Your FAQ could be answering 40% of support requests and save you 8 hrs/mo • Hacker News Board

Re: Your FAQ could be answering 40% of support requests and save you 8 hrs/mo

#31

Post by DenisM » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 9:04 PM UTC

andrewljohnson wrote: post #19

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…

Came here to say the same thing. Fixing your usability bugs can save you 8hrs/week in support cost and make your users love your app.

Re: Your FAQ could be answering 40% of support requests and save you 8 hrs/mo

#32

Post by evanhamilton » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 10:20 PM UTC

kevinpet wrote: post #29

Shoddy math. You can't take the average time to answer a customer inquiry and then assume that reducing the number of inquiries will reduce your work load by that much. The questions that can be answered by a good FAQ are precisely those questions that can be handled quickly. In other words, it overestimates the time savings from having an FAQ.

You have a point about the actual amount of time saved, but there are plenty of questions that are very complex that can be answered by a good FAQ.

For example: we offer Single Sign-On for UserVoice. If we didn't have any documentation at all about it, we'd spend many, many more hours answering basic questions like "how do I set up SSO?", "how can I encrypt my JSON token?", etc. Yes, we still have to answer specific questions that can't be anticipated by an FAQ, but we've saved ourselves many hours with this documentation.

Re: Your FAQ could be answering 40% of support requests and save you 8 hrs/mo

#33

Post by evanhamilton » Fri, Oct 28, 2011, 11:34 PM UTC

andrewljohnson wrote: post #22

evanhamilton wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed that you should be making your product better...I think that's perhaps the unsung goal with our reporting system. If an article gets read a lot, look at how you can improve it in your product. 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 op…

You just have to be sure you don't eliminate the customer support with documentation, and then not ever fix the problem. I think it's better to feel the pain in the short run, and have a better product in the long run. This reminds me of another thing we do - when we make new apps, we don't provide a manual to the beta group. We make one after the fact, but we want to get feedback from users as if there are no instru…

Totally! I'm obsessed with telling our team about customer problems, our support folks are obsessed with helping them, and our Head of UX is obsessed with fixing the actual problems. It's a good set of checks and balances.

Thanks for the kind words and for being a customer! :)

Re: Your FAQ could be answering 40% of support requests and save you 8 hrs/mo

#34

Post by Anti-Ratfish » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 7:42 AM UTC

acheron wrote: post #6

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…

Your giving me Kodak software flashbacks. The software was god awful. Right from login. New password required every few weeks. Can't be related to your previous one, and the 'change password' button that you had to click took you to a page were you had to type username, then new password 2x, then old password (in that strange order). However all the boxes were unlabeled so you had to guess were what went. I emailed Kodak every time just to make a point. It makes me so angry every time I see a Kodak logo now.

Re: Your FAQ could be answering 40% of support requests and save you 8 hrs/mo

#35

Post by DanBC » Sat, Oct 29, 2011, 12:14 PM UTC

larrys wrote: post #30

DanBC wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> having the customer send you an email [...] is a great opportunity to try to sell them something else or even answer a survey question etc. Wow. That wouldn't go down well with me.

Are you sure? What's wrong with showing an extra line saying, for example, "by the way did you know that we also offer site monitoring which you can get for an additional $ per month"? It's similar to the viral marketing that started with the "get your own free email at hotmail.com" as a result of Tim Draper's suggestion... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_C._Draper

I want you to fix my problem. If something is broken enough that I need to contact you then, in my mind, your only priority is to get me working again.

Associating your other products with the faults I've found in the product I'm using might be a sub-optimal marketing strategy.