Support tickets are the most effective way for you to get personal support for your site quickly. Below, are the reasons we insist on support tickets rather than emails for your website support. 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 6 years, they are just closed when completed.
- Because support tickets are not deleted, you have a semi-permanent record of our answers or details of work we have carried out for you. 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 the person dealing with your support request not be here due to illness, holidays, or for any other reason. One of our other team members will be aware your task is not complete and can jump in to help.
- 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 example your site was down, we would deal with that before editing 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.
- Emails can be intercepted in transit and so are much less secure.
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 a selection of 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
If you are not a 3001 web client then you will submit to pre-sales enquiries
Selecting 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 to 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. 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 require 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. 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. 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.
4. 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 e-card, 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.
