Support to my customers is one of the things that I have always wanted to make sure that I did to my best ability.
As our customer base has grown over the years this task has become more difficult. Since the support team is just I, myself and me it sometimes becomes a daunting task to keep track of emails and requests. Interestingly, customer support comes in waves. I may not get a single email for a week and then I get 10 in one day for as many products.
Having a good system in place has become one of my highest priorities in the past few months. Many developers feel that they have to design and write such systems themselves to make sure they work. I definitely used to be one of them, but I have started to learn that sometimes it's easier - and a whole lot cheaper - to use one of the many services out there rather than do it yourself.
Couple of months ago I mentioned this to Sue and she happened to have been reading some posts on her forums about options in customer support. One of them was Zendesk and after taking a good look at it I decided to try to use their service. But I got sidetracked by school and didn't get back to it until this week. I expect to have it completely set up sometime next week and once I'm done with that, emails will go out to all my customers about this new service and how to use it. Following that, subscribers will be added to the Zendesk account so they will have direct access. If people who are not my customers want to post question all you need to do is sign up and post. It's completely free and only takes a few seconds.
To access the Icetips portal at Zendesk, please go to http://icetips.zendesk.com I have not completely set up the end user portal yet as I have been working on the administration setup. Over the next week or so this page will change, but the support is fully functional by now. Over the next week I will send out emails to my customers with instructions and information about how to submit support requests.
I hope that with this new system in place I can keep a much better track of support requests and my customers can keep better track of what is going on.
Arnor Baldvinsson
