Announcing your WordPress website support concierge

Does’t everyone just love WordPress website support ? lodging tickets, describing screens, closing browsers, clearing cache, hit reload about 100 times, try a different browser, different PC, a phone, a tablet, reboot your router, restart your PC …. and the site still isn’t working.

The Problem

What’s even worse if you are an agency, and you’ve had the customer ring you to complain, you now have to ring your hosting support – and deal with them and the customer – all when you’re on some other deadline for a new site getting completed. Sometimes the fix is purely technical, sometimes the communication needs to continue to go back and forward between all 3 parties (the hosting support, the agency, and the site owner).

What’s more you don’t get paid for this support – even if you have a maintenance contract you aren’t able to bill extra for the frustrating hour or so it might take to resolve.

Then of course the calls coming from your client come at the worst time – when you’re about to go out to dinner, or when you’re trying to bundle the kids into the car for school.

Not only is it a hassle to everyone – the support calls are eroding your brand and relationship with your client (no one loves support).

The Solution – WordPress website support concierge

When a site is broken wouldn’t it be better if it lodged it’s own support request ?  communicated with the parties ? resolved it’s own issues ? It would certainly save a lot of phone calls and angst.

At wpdone – we know how to do things right  (I know ‘correctly’ is more better english, but our moto is ‘WordPress hosting done right’) .

We test our client sites continuously. Both with our own tools, and from a 3rd party – uptime robot. This way we get a better picture if something is broken.

When we detected an issue, we lodge our own support ticket, start the communication with the agency, and start solving it.

WordPress website support concierge – an example

• 8pm Sunday night uptime robot detects a client site is broken.
• 8:10pm we’ve lodge our own support ticket and it emails the agency
• 8:35pm the ticket is escalated internally as the problem is complicated.
• 8:45pm I take a look – and yes, it’s an external DNS issue – looks like the end customer hasn’t paid their DNS registry invoice (which comes around every 2 years).
• 9pm I email and facebook message the agency, the problem, and the likely solution.

The upshot is the agency did get annoying messages late sunday night, but they were of a ‘we’re on it’ nature – and they didn’t have to do anything.

Perhaps the agency spoke to the client Monday morning. Maybe the client rang the agency Sunday night or Monday morning. Either way it reduced the number of phone calls, and aggravation – and no one had to lodge a support ticket (oh, other than our concierge).

Without using the external tool, uptime robot, we wouldn’t have seen the external DNS issue (as our DNS servers would likely still be working for the domain).

By Scott Farrell on January 17th, 2017 , Follow @scott_WordPress Tweet to @scott_WordPress