McFilter

The fourth panel was a question-and-answer session about ways to provide support for your users. The panel comprised:

• Marcel Hartgerink of Wibu Systems
• Thomas Wetzel of Wisco
• Bob Walsh of My Micro-ISV
• Marck Pearlstone of BrainStorm Software
• Tony Edgecombe of Frogmore
• Gary Elfring of Elfring Fonts

Q: Should I put my phone number on my website?

Gary: I love phone calls. Beginners call and you can get info out of them.

Q: Where do you draw the line, so that you don't end up being tech-support for everything for that user?

Marck: Our product is only $35 and we don't have a phone number. We mainly support people on our user forum or via email. Forums let your users support each other.

Gary: What is the ratio of support:sales?

Tony: At least you're finding out about bugs.

Bob: Depends where you are in sales process.

Thomas: Often it's companies who want to phone you. Sometimes they're just checking that you exist.

Marcel: They have a phone number. Not always cost effective but it is necessary.

Q: How do you control forums?

Bob: Had forums for a while but then moved to FogBugz as it's better.

Tony: It's about how you respond to negative messages.

Audience: Often leave it for other users to evangelise the product.

Q: How do you deal with phone calls as a 1 man band?

Bob: It's worth the occasional interruption. He leaves his email address on the answerphone.

Gary: They have published hours, "we won't call you back", and have a separate business line with an answerphone out of hours.

Bob: FogBugz has bayesian filter on its forums and lets spammers think they've succeeded when they haven't.

Quick Survey of the Attendees

• Just over 50% don't have forums
• Not many have a phone number
• Almost everyone has email support
• Just under half use email rather than a contact form

Both the panel and the audience were split on whether a contact form was essential or whether an email address was a better solution.

Audience: They make follow up phone calls, which work really well.

Bob: Email must have personal voice.

Marck: Swears by the Bat as email client.

Gary: Has lots of canned responses in the Bat.

Thomas: DirectAccess from Andrea is good.

Bob: Tech support is a sales opportunity.

Audience: Plimus show reports of failed transactions, so you could follow up or at least monitor them.

Gary: Put your phone number on the purchase pages.

How do you deal with requests for lost keys?

Marck and Bob: Manually.

Thomas: Has a web server to mail you your keys but tracks who is using it.

Gary: Just offers upgrades after a year

Q: What about customers who share keys?

Marck: Uses users name in the key and displays it in the program to shame them.

Tony: It's also an education process. Not everyone realises it's a problem.

Marck: He doesn't mind a person installing it on multiple machines for their own use.

Gary: Offer discount info in the software.

Tony: Price things like a "family licence" for not much more than your standard licence.

Bob: His licence is for 2 machines but the other machine could be a friend's. It broadens the reach of who sees your software.

Q: Installation onto a USB key. Does that affect things?

Marck: They already allow that as an option.

Marcel: Their company's product lets people offer that as an option.

Bob: Unregistered copies should give a trial version in that scenario.

Q: Mathilde Rufenacht - What about supporting localised software?

Marcel: They can always give support in English, and if you're lucky with an engineer they could also speak your language.

Audience: www.linguatec.de offer a good free online translation tool.

Q: Has anyone considered outsourcing support?

No-one in either audience or panel has.