this than we do!
Many support systems have an API so you can link up other systems that
you use or develop extra functionality that is specific to your requirements.
As David Goss, who supports the e-commerce website for Thackerays^11 ,
explains:We’ve gotten on very well with Zendesk. It’s flexible enough so we can set up the
workflow and processes as we want them, but the really useful thing is the API,
so we can do a lot of stuff automatically from the back end of the website. For
example I’m making a change to our “payment failed” page at the moment so
if a customers payment fails there’s a button for them labelled “Help — I don’t
know why my payment failed” and that will generate a ticket with all their
order and payment details attached to it and email them to let them know we’re
looking into it for them.Also being more proactive is something I’m working on. Most helpdesk systems
are based on the premise that a customer has a problem and reports it to the
company, but if we see a problem before the customer does, like maybe their
delivery gets delayed a day or something they ordered is out of stock, we want
to open a ticket on their behalf, let them know what’s happening and ask what
they’d like to do, as automatically as possible. With the API this is actually going
to be pretty easy to get done.11 http://thackerays.co.uk