A customer support page

Separate customers from prospects

A prospect is being persuaded. A customer is being helped. Those are opposite tones, and a page trying to do both usually persuades nobody and helps nobody either.

Give support its own page and link to it plainly from the navigation. Existing customers should not have to read past an offer to reach the help they are already paying for.

It also improves the sales pages, which can stop carrying troubleshooting nobody buying has any interest in reading.

Name the page in the words customers use. Support, help and contact us about an existing job all work. Anything branded, or anything called a resource center, sends people back to the navigation to guess again.

The fastest route, first

Put the contact route at the top with the hours beside it. Somebody with a problem is measuring you by how quickly they can reach a person, not by how thorough the page is.

Say what response time to expect and then meet it. An unanswered support request becomes a public review far more often than an unanswered sales enquiry does.

Our page on contact forms covers the mechanics. For support, a monitored route matters more than which route it is.

Say what happens outside those hours. An out-of-hours message that says when somebody will read it is far better than silence, and it stops the customer sending the same request through four different routes.

Answer the common problems

Every business has five or six issues that account for most support contact. Writing those up properly saves the customer a wait and saves you the conversation.

Write them as the customer describes them rather than as you classify them. Nobody asks a search engine or an answer engine about a connectivity fault, and everybody asks about it stopped working.

Our page on FAQ content covers how to find the real questions and how to write answers that are actually usable.

Put the fix before the explanation. Somebody whose equipment has stopped wants the steps first and the reason afterward, and a page that explains the cause for three paragraphs loses them before the remedy.

What a customer with a problem looks for

The list below is what a customer with a problem is looking for. The order matters, because most of them will not read past the first screen.

• How to reach a person, and when
• What response time to expect
• The common problems, described as customers describe them
• What information to have ready before contacting
• Where to find account or order details
• What is covered and what would be chargeable
• How to escalate if the first route fails

Say what is chargeable

Support that turns out to cost money after the fact is the most reliable way to turn a small problem into a complaint. Say what is included and what is not, before they contact you.

Where a call-out would be chargeable, say the figure. A customer who knows can decide, and a customer who discovers it afterward escalates.

This connects to whatever you published as a warranty. Our page on warranty information covers keeping the two consistent, since customers read them together.

Make escalation possible

Say what to do if the first route does not work. A customer who has been waiting three days with nowhere else to go writes a review instead, and that review is permanent.

Name a person or a role for escalation. An anonymous second inbox is not an escalation route, and customers recognize the difference immediately.

Then actually watch it. An escalation route nobody monitors is worse than none, because it consumed the customer's last piece of patience before they gave up.

Keep it current with the product

Support content ages faster than anything else on a site, because it describes how something works and the something keeps changing.

Review it whenever the product, the process or the pricing changes. A support page describing a screen that no longer exists is actively misleading rather than merely stale.

Our page on keeping content current covers the routine. Support pages justify a tighter review cycle than the rest of a site.

Ask whoever answers support to flag anything the page got wrong. They find the errors first, and a standing habit of reporting them keeps the page accurate without anybody scheduling a review.