As I’ve got several info products, now and more on the way, I decided a little while back to get a support desk system set up.

I tried using a couple of the free ones that are available in the cPanel Fantastico script library, but couldn’t get the one’s I liked the look of to work properly, so I ended up doing some research in to other free scripts that are available.

I picked one from MaianScriptWorld in the end and I’ve been very pleased with it so far.

It’s not as sophisticated as many of the paid one’s, but it does allow for different “departments” (for different products), ticket tracking, different admins, so you can outsource the support and keep an eye on your outsource staff, as well as a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) and email notifications of new support tickets.

It’s actually been well worth the time to set up, as people seem more willing to wait for a support ticket to be answered than they are with an email.

I’ve found that often when someone sends an email asking for support they tend to expect to receive a reply very quickly and if they don’t they can get “worried” as to whether they will actualy get the support they need, where as with a support desk they know that the request has been logged and won’t get “worried” if the don’t receive a reply within a few minutes.

This basically means I can deal with support requests just once a day, rather than having to interupt whatever I am in the middle of doing to answer the question.

I also seem to get less support requests, so I’m guessing that the FAQ feature is helping out there as well.

Whenever I get a support request that couldhave been dealt with by a FAQ I make sure I spend the few minutes it takes to set add one, so the FAZ databaseis building up over time and should mean that I spend less and less time on support.

I really should have it outsourced, but it’s one of those things on my “to do” list and I’m not sure how soon I’ll get around to doing so…

If you’d like to see what the script I’m using is like, you can check it our here:
http://www.askmattg.com

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