I’ve been doing support for over 2 years now, I have such a love hate relationship with it.
I hate the generic support requests that go along the lines of “ZOMG IT’S ALL BROKEN” (actual ticket, well not really), but I love the complex issues, those that can actually engage me and force me to bring out my debugging skills.
Every support ticket falls into 2 camps, those that make you scream and those that make you think, I’d say 90% are those that make you scream. This is why I’m proposing the following manifesto:
You WILL include Browser and OS information - “It doesn’t work” is not good enough and will just make things take longer, ultimately we have to bounce the ticket back for more info so do us a favour and start out with as much possible.
URLS for the love of whatever deity you follow please include a url, your not our only client and chances are you host more than one site with us. Also chances are we aren’t 100% familiar with your site so a specific url will help us target the issue. Oh yeah and it helps us to grep logs as well.
Time the issue was noted, again we have logs if you can narrow down the timeframe that would help both you and us!
“Just one more thing” - NO NO NO start a new ticket, I’m going to forget about your second issue if it’s deep in a ticket 30 replies long.
Understand the difference between a feature request and bug, it sounds easy but you’d be surprised how many times people get it wrong!
Don’t phone to say you’ve put a ticket in, we know you have and while I have one hand on the phone talking to you I can’t work as fast.
Don’t leave your ticket open, if we’ve fixed it then close it stating your happy with the response.
Where possible include a screenshot, visual aids help a lot more than a wall of text, also follow below rule.
The following formats are not acceptable for screenshots - ppt, pptx, xls, xlsx, doc, docx, odt.
Lastly, thanks us. A happy support monkey is a productive support monkey.
EDIT: Some more rules!
My time estimates are final, if you can do it faster then fuck you do it yourself.
You’re not our only client! Shocking I know but sometimes we work with other people.
So there it is, follow these simple rules and we won’t hunt you down and knife you.