Support tickets are the most effective way for you to get support for your site quickly. Below you can read why we recommend you always use support tickets for help. If you are not sure how to use support tickets there is a video here to show you how.
The Advantage of support tickets over emails.
- Even the best of us can lose or inadvertently delete an email. Support tickets do not get deleted for at least 24 months they are just closed when completed.
- Because support tickets are not deleted you have a semi-permanent record of our answers. We may answer a question for you on how to do a certain task, three months later you may need to do that task again and can not remember how. No problem you just log into your client area and look at the original ticket and our answer. If this were an email the chances are you may have deleted our reply to keep your inbox uncluttered so you would be asking us the same question again and waiting for a reply again.
- Support accessibility is another important factor. When you submit a support ticket to a department all the support staff in that department are informed, typically the person who answers your ticket first will deal with your request. However should that person not be here for a few days, for example, the staff member goes on Holiday/Vacation another member of staff can continue to help you.
- Were support done by email you would be waiting for one person to get around to answering, if that person is on holiday/vacation the other staff may not have access to their email account, by using tickets you have access to all our support staff and the first one available will answer your request and ALL our staff can monitor any ticket.
- Timely support. Another advantage of support tickets is that we can deal with them in the order they arrive which makes our support system fair. We can also deal with urgent issues before less urgent requests. If for some reason your site was down we would deal with that before adding an extra function to another client’s site for obvious reasons.
- Clarity of communication. A support ticket shows an entire conversation between you and our staff reply by reply. If we used email there may be multiple emails going back and forth for each request it is much easier for you and the support staff to keep track of issues this way.
- Support tickets do not get lost in transit. We all know that emails can go astray and not get delivered for many reasons. Support tickets are submitted directly to our support area and do not need to be delivered.
IMPORTANT Guidelines On Submitting Tickets
Below are guidelines on submitting support tickets that will save you and our staff time please read them:
1. Choose the correct support department
When you open a ticket you will see one of three support departments to choose from.
Billing: for all questions about invoices or payments to 3001 web
Work Request: Used when you want edits, installations or programming for your site.
Support: When you just have a question
Data Protection: For all enquires to do with data protection
Programming: Work requests for our programming team
If you are not a 3001 web client then you will submit to pre-sales enquiries
Choosing the wrong department can delay our response as we have to flag the ticket for the attention of a different department.
2. Open One Ticket Per Issue, Question Or Request
There is no limit on how many tickets you can submit so please try and keep tickets dedicated to a single subject or task. While that seems like a pain in the butt here are two examples of why you should do this:
First, let’s look at a support question
You open a ticket to ask us how to set up your email programme to retrieve email from your site and you give it a subject of “Email Setup” In the same ticket you also ask us how to add a new image to your homepage. Our staff may well answer both questions for you on that ticket. Then two months later you need a reminder of how to change your homepage image. You think ahh I’ll go look at the reply I got last time, will you remember that you asked about the home page image in a ticket titled “Email setup”? You may well have submitted 50 tickets by then and your answer will take forever to find.
By submitting one ticket for each question you have you will have your very own supply of answers right here in the support area.
Now Let’s Look At Work Requests
You need three things to change on your site you want the header of your site editing, you want your featured product box moving to the other side of the page and you want a coupon plugin added to your store.
Our support staff deal with hundreds of support requests each week they may do one of your jobs and need more info from you on the other two, you may want several revisions to your new header and there may be several replies back and forth on this edit, it is easy for the other change to be forgotten or for things to get confused because you or the support staff are sending replies on different issues in the same ticket.
If you open one support ticket for each job communication is kept clear and as soon as the job is done the support staff can close the ticket and move on to your next request.
3. Provide full details of your site and any needed login details
Remember to tell us which site the request concerns. This is really important please make sure you type something like
SITE: www.fredsfrogs.com
either within the ticket subject or at the top of the request.
Our staff are good but remember we have hundreds of clients it is impossible for all our staff to know and remember who has what site, in addition, you may have more than one site with us many clients do, so please state which site you want us to work on.
If we need to log into an admin area, upload files, or access your main hosting control panel please provide us with the login details we need when you submit your ticket. Again this saves time as our staff can just get on with the work and not have to ask you for login details and wait for your reply.
3001 web does not store passwords between jobs for you so make sure you provide all the passwords we may need.
4. Be CRYSTAL clear with your requests
Remember that our support staff may not know your product, business model or site so be VERY clear with issues and questions when you submit your tickets. If the ticket is about an error on your site tell our staff what you did, and what you clicked that caused the error. Give them links to pages containing errors so that they can see the problem. We can not fix what we can not see.
If you want changes made to your site give as much detail as possible of what you want to do. Imagine we are all 5 years old and give us nice clear instructions our staff will never be insulted by this so don’t worry.
5. Avoid Saying Thank You
This sounds like a very strange thing to say manners cost nothing right? It is not that we don’t appreciate the thanks we do, however, our staff may deal with your issue and close the ticket. If you reply with a “Thank you” the ticket is reopened and the support staff get a notification saying “A client has responded to a support ticket, log in here to see the response” Our staff then go and log in and navigate to the ticket, open it and it says “thank you” Silly as it sounds a couple of hundred times a month this can add up to hours we could be spending solving other issues or doing work for our clients.
Solution send us a Christmas card once a year or an email or an ecard we will make sure the staff see it. Better still tell other people how great our staff are and suggest they let 3001Web take care of their site too.