This post is written by our special guest, Nikolay Tyushkov.
Nikolay is an owner of Softvoile. The most known software titles by Softvoile are Flashpaste – an utility for managing and quick pasting text templates, and Clipdiary – a free utility for keeping the clipboard history.

As a veteran of ISV business, Nikolay has great practical experience he would like to share with colleagues. Today he unveils 7 steps to speed up software technical support tasks.

If you develop and sell your products then you are sure to have a lot of users, and … a huge number of questions to your technical support.

It’s an infinite chain of similar questions and standard answers – “Why didn’t I get my registration key?”, “How do I move my data to another computer?”, “What button should I press to get this thing I see in the picture?”, and many others repetitive inquiries.

Regardless you have FAQ section in your help file or on your website you have to answer the same questions every day. Unfortunately, it is impossible to get rid of boring mechanical work, but you can considerably speed it up. Similar questions mean standard answers. Let’s see what can be done about it.

1. Start creating a database of your standard answers. It is the first thing you should do. For example, if you are telling a user how to register a program then enter the answer into the database at once. When you are writing an instruction on some feature in the program, add it to the database as well. Believe me you will have to answer the same things more than once.
2. Write in the most general way. Write not as if you were answering a specific question from this particular user, but as if this answer satisfied everyone who would ask similar questions.
3. Make the description as detailed as possible. If you want to tell a user how to select a checkbox in options, also write how to open the dialog with these options, how to find the necessary checkbox and what it will result in. It will reduce the number of clarification requests and will save you lots of time.
4. If you have several products, try to avoid product names in common phrases. For instance, in a message about resending the registration key, write the answer template so that it can be used for any of your programs. Or you can better use a program that allows you to insert text macros.
5. Organize your answer templates. Put the general phrases in one category, registration questions in another category, problem solutions in still another one …
6. Store your answer templates in a special program developed for this purpose that can paste the template text into the any application practically easily.
7. Use Hot Keys to quickly insert the template text in the answer. Using hot keys rather then clicking through many menus will bring your productivity to a new level. You will be able to easily reply to message with one hand. What can be easier?

All these important points can be easily achieved with a special tool for pasting text snippets, Flashpaste (www.flashpaste.com ).
Flashpaste offers the complete set of features you need to reply your support messages quickly: text categories, hot keys support, plain and formatted text with full Unicode support, macros for inserting timestamps, substitution macros, database sharing among several employees and a lot of other useful functions. Also, Flashpaste will be useful for everyone who works with texts a lot: software developers, web designers, technical writers and translators.

Thanks for sharing this list, Nikolay!

Posted in Productivity Support
1 Comment Posted by Dennis Crane