Everything installed perfectly. Your system specifications are all up to scratch. Everything is fresh and new, and you can't wait to try out the new functionality. You open up the new plugin - bam. Failure. 404. Database not found. Choose your error. It has happened to us all.
You want a solution fast. You read the manual, you Google for similar problems. You submit a support ticket.
You wait. Sometimes, for weeks.
Support ticket systems can be very useful, especially when you are dealing with a huge customer base with problems spanning multiple areas of expertise. But if you're a company of 3, with one person doing all the support work, you might want to re-think your strategy.
It surprises me when I don't see small development companies using their forums. Most of them have one, and it is a place of tumbleweeds and broken dreams. There's usually even a board solely for reporting bugs and seeking support - but every requester is told to submit a ticket, regardless of how many hundreds of times the problem has been submitted.
If these most frequently asked questions were answered in public, a significant load could be taken off the back of your support person as many queries that would have become tickets are solved with a quick search of the forums.
Yes, there are users who are not technically savvy enough to use forums. In my experience, a little prompting from the UI can go a long way to make people confident enough to search forums, and pointing out that they exist in the first place.
When you are selling a software solution to a technically savvy audience, not using your forums is just ridiculous. People can provide highly detailed summaries of their problems. Users will often solve each other's problems, as I see all the time in the tech forums I frequent.
If you are a bootstrapped company, installing both a forum and a support ticket system and relying solely on the latter for support is a bad idea. Instead, let your users help each other, and stop having to copy and paste the same tired solution day after day to the list of people all having the same problem with your product. In the long run, you'll be glad you did.
