As we go into the final quarter of 2020, I wanted to touch base with the support projects we’ve been working on and testing throughout the year. We’ve worked as a team tweaking our support system to handle better the larger number of users MainWP has gained this year.
Many of the projects have been going on in the background as we ran through multiple A/B tests and workflows.
Some have been released in plain sight like the new Knowledge Base and others like the MainWP Community we’ve been promoting throughout the year.
Today I just want to review some of those changes with the most important being the conversion to a new Help Desk system.
Announced Help Desk Hours
We added our official Help Desk hours to support forms and to the support policy. They are 7 am to 3 pm EST Monday-Friday.
While this may seem scary at first, this has been our internal policy for years; we are just setting it in writing now. I wanted to be able to set expectations better as we add more users.
The support staff can still jump-in any time they wanted to, whether it was to make up time or add time to their compensation, and that option is still available to them. I do not put a cap on the hours the support team can work; I only require they are available during the support hours specified.
New HelpScout Support Desk
After years and 1000’s tickets with FreshDesk, we’ve decided to move from FreshDesk to HelpScout. It’s never easy to change support desks, especially one you’ve used for so long.
However, HelpScout better fits our current needs and support flow without having to create custom solutions.
New tickets from today
will need to use the contact form, support form from the my-account section, or email help@mainwp.com to start a new support ticket. Also, new tickets will be responding using the help@mainwp.com email address. Be sure to add this to the “allow list” with your email provider.
We’ve been testing HelpScout for a while now but there are bound to be a few hiccups so please be patient with us during the transition.
New Support and Contact Forms
Switching to HelpScout opens a wide range of new options to us, including the ability to ask various questions and allow txt uploads directly in the forms.
The .txt option is really exciting since it allows us to remove one of the support steps of us having to ask you for that information, and instead, we can jump right in and look for any apparent issues from your first request.
New Knowledge Base
We rewrote the old MainWP Help to the new MainWP Knowledge Base.
The new KB includes the Algolia search engine to provide a better search than WordPress’ built-in search. With almost 400 documents covering every aspect of MainWP that we’ve collected over the years, this is the best place to start looking for an answer to any question you have.
The MainWP Community
The first and oldest release in the revised support process began with MainWP Community’s testing. The Community was a new discussion point to source the userbase to help each other. I’m happy to report that the Community has been growing every day, and we’re seeing excellent involvement from many MainWP users.
After the Knowledge Base and nearly a year, and hundreds of questions answered by other MainWP users, this would be the second-best place to look for any MainWP questions you have.
New Support Bot with Live Chat
Edwin 1.0 started about a year ago and has had 5000 interactions with a 15.47 correct answer rate, saving almost 800 tickets over that period, but we felt it was time to step the game up a bit, so we built Edwin 2.0!
Edwin 2.0 is built off one of the more advanced bot services available now, Drift.
Edwin 2.0 even comes with built-in Live Chat, so if he can’t help you, you’ll have the option of reaching a Live Help Agent.
Our Live Help Agents are the same people you would get by submitting a support ticket, but they’ll only be answering basic questions on live chat; for more complex questions, you’ll still need to open a ticket. However, the Live Chat Agent can do that directly from the chat, so you won’t need to start all over again.
We’re excited to see what you think of Edwin 2.0, so feel free to experiment with him. You can reach him on the bottom right of most pages.
Removed Usersnap
With Dashboard version 4.1.2.1, we removed the Usersnap screen capture option. I don’t think most of you will notice this since we used it for a year, and on average, we received four screenshots a month from users, so that I couldn’t justify the fee for a feature not being used by users.
Let us know your thoughts
At the bottom of this page is a link to the MainWP Community to discuss this post.
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