Support response times

[nfp1900 29]

From experience support provided by authors of premium plugins tends to be quite fast - within hours or certainly the same day. One plugin I use for the registration and management of events called Event Espresso costs $69/year, has support coverage in the UK and USA and you can always expect a response within hours. 

 

I'm not commenting on the quality of support provided by Pagelines but the response times where it can take days to resolve minor issues.  It must be an impossible task to have just one person working all the forums and I would like to understand what your plans are to improve in this area.

[Danny+ 1,327]

Hi,

 

In the past ten year or so years, I have used all the technical support forums you can imagine, from WordPress themes, Drupal, Joomla, vBulletin, IPB, XenForo, aMember to name a few. Our response time is extremely fast in comparison to these and many popular WordPress theme providers.

 

Event Espresso, I have used them in the past and to say they reply within an hour is slightly exaggerated. They even state on their VIP membership, that responses will be within 24-48 hours. This is the standard amount of time for premium plugins/themes to provide support in and we are no exception.

 

There is only one support-inception moment and this occurs when our users post on a Friday evening (GMT) i.e. after I have logged off. They will likely not receive a response until Sunday when I login back in. However, it is very rare for technical support to be provided on a weekend, regardless if you pay for premium support or not. Also, I have responded to some users posts within minutes of creation, this is just luck of the draw.

This is how our support works in the forums. When I login or any of support staff login, we have a special button that only admins and moderators can see, which brings up all unanswered topics and new topics in one que. This que is ordered by new post at the top and old post at the bottom. Our staff then go through this list of topics from old to new. The only exception is that if our club users who are easily distinguishable to our staff will take priority over non-club members. As do DMS users over legacy theme users such as PageLines Framework. Therefore, I am unaware of any user awaiting days for a response, all topics on our forums are answered within 24-48hrs depending on the day the topic was created i.e. near or on the weekend.

 

However, receiving support swings in both ways. For example, the amount of time I personally waste replying to users for information that has already been asked in our notification when you click the Start New Topic button is just incredible. https://cloudup.com/cjiYtOo15Rn Ifall users on our forums included this information off the bat, it would increase our efficiency greatly.

 

I also feel we go beyond what most other theme providers do in their support. For example, some theme providers just don't provide customisation support in any way, shape, or form and is left to their community to assist to such topics. They state that their products come as is and therefore, they do not provide or support customisation of their products. Which is perfectly fine, but we try to be more flexible and provide some customisation support and if the customisation question goes beyond what we can provide, we usually either make a suggestion or link to an article that can assist them.

 

However, you're right in that we can improve and we are always looking for ways or systems to improve our support performance and efficiency. That is why we now have the answers portal and once a few issues are resolved, it will be a hub of knowledge. I already have about 200 articles on my to-do-list to add to our Answers portal such as how to target individual menu items, RevSlider extra options, how to use Action Map etc...