11–20 of 35 posts
We're actively looking for this solution if anyone has something that would fit this need.
So why the hell are we still wasting time responding to the same damn questions? Because customers never read anyway.
Customers do look at search results, especially if they are written by people with good writing skills.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We totally agree. That's why we automatically pull up related FAQs but don't pull the customer away from their flow of writing a message to you. We've found it works quite well, as demonstrated by the numbers. It's not annoying like the latter system you mentioned, but surfaces those FAQs that could have helped with that 80%. -Evan Hamilton Community Manager, UserVoice
I just watched your demo video, and the system looks nice and very useful, unlike those I wrote about in the last paragraph -- customers instantly see the answer to their question without interruption.
It is a lot more than a FAQ: it has a somewhat good search feature, and also directs users to an intro tour, the forums, and votebox (a place to request and discuss features).
Improving it is a bit more complicated than just getting analytics around how many hits on /help end up searching, reading help articles, and maybe filing tickets. There is a lot more needed to understand which areas of the help center aren't getting enough prominence, which topics are just missing, and also how we could create some automated tools to help people find sources of problems. For example, if you are over quota, we should tell you that prominently on /help. Getting automated feedback on search results (clicks on help articles increasing their rank for a given query), and also from ticket responses (the article which would have answered the question needs higher rank for the original query) is a huge area of potential improvement, but both require a fair amount of work.
The potential impact is actually huge: would we need to double the size of the support team if we double the userbase (yet again)? If you're interested in hearing more about this, and especially if you've like to help build these systems, shoot me an email: ivan@dropbox.com
I'm working to help improve http://dropbox.com/help It is a lot more than a FAQ: it has a somewhat good search feature, and also directs users to an intro tour, the forums, and votebox (a place to request and discuss features). Improving it is a bit more complicated than just getting analytics around how many hits on /help end up searching, reading help articles, and maybe filing tickets. There is a lot more needed t…
For certain types of businesses having the customer send you an email that you have to respond to (and we use auto complete emails so they are knocked out in After all companies do all sorts of things to get customer interaction. There is nothing better than building customer loyalty (once again depending on the particular situation) by using this as a way to send a seemingly personal response which someone will definitely be reading and not ignoring like a sales email. Even if you are not selling anything there is a value to that.
This kind of "pull up a FAQ while the user enters a ticket" tech could work incredibly well for fortune 500 companies, schools, universities, etc.
I worked email support for a website once upon a time. I'm pretty sure 40% of the emails were "I forgot my password", despite a large "Forgot Your Password?" link on the top of every page next to the login box. And this was a rather technically-oriented website, too; most of these people had to be fairly tech-savvy to even be using the site in the first place. If those people can't read the site enough to find a link…
"Invalid username and/or password. Would you like us to reset your password for you? [button: YES, reset my password]"
If the user simply mistyped their password they can ignore the prompt and try again. If they click the YES button, direct them to a page that has the email address they entered pre-populated and a "Reset My Password" button with clear instructions elsewhere on what to do. For example, an arrow to the email field with instructions on ensuring the email address is correct; another arrow to the button with instructions to click there. Clicking on the button then shows "We have sent an email to . Please follow the instructions contained in the email to reset your password." The email would contain a link with a time-expiring token that, when clicked, lets them specify their new password.
With that approach you could have reduced those types of emails to mostly situations where the user did not get the email.
We get a request or two per week in Gaia GPS for people asking "How to I delete a waypoint?" and other people seem to search for "Gaia GPS delete waypoint" on Google too. To do this, you swipe the row of the waypoint to be deleted in a table view, and a delete button appears. This is how the native iPhone email works.
We describe how to do this in a page in our help describing hard-to-find-features (the top page in our Help manual even). But really, we need to make it more obvious to everyone how to do it.
To solve this problem, we changed the software this release to add a delete option to the details page of each object. When this is approved, I imagine all the support will disappear.
Papering over user support with an FAQ is addressing the symptom, not the problem. You should consider an FAQ to be a stop gap, until you fix your bad software. Example: We get a request or two per week in Gaia GPS for people asking "How to I delete a waypoint?" and other people seem to search for "Gaia GPS delete waypoint" on Google too. To do this, you swipe the row of the waypoint to be deleted in a table view, an…
But you can't fix things fast enough and there will always be someone confused (If you build it one day, user X will be confused. Build it another, user Y will be confused.) so having good documentation is key, in our opinion.