Wheres the post where Chris D says this forum is not to replace actinic support?

[pnagames]

It would surely make sense for support to search the forum on the customers behalf and point them to a thread. It does not look so good if support are saying 'dunno, go ask on the forum'.

I do take the point made by Chris though. There may be tweaks that we have achieved which we can advise newbies.

There are a couple that I have done which I am particularly proud of but nobody has asked how to do it yet! Come on, I've taken so much, I really want to give summink back!

Support would not know everything.

we do the same thing as the actinic support on occassions on our helpdesk support (my normal 9-5 job).

some problems are best answered by the people who have the experience in this things.

[george]

Much easier to read/print off a solution (from here) than listen to it on the phone anyway...

[pinbrook]

It looks as if both posts were design issues, so I can't see what the problem was in support referring them to the forum. I get quite a few calls here for design and I always refer people to the forum.

If people are so uphappy about these posts, why answer them?

I agree with you Jan, the thing that does bother me is the message sent, ie use the community for support rather than actinic support.

It could be these people were told "this is a design issue thus it is not covered by cover" please try the community - this is fine

its the underlying message that bothers me especially when the person helped then posted

Next time, I think I will come straight here!

[Jan]

It's a no win situation for support really, in order to be helpful they can refer people with design issues to this forum, but they can't then stop people asking for support here in the future.

I think that if support was more open to the customers and had the sort of systems that we have for support, with a knowledge base as the key point for support (people that aren't me or Jo could look at this URL to see what I'm talking about http://moleend.helpserve.com/).

Since we implemented our knowledge base, the amount of support we need to do has dropped drastically, because the answers are all there for the taking. Noone really wants to spend time on the phone to support or time waiting for answers on the forum, if you can just look it up then it's much better.

Every time we have a new support issue, we add the resolution to the knowledgebase, then anyone can see it. It works really well.

We had all of the same information in our support forum before we created the knowledgebase but it just didn't work.

Regards,

[pinbrook]

Good point Jan

Co-incidently I signed up a new hosting client yesterday who said one of the influencing factors in his decision to come to us was our help files.

This is such a simple thing for us - as we simply buy them from a 3rd party.

It is becoming second nature nowadays to check a website for info before picking up the phone. (Except for newbies who find the community and ask before looking )

this takes the discussion full circle to the lack of decent online help/FAQs on Actinic site