Your ideas wanted on improving vbseo support

I've noticed there are a lot of people happy with the vbseo support offered, and there are a minority that aren't so happy. With me its very mixed. Some days its great and some days its not.

I get the feeling Crawlability are in a place where their user base is growing quicker than they can grow the support team - so I thought we could club together to come up with ideas for improving support and reducing their workload on common problems.

- An online instruction manual

- Support opening times


Those are my ideas - what are yours?

We do have official support times. But we try to be available as many hours of the day as possible.

You're correct about documentation. We plan to improve it by providing official user documentation, how-tos, and faqs, to help users discover info quickly.

By the way - we certainly look forward to hearing all of your suggestions. Support is something we take pride in and definitely would like to improve.

Well,

I find it VERY frusturating to read in a lot of threads that the solution to a problem is done over private support or PM.
vBSEO personal or users can reply to a thread with "Problem solved ...." but not a single word about how!!!
So the same problems get solved over and over again in private.....

Make a searchable knowledgebase of all the cases and the support will decrease for sure or tell about the solution when replying to the thread.

Many of us really try hard to find solutions by reading and searching because we want to learn but that is difficult when so many problems is solved in private without presenting the solution.

Regards

Very good point. This is something that we've noted as well.

What happens is that we often request private login information to more rapidly troubleshoot hands on. Therefore, this needs to be done in private.

When dealing with support issues, we are often on to the next customer, and do not have a lot of time to repost a description of the fix in the public forums.

We are going to alleviate this by developing a how to, faq, and expanded troubleshooting guide capturing the solutions to common issues and the steps to correcting them.

Joe,

I fully understand the problem and also know how hard it can be for a technician to document afterwards....(I'm one myself)

But my suggestion is to let someone else pick the private support cases and remove any sensitive information and after a tech has approwed it you could publish it.

Our support issues have a high tendency to be the same set of issues repeatedly. It's just new users that are unaware, largely because it is difficult to find troubleshooting information.

If we have this information prepared, it will be very easy for us to link to the solution thread within each bug/issue report thread for the benefit of other users monitoring the thread.

Once the documentation is in place, we expect this will be a far more efficient method of distributing solution info to public threads.

@all - Thanks for the suggestions so far.

I'd suggest a wiki.

I've fixed/found stuff/tweaked things on my own plenty of times for random things, and afterwards, i could easily post what i did in a section of a wiki. later on, someone might improve on what i did, and can alter my post.

Originally Posted by briansol

I'd suggest a wiki.

I've fixed/found stuff/tweaked things on my own plenty of times for random things, and afterwards, i could easily post what i did in a section of a wiki. later on, someone might improve on what i did, and can alter my post.

Excellent suggestion! There's a very good chance we implement one in the near future.

I find the support here too quick and snappy (as apposed to be personalised and thoughtfull).

vBulletin support team only asks for FTP + Admin details as a last resort, whereas here its the first thing they ask for. I know the vbseo support team they probably think: "ohh its just this problem again" and want to dive in and fix it, but some people don't like random people accessing their server/admincp.

Also I'd like to add, that when "fixing" my last issue I had (Zend 3.2.x Incompatibility) the settings where left wrong. A backup hadn't been made before hand. Luckily I had a backup of the settings from a few weeks back. The response I got was that a new possible "fix" will be in the next version (gold), which is still yet to come out. I managed to fix the problem myself in the end (which was because there was too much text in: "Define Dimension Attributes", who knows why but after reducing the amount of entries the problem stopped).

So overall you can see I'm not best please with the support. Its fairly average in my opinion and alot can be improved.

Hope this helps

I think web host specific notes would be useful, detailing specific settings that have to be altered for a particular web host, especially the popular ones.

For example, I'm with Mosso hosting - I'll try to put some notes together and post them in the forum.

Others could do the same with their web hosts.

Ok, I've added the Mosso hosting notes here:

Mosso hosting notes on installing vbseo


I'm going to ask the support guys to set up a forum just for hosting notes, I think this could be a real time saver for everyone.

I think a wiki would be good only if mods and staff have permission to edit the main pages.

Originally Posted by MaestroX

I find the support here too quick and snappy (as apposed to be personalised and thoughtfull).

vBulletin support team only asks for FTP + Admin details as a last resort, whereas here its the first thing they ask for. I know the vbseo support team they probably think: "ohh its just this problem again" and want to dive in and fix it, but some people don't like random people accessing their server/admincp.

Also I'd like to add, that when "fixing" my last issue I had (Zend 3.2.x Incompatibility) the settings where left wrong. A backup hadn't been made before hand. Luckily I had a backup of the settings from a few weeks back. The response I got was that a new possible "fix" will be in the next version (gold), which is still yet to come out. I managed to fix the problem myself in the end (which was because there was too much text in: "Define Dimension Attributes", who knows why but after reducing the amount of entries the problem stopped).

So overall you can see I'm not best please with the support. Its fairly average in my opinion and alot can be improved.

Hope this helps

Thanks for the feedback Chris. Will be taken in consideration.