We have developed our support systems step-by-step since we have released our first premium themes and paid theme club. We added a documentation section, video tutorials and support forum and have written a lot of tutorials as we went along. The result was that our support center has become a little bit messy over time.
Another pain for us was the support forum, which is powered by the bbpress plugin. The main problem was not bbpress but that forums are a community tool and not really a support tool. We needed a bunch of third-party plugins and our own customizations to make it work. For example, we have modified bbpress to allow people only respond to their own threads, because earlier they have often answered to other people’s threads with unrelated questions.
Now it is time to reorganize our theme support!
Our goal was to provide a seamless and organized support experience and make it much more easier for you to get quick answers to all your questions about our themes.
Here are the things we have changed:
Support Center
So far our main support page was only a quick overview of our three support channels: Videos, Documentation and Forums. After the first contact the page was quite useless and most customers jumped directly to documentation or support forum not visiting the page anymore.
Since the support center is the entry page and therefore very important, we have tried to make the page more useful. We have added a search form for the theme documentation at the top and a list of tutorials to the right sidebar.
Theme Documentation
The main thing we have changed on the documentation page were the content itself. We have rewritten all tutorials and added a lot of screenshots to make it even more understandable. We have deleted some unnecessary tutorials and created new ones. We have also reorganized the structure and hierarchy of the sections and tutorials to be more consistent and logical.
Technically we have moved the sidebar from the left to the right side of the page.
Support Forums
We are closing our support forums, effective immediately. By shutting down the forums we now offer personal support via email, as described below.
Email Support
The biggest change is moving from our support forum to Helpscout. Helpscout is a help desk software in the cloud which comes with several great features. It will significantly improve our support processes and hopefully result in a much better support experience for all customers.
The greatest part for you: It is completely invisible for customers and works just like plain email. So if you have any questions beyond the documentation, just email us at support@themezee.com or use our contact form and you will get help via email. No need to login to ThemeZee.com or a complicated helpdesk ticket system anymore.
Support Access
We have also decided to make our theme documentation publicly accessible. Since we do now sell single themes instead of our old theme club model, it makes no sense anymore to hide the docs behind a login form.
Please understand that we still can only provide personal email support to purchasers of the PRO themes. Although we would really like to help the thousands of users of our free themes personally, we have just not enough resources to do that properly.
The video tutorials are also only available for theme purchasers, because they are licensed from WP101.com and can not be published for everyone.
What do you think about our new support center? We would love to hear your feedback and comments.