One of our Support guys had some praise from a customer today, who said that it’s refreshing to speak to a company who is not trying to get them off the ‘phone as quickly as possible.

This is something we do strive towards and I’ll never have any targets for the Support team to have maximum call lengths or anything like that, so you can rest assured that if you do need to call us then our main concern will be resolving your issue and not thinking about the next call before we’ve even finished the current one.

Following on from last week’s article about our knowledge base, it’s worth pointing out that it’s there in support of, and not as a replacement for, our customer support team.

At times we may refer you to specific articles, either on the telephone or in a helpdesk ticket. We don’t do this to deal with your issue faster for our benefit, though, but for yours.  Some tasks and questions may seem very simple at first, but it often turns out there are a fair few steps involved and there can be a lot to remember when discussing it verbally.

A good example is if you are new to transferring com/net/org domain names. After you’ve done a few then you can probably make a transfer with your eyes closed, but if it’s the first time you have done one then there can be a lot to take in: different contact email addresses on the domain, what company to request the transfer from, checking WHOIS for the locking status, making sure you have the EPP code, any transfer/renewal fee, checking the status of WHOIS privacy, seeing if the registration is past the 60 day limit etc.

We’re quite happy to go through all these steps on the telephone if you want, but we often find the transfers that fail are the ones where customers have just simply been overwhelmed by the different steps and trying to take it all in. Often we hear callers frantically trying to scribble down all the steps we’re talking them through.

This is where our Knowledge Base comes in. We have simple to follow, step-by-step guides (with screen shots)  for all common tasks like this, so there’s really no need to make notes on the telephone or struggle to remember everything we are telling you – you can just refer to the guide at your leisure.

Feedback from our customers is very positive – we’re told that having a knowledge base article to refer to takes a lot of the stress out of some tasks. It’s generally a lot easier to work through some clearly laid-out steps in your own time than to try to remember what was said or decipher hastily-written notes from a ‘phone call, and if you do hit a problem then you can call about that specific step so we can get you through it.

So, rest assured: if we do ever send you an article it’s because we think it’s the best way we can help you out.

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We spend a lot of time making sure the knowledge base is informative as possible and always welcome requests for new articles, so if there’s anything that you’d like a guide for just drop us a line or leave a comment.