Envato
Creattica
AppStorm
Web.Appstorm
iPhone.Appstorm
Plus
Psdtuts+
Nettuts+
Vectortuts+
Audiotuts+
Aetuts+
Activetuts+
Cgtuts+
Phototuts+
Mobiletuts+
Webdesigntuts+
Wptuts+
Rockable Press
FreelanceSwitch
by dgmata on PhotoDune
Your Say: How do you deliver support?
We all have to deliver support to our buyers. But the questions here is: How do you deliver your support? I have seen different ways of how authors give support. Most of us just use the comment section for support. But for example Pixelentity from CodeCanyon uses a forum to answer the questions people have about their items.
Is there a good way and a bad way? I guess not. As long as author delivers good support and tries to answer the questions people have ASAP then in my opinion they do fine.
To give a example of what is in my opinion good support. I bought a item from jonnysnip3r on CodeCanyon the other day since I needed a login script I could quickly use. I didn’t need the JS in his script and asked him if he could help me delete everything I didn’t need since I didn’t had time for this myself at that time.
He told me this would take some time and I asked him if he could send me another one of his items instead since the one I bought was pretty useless since I needed the project done within 24 hours. He sent me another one of his products and told me that if I had any more questions I could always send him an email.
That’s what I call some good support! He responded to my question within 24 hours and sent me another item because I was not satisfied with the one I bought.
How do you deliver support to your customers? And what do you find the best way to deliver good support? Let us know in the comments.
I’ve found getting support from various authors to be somewhat frustrating and confusing. Every author seems to have a different website/contact method, most of which aren’t overly user friendly.
I centralized, Envato-hosted solution would be very welcome.
So that author gave you a free file and violated Envato Copyrights? Nice way to go!
)
I personally have never been happy with any of the “usual” solutions. Comments on the product page are difficult to manage, email is disorganized, forums are hard to moderate, etc.
This is why I created my own solution (which is now widely available to the Envato community, you may know what I’m talking about) and haven’t looked back. I won’t shamelessly post a link here, but you can click my name above.
On the flip-side, while it’s important to keep support requests organized and manageable, the most important thing is getting back to people quickly with good, solid answers. I found out very quickly that all of that time you put into support requests pays for itself when you get many repeat customers directly because of it (I’ve had many customers specifically buy my products because of my support responses).
Respond quickly. Be nice no matter what. Those are my two big suggestions.
Right now I’m content answering maybe 10 a day via comments and e-mail. I thought I’d setup a forum like other ThemeForest authors do but I don’t like that the customer needs to register for a separate system and I don’t want to tell people asking questions in comments or via my profile page, “now go to this site and ask again.” If I don’t tell them that and help them where they are then I’d be providing support in three places which still is not ideal.
Ideally what I would like and what I feel the customers deserve is a system inside of ThemeForest (and others) that lets users submit private tickets for the author to respond to, so that there is a singular place for all customers and authors to use. Even better would be if the requirement for including documentation was nixed and instead knowledge base articles could be added to this system so that the user would need to search for an answer before submitting a ticket.