New Perspectives On Web Design

By Rachel Andrew CHAPTER 11

you are offering Web-based support only. Is social media support within
the system valuable for you? Is there anything about the types of respons-
es you need to give that you should check is supported? Before setting up
trials of the various systems, consider the following things:

• What are the methods (phone, email, Twitter, Facebook, logging
  into a ticketing system) we want people to contact us by?


• Are support requests usually short questions and answers, or do
  you expect longer threads discussing an issue back and forth?


• Should support be public, private, or a mixture of both?


• If you use a public system, should customers be able to comment
  on and advise each other?


• Do you need to be able to collect specific information when a
  customer posts a ticket?


• Do you need to be able to verify a customer’s status in any way?
  This is important if you have limitations around support.


• Do you need to integrate support with any other systems?

In our case, one of the important features is that the system allows
us to post code examples into tickets and forum responses. Much of our
support involves helping someone with their templates or custom PHP.
Some systems had very poor support for doing this. When we asked for
advice as to how to get round the issue they suggested that we get all of
our customers to use a third-party tool for displaying code snippets. In our
eyes, that just put up an additional barrier for people wanting help. What
might seem a very small thing became a deal breaker for us with some of
the popular systems.
We would also advise caution when having a completely public sys-
tem where customers can help each other out. People often post secure
information — things like database connection details — into the public
domain. Customers don’t always realize that their ticket will be public.