New Forum-Based Support
Posted on 05. Apr, 2010 by Eric Yang in Topaz News
Our main priority at Topaz Labs is to provide you with the best experience possible when you try our plug-ins or interact with us in any way. This is a very ambitious goal, and it’s not one we take lightly! To reach this goal, we are constantly improving the systems and our processes that make an excellent customer experience possible. That’s why we recently switched our support system to be completely forum-based.
Customer support is one extremely important part of this equation. All of us believe that great software is absolutely nothing without great support backing it up, which is why we take customer support very seriously. An exclusive support forum offers many large advantages over simple email-based support. Here are some of the reasons that prompted us to switch:
- Deliverability! This is a huge one, as email is notoriously unreliable. We kept hearing from customers who had not received our response because our email was caught in their spam filter. OR their email was caught in our spam filter. OR their ISP decided not to let our domain name through. OR… you get the point. This situation made us very sad
, so we began to look for an alternative. Turns out that the great thing about a forum is, when you post a forum message, it always appears where it should, 100% of the time! Nice. Forum 1, email 0. - Accountability. The very nature of a forum makes us highly accountable for the quality of our support. If we say we have good support and we only do email, you have to actually have a problem with our software before you discover it for yourself. With a forum, though, everyone can see exactly how fast we respond, how nice we are, and how effective our responses are at getting your problem solved. This is by design: transparency helps everyone. (By the way, this is also partly why you don’t see too many smaller companies doing forum support.)
We think that the quality and spirit of our support matters more than the medium we use, but a good system always helps. Forum-based support helps you get your answers in a more timely and more reliable way, and we’re glad to be able to help you better using the new system.
For all of our support resources including our heavily updated Knowledge Base, frequently asked questions, and support contact information, visit our support center here:
http://www.topazlabs.com/support
(Or contact us on Twitter and Facebook.)
Please let me know what you think about the new system, any questions you might have, or any thoughts you have about forum vs. email support. We would really love to know what you think about this in order to further improve our system in the future!