Lessons Learned: Choosing your “contact us” method

After supporting an enterprise-wide service for a few years now, I have had the opportunity to test support via email, phone, ticketing system, and web-based forum.  Depending on the service you’re actually supporting, the number of users, and the support model you feel most comfortable with, there are pros and cons to each. 

Something you should keep in mind while making this big decision: In most cases, your goal should be to reduce the amount of support required.  I am not saying to stop picking up the phone, or stop emailing people back, I am suggesting to figure out why people are calling in the first place, and make it so nobody will need to contact you for those reasons ever again.  Each of the following sections will not only contain pros and cons of each contact method, but will also tell you how to use each as effectively as possible.  Hopefully, by the end, you will have the answer to these simple questions:

• How do I want my customers to contact me?  
• And more importantly, how do I want to contact them back?

Phone

When I first started supporting my service, 100% of support was done via the phone.  My company has a shared enterprise helpdesk, so they would take the basic support calls, but every time they had to escalate, I would receive a call on my cell phone.  If I didn’t pick up the phone, they would leave a message, and that was the only place I could find what was in my “queue”.  People typically only leave their phone number to get back to them (even when you specify to leave an email), so my only option was to call them back.  As you can imagine, there were several times when the voicemail filled up during an outage.  In most cases, I would try and figure out their email address by searching the corporate directory, and send a bulk email back to all of them at once.  This usually happened when I received so many voicemails that I had no choice but to “declare bankruptcy”.

Services like Google Voice – or another helpdesk voicemail software could help out with this, but I would ultimately recommend avoiding phone support.  Taking orders over the phone is fine - since orders actually make you money – but supporting customers via phone is a disaster waiting to happen.

Email

Email is great when talking to friends, doing basic customer service, sending out system announcements, and surveying your customers, but can become a nightmare to manage a helpdesk.  Imagine for a second that your service is big enough that you require more than one support rep.  You could either use a group mailbox or login to the same email account.  When one person is working a request, they need to make sure it gets marked as “read” – otherwise the other reps might contact the same customer when its already been worked.  If you decide not to work one and read it, you need to make sure to mark it as “unread” – otherwise you will definitely forget to come back to it later.  Ultimately, email is a good way to start with email, but should eventually be phased out as you scale your service.

Ticketing System

Ticketing systems can be great when they’re full-featured, but can also be problematic when they’re not.  My company has an overly-complex ticketing system that does not facilitate the customer interaction.  Some of the better ones I’ve seen out there allow you to facilitate all communications with the customer via the system – which is extremely powerful.  This way, you do not have emails from a customer all over your inbox, voicemails from them on your phone, and messages from them on the forum – all about the same issue. 

Ticketing systems are extremely powerful if you plan on going back and doing analysis of the tickets.  By having that data available, you can dig through past data and pick up on trends.  Any trends you find can be used to support my philosophy above - fix those problems so you never have to answer a question about them again.

Forum

Nowadays, using forums (A.K.A. message boards) to do support is becoming commonplace.  Great examples can be found in open source projects such as WordPress, and products with great communities like ExpressionEngine.  Some choose to host their own forum, and some choose to use services like GetSatisfaction and UserVoice – which are both great.  If you have a very active user community, forums can allow users to support users, which of course allows you to keep your support staff at a minimum relative to comparable companies opting for siloed support methods (email, phone, etc). 

Forums can also allow users to search for answers to their questions before they ask the same question again.  Since most support requests you will receive are repetitive, this can be extremely beneficial.  See 37signal’s “Answers” site for a great example of searchable, crowdsourced help.

One thing to keep in mind is that forums are not the end all be all.  Forums must be paired with one of the other methods described above when “private” tickets are necessary.  Examples of “private” tickets are billing questions, password problems, and other things that cannot be discussed in a public forum.

Contacting them back

Now that we’ve laid out the most common options for users to contact you, how do you want to contact them?  In most of the methods above, you can either have an automated reply or greeting telling the users what information you need to contact them back, and how you will be contacting them back.  If you think you can support twice the number of people via email that you can via phone, then make a rule that you will only email them back – regardless of how they contact you.  It goes without saying that you should reply back within the forum or ticketing system if that’s how a user contacts you (but I said it anyways).

Tracking and Analysis

Remember the more data you have about the support requests, the more analysis you can do in the future.

Conclusion

While results will vary depending on the nature of support requests and the nature of your product or service, my findings are likely to hold true.  If there is one thing you take away from this essay, it is that you should not pick a support model and stick with it forever.  Your needs - and the needs of your customers - are bound to change over time as you scale.