How to ask for support effectively

September 4, 2013

Asking after sales support might sound a quite straight-forward process at first, but the way we describe the problem that we want a solution for, might result to delays and -many times- confusion. Here is some advice on how to ask support, if you want to have a quick feedback and a solution with no delays. This applies mainly for WordPress Themes support, but it may apply to several other cases too.

Read the documentation first

Many of the issues people describe are not real issues. Actually they ask for support because they cannot find a way to achieve an appearance similar to the demo. Most of the times, this information is included in the documentation file. But we sometimes are so eager to create and shape our website that we are not patient enough to go through a manual. True.

Read the Knowledge base

In many occasions it would be more fast to make a quick check at the Knowledge base rather than to submit a ticket and wait for a reply. Since many issues may have already been resolved for other users, it’s worth the time to see if a solution to your own problem is provided.

Be descriptive and provide enough information

Avoid posting a generic ticket like: ”My site doesn’t work. Can you please advice?”. This is some of the the info we are going to need to provide a solution:

  1. A link to your site. This must be included for sure. If your site is in maintenance mode, please provide temporary login credentials for the admin side.
  2. Theme version, and WordPress version. Your hosting provided will be handy too in many cases.
  3. If you suspect that there might be a conflict with a plugin, you will surely need to provide a list of the plugins.
  4. In more complex issues, temporary login credentials credentials are required. Avoid to wait for a reply from the support staff asking you to send them over, by including them in the first thread. Tickets at our support forum are private, so you can freely post you login credentials there.

Be polite and pleasant to work with

Well, the title says it all. Be polite and friendly and note the time differences when expecting a reply. Be the person that you would also like to deal with, and avoid rude language and behavior. Support is there to help. otherwise it would not be there at all.

Author

John Fraskos

WordPress designer and co-founder of Codestag.

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