When Redhead Digital was the seed of an idea many years ago, I knew I had a good grasp of quite a range of marketing products and websites platforms but it was a case of a little bit of this, a little bit of that – the refrain “jack of all trades, master of none” weighed heavy in my mind…So I’m stoked when I review all the Partner (or equivalent) Status’s I have gathered since then! (ps. yes I’m a badged Google Partner, but the badge didn’t look as pretty in my graphic – lol!)
And to celebrate I’m going to give you my top 3 tips for getting the best result when placing support queries – they may seem obvious but so many of my clients spend so much time going in circles before they decide to hand it over to me …
- When you’re stuck, STOP. And contact Support. Because if you don’t know what you’re doing then your efforts, no matter how good-intentioned, to try a random range of fixes or changing of settings usually makes things worse and it’s an even bigger job as support has to ‘undo’ those efforts before we can even get to the initial problem. Now your support line might be an email, support board, live chat or posting on an internet board, but the golden rule is don’t make the hole any deeper!
- Send evidence. Screenshot the issue or even better use a screen video recorder like Loom to record the behaviour. Include the link to the page you’re seeing the problem on. Being able to go straight to the problem and replicate it, means we can fix it much faster.
- Keep it simple. Sending paragraphs of information usually isn’t that helpful – it just takes time to review and decode.
Tell support the MAIN problem you want to resolve and use screenshots or plain terminology to describe that problem. If you’re not fluent in the lingo of the product/tech then best to avoid its use – many a wild goose chase has been caused by clients with the best intentions, misidentifying the key component of the issue.
And whilst support will need to know the critical history, even if you provide all the things you’ve tried to resolve it, they are still going to have to follow their support process to identify and troubleshoot the issue.
And a bonus one because I’m on a roll – ESCALATE. Many large call-centres or support centres are staffed by entry-level support staff, you know the ones – you get a copy and paste reply to most issues. So if you’re struggling to get a result then reach out to a local Expert that can assist in firstly diagnosing the issue and escalating it up with support food-chain.
Onwards!
