Supporting support

Earlier today I tweeted a request

The context was that I had landed on a ticket where someone basically said “why is this not working?” but they hadn’t provided much else. So I recognised the possible core problem from a ticket I did a few weeks back and spent a good hour or so debugging.

I ended up copy and pasting much of my reply and internal note.

What I was disappointed to see was that the customer in the initial interaction hadn’t replied to say if my debugging and suggestions had worked. I guess they had since they haven’t reached out again but I don’t know for sure.

If you contact support for a company, and they give you suggestions, let the company know if they worked. Or even if you figure it out yourself how to solve it.

The benefits are multiple:

• Support knows the answer to the problem and can confidently help others.

• If there is a product gap, the company can look to fix this (I know, it has happened!).

• If you fix it yourself, support will literally sing your praises and thank you. I’ve given people coupons or such in the past!

• If we fix it and you literally reply “thanks, that sorted it”, you have no idea how much this makes us happy (my job title is Happiness Engineer, I WANT to make you happier using our products

I hope this customer replies and lets me know if my suggestions help. If they do then I’m adding them to the documentation. As much as I love doing detective work troubleshooting, it helps when I know literally why something doesn’t work.

And oh documentation. Please, read the docs, we (all support and product teams, not just a8c) spend a lot of time trying to help people self-serve.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.