Here at Vivid Image our goal is to always provide fast and efficient solutions to any tech issues you may experience with your website or Vivid Image provided email accounts. In an effort to help clear up the lines of communication and make sure our tech team has all the information they need to get you an answer as quickly as possible, we’ve come up with a couple of things you can do to help us help you.
Get your request to the right person
Account directors are often your best first point of contact for any issues you may be experiencing with your website or emails. They’re in the perfect position to get the big picture and can often assign tech troubleshooting tasks to the right member of our tech team to ensure your issues gets the attention it needs as soon as possible. Communicating directly with your Account Director also has the added benefit of keeping them in the loop and up-to-date on any issues you may be experiencing with your site or emails and can help recommend long term solutions or services that can help prevent issues in the future.
Clarity
Clarity is a key facet of any technical communications. The clearer your initial request for support is the less likely our support team or account directors will need to engage in a back and forth discussion asking for clarification. Some example questions you can think about when requesting support are;
- Where did the issue occur?
- What were you doing at the time of the issue?
- When did the issue first happen?
- Is the issue still occurring or has it stopped?
- If the issue has stopped when did it stop? Did you do anything different when it stopped?
A well-defined support request will help us respond quicker and get to work on the problem right away instead of waiting for clarification from you. As an example consider the following support requests.
“Attachments aren’t showing up in my email”
Vs
“When using Outlook 2013 email attachments aren’t showing up on emails, for example the email I received today at 11:30 from [email protected] was missing a zip attachment.”
The second request offers some important details such as which email client you we’re using and an example of an email that was missing an attachment along with the type of attachment you were expecting to receive. All of these little clues will help our tech team get to work on your problem right away.
Detail
Details are an extension of our clarity point above. The better the details you provide the more clearly your request will be for our tech team and will help us to replicate the issue and begin investigating solutions. There are many variables when it comes to tech problems so knowing which ones were in play when you had an issue appear is crucial to our tech team’s ability to replicate your issue. Things you should consider when reaching out for help are things like:
- Were you working on the front end of the site or the dashboard?
- Were you logged into the site at the time of the issue?
- What exactly were you doing at the time of the issue?
- What were you trying to accomplish?
- Does this issue appear on all pages or only one?
- What email client or browser are you using / seeing this problem in?
- Have you tried clearing your browser’s cache and cookies?
- Was this issue reported to you by your customers / users? If so was it just one or many?
All of these tiny details add up to paint a larger picture and help direct our tech team’s focus better, which ultimately results in a quicker and more permanent solution to your issue. A helpful tool we recommend to use is https://www.whatismybrowser.com/. This tool will allow you to email us a lot of the little details about your browser and operating system that helps us narrow down the root cause of your issue.
A picture is worth a thousand words
Sometimes seeing what you’re seeing can go a long way in getting our tech team on the right track to solving your issue. Both Windows (snipping tool) and Mac OS X (keyboard shortcuts) provide built in ways for you to easily take a screenshot of what you’re experiencing. Dropping one or two screenshots in an email to your account director along with answers to some of the questions can really help speed up the process.
In conclusion
There is often a big gap between a support request and a good support request. Making sure you’re submitting good support requests to the right people will help Vivid Image to serve you better and provide the kind of long term and personal support we want to provide for all of our clients.
