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Verbatim text
Lee:
Welcome to the Agency Trailblazer podcast. This is your host, Lee. And today, let’s talk about support. I want to talk about support in the context of troubleshooting as an agency owner, as a web developer. I can think of so many occasions where I’ve been really frustrated with the perceived level of support that I’ve received from a company. Normally, I’m at the point where I am most desperate. I need help. Either something has gone down or there is a bug that I just can’t explain. And I am sure there is something that the support team at whatever company I’m dealing with could just help me out. And yet I find that perhaps their communication style offends me, or perhaps they give me half-arsed answers telling me to try X and try Z, when I know I’ve already tried all of these things. And I’m sure that you can relate to these sorts of scenarios. I think a lot of businesses are made by the level of support that they provide, and perhaps many people choose not to go for certain providers because there is such a negative energy or a negative perception of the level of support that they provide.
Lee:
So what I’d like to do in this podcast is I’ll really try and change the dialogue a little bit because I think that we are actually partly responsible for the level of support that we receive. So hear me out. I am preaching to myself more than anybody right now because this is something that I’ve struggled with for a very long time, and we’ve now developed a process to help us get the best support no matter what company we are dealing with. And it’s also reflecting in the way that we provide our own support, the questions that we ask in the way that we interact with our own clients. So this is definitely an episode worth listening to. I’m going to talk about the life of a support ticket cruncher. We’re going to talk about the point that we as an agency owner might be reaching out for help. I’m going to share with you our troubleshooting workflow and then wrap up with how we submit our support tickets as well as set our client’s expectations. Now, many years ago, I used to do support tickets for a living. I was in the IT Department of a Fortune 500 company, and there were maybe 20 to 40 tickets in my inbox the moment I started.
Lee:
And many were very similar. There was lots of frustration from the ticket creator. Some of the questions were quite hard to answer because I just didn’t have enough information. And I got to be honest, it was a a really difficult job. In fact, it was a thankless job. In many cases, when I’d sent an answer, there’d never be a reply, so I assumed they were all sorted, or in other circumstances, I would just get a constant barrage of chasing. Despite despite the fact that I was well within the SLAs that were all agreed. For me as the ticket cruncher, it was a bit of a soul-destroying job. I would consistently try to be nice to people, but at the same time, when I was receiving short messages, abusive messages, or messages that sounded like other messages I’d had in the past, then it was very hard to remain upbeat and to be able to focus on every single problem at hand and fix it with energy, joy, and passion. We do have to remember that in many circumstances, be it a software company, a hosting company, etc, then these support ticket crunch are likely having a very similar existence where people are connecting with them when they’re at their most stressed, sending short or curt or rude messages, or perhaps they’re just closing the same ticket over and over again.
Lee:
And now that we’re all in lockdown, we can understand how important mental health is and the impact of mental health where we are all stuck at home. Equally, the impact of mental health on somebody who is there to crunch tickets is negatively impacted by the constant barrage of tickets that they continue to receive. This does mean that there are going to be times, no matter what company you work with, where there will be a support experience that is not as you anticipated. Now, in these circumstances, the company should recognise this and then invest in supporting their support team, their mental health, etc, putting systems and processes in to help them manage all of this. However, in situations where there are a high volume of tickets, this isn’t always a quick fix, and this is something that needs to happen and develop over time. Let’s now flip the script and look at when we might be submitting support tickets or jumping on the live chat for some support. I’m going to speak from my experience, and the point I’m ready to submit a support ticket is the point where I believe I’ve tried absolutely everything that I can possibly think of or search.
Lee:
We work in an agency or we’re agency owners because we are naturally problem solvers. So we’re going to have done some due diligence to see if we can solve the problem before we go to the point of submitting support tickets. Of course, this does mean that if we get a poor answer, this is going to add to our frustration. The other point that we are submitting support tickets tends to be when clients are putting pressure on us. Perhaps websites gone down, perhaps software is not doing what it should be doing. And we’ve already tried everything that we can possibly try in our armoury, and we are getting stressed out because our clients are chasing us. They’re putting the pressure on us. Perhaps there is billing that we need to do. Perhaps there are already ongoing issues with the client, and we feel all of that pressure, and we are pushed to whichever support desk we need help from. And in many cases, we feel desperate. It. That desperation might lead to us submitting very short, pushy support tickets because we feel like we need help. We need it now. We want to get this issue resolved, and we’ve got all of that pressure that seems to be laying just on us, and we need someone to just share that burden, make us feel good, make us feel safe, and get whatever that problem is resolved as soon as possible.
Lee:
Now that we’ve seen both sides of the situation, I’d like to share with you our trouble troubleshooting workflow. This is our process for solving a problem that then leads up to us creating a ticket. Then what I’m going to do is share with you what we would include in our support tickets to try and make the process as efficient as possible and get to a solution quickly. We have five stages of our troubleshooting workflow. The first step is to clearly define the problem. We try and use the tweet methodology where if we can fit the issue into a tweet and make it as clear as possible, then that gives us a framework to, a, seek an answer, but b, explain it simply to other people should we need to. The next step we’ll take is to use the search engine. I’m a massive fan of Bing, so I’ll probably start there, but I’ll also use Google if I can’t get the results. But I’ll be looking out to see if I can find anything out there that might help help me solve this problem, because in most circumstances, the problems that we have, other people have had, and they have asked on many different websites and received solutions.
Lee:
And this, more often than not, has actually been our first and last port of call because we find the solution there and then. If, however, we can’t find anything via the search engines, we’ll move on to the next step, which will be to consult support documentation on the relevant website. Most companies will have a decent knowledge base and support documentation. And because we’ve defined the problem, we’ve got some keywords that we can use. As well as using Google searches, we may have come up with other keywords that we can use in our searches. We can now attack that support documentation and see if there is anything in there that’s going to help us through the process of working out how to resolve our issue. If neither of these options give us what we need, we I will now go to community groups such as Reddit or Facebook or a relevant forum. The reason we do the searching first is because I get sick of people saying, Oh, let me Google that for you, with their sarcastic passive-aggressive messaging. So I want to make sure that I’ve done some resets first before I go ahead and ask the question.
Lee:
So I’ll go to maybe the Facebook group or the Reddit channel, and I will run a search first to see if anyone else has had the issue. And then, if not, I will ask the question of the community as well as share any supporting information that I may have found along with my searches. In many cases, I don’t even need to submit the actual request for help because somebody else will have had that issue and they will have shared in the comments thread a fix that worked in their circumstance, and then I can go ahead and grab that and make some use of it. At this point, if we’re not getting what we need from these channels, then we will submit a support ticket. I’d like to share with you what we will share in our support tickets to make sure that we can get the most out of that support interaction. But let’s quickly recap. First of all, we define the problem as short as we can, maybe in a tweet format. We’re then going to search the internet. We’re then going to search through the documentation. We’re then going to search through groups like Reddit, Facebook, etc, and even submit what our problem is if we have time to see if we can get community feedback.
Lee:
Then if we’ve exhausted all of those channels, we’re going to take that to a support ticket. During the problem solving process, I mentioned that defining the problem is key, and that is also going to be key for when we submit our support ticket. Now, first of all, we’re going to start off polite because I think ticket crunchers need to hear something positive. We’re going to start off with a friendly hello, and then we’re going to share the problem definition that we established, the tweetable, a very simple and clear description of what problem we are experiencing. Then what we’re going to do is share the things that we have tried and also any of the supporting articles that we used as part of that troubleshooting process. As creatives and as problem solvers, we very often have ideas of what might be causing the issue, especially if this is server-side support. If that is the case, we would always make sure that we mention what elements we may feel are affecting the performance or causing the issue. For example, in many cases, it may be missing services or packages on the server. Finally, within the ticket, we will ask for some lead time or expectation setting because that information is key for our own client communications.
Lee:
We need to be able to set our client’s expectations based on the level of support and service that we are going to receive or are receiving from the support provider. If we do have a client involved, then the client is going to receive a very similar message where we will explain that definition of the problem, the simplified definition, as well as the things that we are trying and the approximate lead time for getting that particular issue resolved. So they know not to keep chasing, but they also have an expectation as to when things might be resolved. Communication is absolutely key with our clients, and we should really expect that as well from our support providers. As we come into land, let’s do a quick recap. First of all, we set the scene for the life of a support ticket cruncher. We then talked about how an agency may be connecting with support at a very stressful time. We then shared with you our problem solving process, talking about defining the problem, searching, documentation, asking groups or searching groups, and then submitting the support ticket. And finally, we went through what you should include in your support ticket, including being nice, being clear, share what we’ve tried, show any supporting articles, make suggestions if we know of any potential solutions, as well as ask for our own expectations to be set that we will we’ll then be communicating with our clients on.
Lee:
Before we wrap up the show, I would love to thank our sponsor, Cloudways. They are a wonderful cloud hosting platform that allow you to set up quickly and easily servers on multiple leading providers, and they have phenomenal support. They’re definitely not perfect, but nobody is. However, if you put to practise some of the advice that I’ve shared with you today, then I guarantee no matter who you’re working with, including Cloudways, you will get much better support because everybody is working together to get a solution to whatever the problem is. So Cloudways, highly recommend them. Check out the show notes for any of the latest offers and for links to their website. Folks, what do you do to get good support? What are your support horror stories? What are your support wins? Please come and join us either in the comments of this episode over on agencytrailblazer.com or in our Facebook group at agencytrailblazer.com/group that will redirect you to our crazy cool, awesome hip hop and happening Facebook group, where it’s all at. If we don’t see you in the group, we will see you in the next episode.
