Compiling the PERFECT Support Request for Your Web Dev Agency

searchrovrdemo on July 10, 2020

Being in this game for over a decade with hundreds of clients, we’ve seen a support request or two in our time. In a given week we get dozens of requests.

How well-pulled-together the request is, directly equates to how quickly we can resolve.

Here’s how to compile the PERFECT support request for us or any Web Development / Design or Marketing agency.

1. Details, Details, Details

Sometimes we have to waste a few round-robins of emails just figuring out basic details. Let’s play baseball, not ping pong 🙂

State the need / issue as clearly as possible in the email subject line.

In the email body please give us:

  • Thorough description of the issue / need
  • URLs involved
  • Steps to reproduce

2. Your Browser / Operating System

For many bugs we need to know what browser you are using and what operating system. Does that sound like mumbo jumbo? Here are some examples.

  • Chrome / Windows 10
  • Safari / Mac OS Catalina
  • FireFox / Ubuntu
  • Chrome / Chromebook
  • Safari / iPhone 8+

If we aren’t able to replicate the issue it can be really challenging to solve.

3. Cleared cache?

Cache is the bane of our existence as web developers. At multiple levels your computer / browser, our server all “cache” (store) parts of sites in an effort to speed up the experience. Sometimes these can get stuck or need to be proactively cleared.

The ultimate is completely clearing your browser cache but sometimes you can just reload / refresh a page or go a step further with a “hard refresh”…

  • ctrl + f5 on most Window’s browsers
  • command + r or command + shift + r on Mac

Clear cache before reaching out and then, if the issue persists, let us know you cleared your cache already.

4. Give us a sense of urgency and timeline

Some weeks we live like a M*A*S*H unit playing triage. You’ll be glad we prioritize critical business-affecting fixes over trivial ones if you ever find yourself in an urgent situation.

Doctor Mallard: “Get this website on the operating table now! Nurse, get me 3 lines of CSS and a shot of espresso. “

If we know when you are expecting help we can more easily fit you in. Our retainer clients who have us reserved for a certain number of hours a month get our most immediate attention but we do our best to attend to all issues with expedience.

5. Be nice

If you are one of our clients I don’t even need to say this as you guys rock.

Remember on the other end of the email is a human being, much like yourself, with all kinds of life pressures, workload to balance, and daily stressors.

It makes our jobs easier knowing you appreciate our efforts and value our time.

Be kind and remember that the brevity of email, while efficient, doesn’t do much to convey tone or attitude. Be generous with the emojis and animated gifs, they brighten our day 🙂

Documentation, Where Do I Put That?

Josh Mallard on February 13, 2018

As we’ve been looking to bring on more talented people into the mix here at LimeCuda, one area that we’re focusing on improving is documentation. At the core of creating any documentation is a need to get expertise, knowledge, and experience out of our own heads and presented in a way that is digestible by anyone coming into our business.

With this focus, we are starting by focusing on support and procedural documentation.

Support Documentation

We are cumulatively responsible for about 200 websites with a wide array of industries and purposes. Even with great variety between sites, we do find ourselves answering some of the same questions on a regular basis… Issues around domains, SSL, and general hosting are very common for us. By creating support documentation to answer these recurring questions, we no longer have to rely on bespoke responses for these issues and can provide a quicker response with reliable and tested information.

To help us in aggregating this information, we’re working to build out this documentation within the “Docs” feature in Helpscout. If you’re an existing customer, you likely received an email about how to submit a support ticket (also powered by Helpscout). By building the documentation here, we’ll have a seamless approach for quickly adding this documentation to our email responses to your requests.

Procedural Documentation

It’s difficult to have a functioning business if you don’t document the why and how general tasks are to be performed for your business. This would include general processes like our process for handling single-developer sprints, configuring DNS, or full checklists like our checklist for a WordPress SSL / HTTPS migration. This documentation is crucial for capturing experience and lessons learned from performing some of these tasks over-and-over and passing it along to new team members when they join. These ever-evolving documents help to ensure that every time we perform a task, it is the best we’ve ever done it.

We have multiple places where we capture procedural documentation. We are a business built around an Open Source ecosystem and have a strong bent towards transparency and sharing. With that ethos, our first place for capturing this documentation is on our public resource site Fewer Than Three. This documentation is fully available to anyone to use in improving their own websites and businesses.

For things that are specific to us internally at LimeCuda, we utilize the Wiki features available within Github. This way, it is easily accessible when creating new tasks for specific projects that can be assigned to anyone on our team.

Is your company actively using a documentation process to help in improving your business? We’d love to hear the tools and strategies you’re using in creating your documentation.