Apr 18th, 2007
Make support requests more informative
When a user emails to you a feature request or an issue report you may not realize if he uses the latest version of your product or not. Maybe he simply must download an update to resolve the problem or you really must fix the bug in the newest build?
Today, I’d like to tell how to simplify your support work with a simple trick. I’ll just describe our own experience.
In our product, Dr.Explain, we have ‘Send E-mail to support‘ menu item under Help group. If user clicks on it, the default e-mail program will create a draft of support request message. Our trick is automatically adding application version number to the subject of the message. Below there is a primitive code snippet for this function. You may easily adopt it for your programming language.
CString sFile;
::GetModuleFileName(NULL, sFile.GetBuffer(MAX_PATH + 1), MAX_PATH);
sFile.ReleaseBuffer();
short n1, n2, n3, n4;
GetFileVer(sFile, &n1, &n2, &n3, &n4);
CString vers;
vers.Format(_T(”mailto:support@drexplain.com?Subject=Support%%20request%%20for%%20Dr.Explain%%20%i.%i.%i”), n1, n2, n3);
::ShellExecute(NULL, _T(”open”), vers, NULL,NULL, SW_SHOW);
This function will create a message draft like this one:
Now we always know which version is installed on the user’s PC. You may create message drafts that contain more details about your product installation and the user’s OS environment. This will help you handle support requests fast and precisely.
We used that in Direct Access and it works very well. I saw that a good number of customer requests comes from the link “Contact Customer Support”.
Originally we placed that in the start menu. Then we moved it as a top menu placed quite visibly in the main form.