Behind the Scenes: Our Support Tools

Yesterday we received two separate comments about our support. One was good and one was not so good. 🙂

The Good:

“Probably the best customer support I’ve come across on the net…ever!”

(yazgar)

The Bad:

“does this “escalation” or “increasing the priority” thing ever have any impact on anything?  Maybe it does for someone else/something else, but just not the stuff I write in about?  I’m beginning to think it’s nothing but a polite way of being shown the door.  Or being told you’re just SOL.  I’d actually rather hear “no, we’re NEVER going to add that or fix that” than hear it’s “escalated” or “prioritized” and then . . . nothing else ever again.  At least with the former, I could stop wondering.”

(robinowsley)

We always try to be transparent. So, I wanted to share how our support team works.  All of these tools are custom developed and we used our Membership Forms to create them.

Support Inbox

When you send us a message, an email, a comment, or a forum post it lands on our support inbox:

When you get an answer to a question, you will also receive the answer in your email. You can reply to that email and your email message will be captured and added to our system. And, the forum thread will be back on the Support Inbox.

We also try to prioritize our paying customers. If we did not have paying customers we wouldn’t be able to afford a free version. So, we give their requests more priority.

Sometimes we cannot answer the question on the spot. We assign those questions to developers, and they show up on their own inboxes:

Making Sure We Provide a Fast Support

We keep an eye on the number of messages on our support inbox. Our first goal is to always provide correct, through, helpful answers. But we also try to answer questions fast. We have a counter that tracks the daily average to answer waiting questions.

Our support team is located on different geographic locations (ie. US, Philippines, Ireland, Barbados and Turkey) so we try to keep an eye on the increases in our support inbox count.

Emergency Alert System

Luckily Jotform is hard solid and we do not have many emergencies. But, on average, once a year, we will have a problem and that will cause a flood in our support system. To solve this problem, we have an emergency alert system that shows recent updates on our support system and contact forms.

Answering Comments:

We allow commenting on both our blog and user guide. As a result we get many questions as a comment on various pages. The problem was that it is difficult to answer these questions within the comments. Sometimes we wouldn’t be aware of questions until someone visits that page.
To solve this, we have designed a comment inbox. Every comment posted on the site, lands in this inbox. If there is a question to be answered, we answer them on the forum and a back link is automatically added to the comment. The poster is also emailed with the answer.

This is how our support team works. Next time, you send us a question you can be sure that it will be answered in a timely manner. If you have not requested support before, go ahead and try us now. 🙂