Why email support is a bad idea.

  • Resolved Tom

    (@godsdead)


    10 years, 2 months ago

    I read your blog post, and tried to comment but after I wrote the comment it notified me that comments were disabled!

    So this is a reply to:
    http://www.mikeyd.com.au/2013/10/10/why-forums-are-a-bad-tool-for-customer-support/
    And why its a terrible idea to only communicate via public email.

    Im a user of your Dropbox plugin and love it, I only found out today that my database is automatically backed up too while in the search for a separate plugin to find one, the reason I found this was a reply to a forum thread from anther user, There by me not needing to start a thread/email you in the first place, A quick google search gave me an answer & solution within seconds, as opposed to having to wait/contact a developer.
    Especially when working with software on a daily basis its really handy that millions of forums are indexed by google, I would say 90% of software issues can be solved by forum threads.
    The 1 to 1 relationship destroys this, increasing the amount of time and effort on both ends to solve a problem that hasn’t been discussed in public.
    Maybe I could suggest a public ticket system?

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-backup-to-dropbox/

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  • Plugin Contributor Michael De Wildt

    (@michaeldewildt)

    10 years, 2 months ago

    Thanks for your opinion. 🙂

    Do you have some data to back your 90% claim?

    If a searchable solution is all that is needed then, as I mentioned in my post, a well curated knowledge base can ensure that common questions are answered.

    I use the FAQ as my knowledge base and your question is answered within it => http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-backup-to-dropbox/faq/

    Thread Starter Tom

    (@godsdead)

    10 years, 2 months ago

    Personal experience with website design and development over the last 10 years? Does that count? I find most nearly all my solutions from exisitng fourm posts that have been aggregated by google.

    The problem is with a knowledge base, is that it gets out of date, quickly, An example is the CPO themes shortcodes doc’s, they updated the plugin but not all their docs.
    And it dousnt coutner for the gigantic variety of systems wordpress can run on, I highly doubt as a solo developer you test on the hundreads of ways wordpress can be run nowerdays, different OS’s, Different PHP&Mysql versions on Shared/VPS/Cloud infrastructures.

    What happens if you loose interest? Or if you hand over the project to someone else?

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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