Encouraging "Real" Support Tickets from End-Users.

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Encouraging "Real" Support Tickets from End-Users.

We have a fairly simple support ticketing system(Send an email to the Support email address). However what we CONSTANTLY do battle with is garbage support tickets where the user is being told by the system how to solve their problem yet the user isn't happy with the course of action they are required to take. Also we get plenty of tickets where the user is basically using our support team to research business issues instead of actual technical problems.

I realize that a certain amount of questions will be inevitable because there is a constant learning process with new features as well as a growth process in the applications that comes from us trying to make things more intuitive for the end user.

However my question is, how do you(other developers) coach your end-users into being responsible with their support requests as these requests take time and resources from other legitimate issues that need to be serviced?

+3 A:

You're doing it wrong. If the user doesn't have the power to resolve business issues easily and intuitively, then you have failed to provide an adequate business integration solution. In that scenario, you should be responsible for researching business issues. If your response is, "There's a way, you just do A > B > C > D > E", maybe you need to rethink the workflow you're presenting to your users.

It sounds like there are root-cause issues here that the "technical team" is simply avoiding. I can only assume that your requirements are buffered by management of some type, as it sounds like you're not fully understanding the business you're supporting.

Stefan Kendall 2010-09-15 16:09:31

Provacative answer, yes. Informative and helpful, no.

Achilles 2010-09-15 16:12:05

If your users are unhappy with something like "File > Fix My Problem", then it's their problem. If they're unhappy with "File > Some window --> Barely relevant tab --> Obscure Setting", it's yours. Users shouldn't have to think -- they do enough of that just trying to get their jobs done. That's the biggest part of what the answer is trying to say.

cHao 2010-09-15 16:17:16

@Achilles You sure? It doesn't address your question - but you can't address a question reliant on a premise (the premise that these tickets are actually garbage tickets) if that premise is wrong. I would seriously suggest the solution to your problem isn't in coaching your end users at all. See http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#goal

Rushyo 2010-09-15 16:18:16

That's a good link. Finding the goal of an activity is far more important than automating a given activity itself. Users will be content to use broken systems for years, manually currying data and whatnot, until you sit down and realize that if you had simply joined the results of two different screens, you could have saved hours of work per month. That's *not* how the process flowed when it was manual, however, so a technical user not engaged in the business could never implement such a change.

Stefan Kendall 2010-09-15 16:27:36

ansaurus

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Encouraging "Real" Support Tickets from End-Users.

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