Marvel Internet Group blog

With any web application there is usually a learning curved involved for the end users before they are familiar enough with the concepts and work flow to explore the application on their own. Especially when a new system is introduced to replace an existing one it can be very difficult for the end user to adjust. That is when support requests start flowing in.

In our experience support emails can become rather difficult when the user does not provide adequate detail about what they are doing, or who they are. The lack of information means a lot of time is spent waiting on user clarification. The time spent identifying the problem often takes longer than providing the solution. This is where investing the time needed to create a custom support form comes in.

In a custom support form that we implemented for ICEF Online (1,500+ people use it almost daily), the form auto-embed hidden values identifying the user’s account, the page they were on before they loaded the support form, as well as browser information and screen size; all of which help us diagnose problems far quicker than if we just relied on plain email, or even an ‘off the shelf’ support ticket system.

For common cases where the reply just requires usage instructions, a custom support form can completely eliminate the need to wait for a user to reply with details of what they were trying to achieve. For more complex scenarios we are able to completely re-create the user experience for testing by reproducing user results with the same browser, operating system, and input values. The limits of how much information your support staff have access to diminishes to almost zero once the basic system is put in place, which is a very low cost given the customer satisfaction returns that can be achieved.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 5:59 pm and is filed under marvelig, marvelsites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.