How to prioritize your support queue
So, you come into work in the morning, open up your help desk app and see 50 tickets waiting in the queue. How do you go about responding in a most effective way? The obvious way is to handle old issues first — going bottom to top. That's what I was doing for a long time until I realized it's wrong. Oldest issues aren't always the most important ones.
Building a support site for your startup
You've already launched your product now it's time to set up a "self-service" help page for your users. Why?
According to Forrester, "72% of customers prefer self-service to resolve their support issues over picking up the phone or sending an email." Our own studies show (we keep an eye on these metrics since we're selling a helpdesk ticketing app) that up to 45% of support issues can be solved without contacting support. Of course it varies throughout specific niches and industries, but on average it's 45%. Which means - almost half of your support burden can be lifted.
How we nearly lost our domain (and how you can prevent this)
TL:DR version when we transferred our domain to NameCheap during the GoDaddy SOPA boycott NameCheap has silently changed our domain's main contact email to "support@namecheap.com" (wtf?), so we were not getting verification emails from ICANN, so ICANN has blocked our domain. Watch out.
Today our domain name ("jitbit.com") went down for nearly 30 minutes. Our website and all our hosted apps, including the hosted version of our help desk ticketing system were inaccessible (our hosted customers access the app using "xxxxx.jitbit.com" URLs). Here's what happened.