We all know that small things can often make a big difference in our lives and business. This is a story about how that rule works in our case.

Some of you might have noticed the support request submission form on activeCollab website. Here’s how it looks like:

I need to mention that this is not something that we came up with – this is a request description box that HelpSpot offers to it’s users to be posted on the contact page.

It is not a secret that we are using HelpSpot to manage our customer support, and this type of contact form is one of the thing that turns out to be surprisingly useful to us. It makes communication with our users much, much easier.

When you are in trouble only thing that matters to you is to find a way out, you don’t think much how did you get here in a first place. It’s a similar situation with customer support requests. When people are asking for help they often don’t know what exactly went wrong and which part of the application they don’t understand. They just wish to see it working in a way they want. Because of that it is can be really hard for us to help people without knowing what really happened with their activeCollab.

This is where the contact form on the support page helps the most! Such type of contact form may seem confusing to people at first sight, but they still go along with it. In most cases users are trying to fill out all the fields and to give us all the answers. These answers are the key of figuring out where the problem is. We can reconstruct their actions and find out what they wanted to accomplish. The rest is easy – we simply give them instructions on how to set the thing properly, or which is the feature that they should use, or… Anyway, we manage to help people effectively and quickly.

Communication, as one of the most important aspects of quality customer support, is something that we have to be good at. People often don’t know what are all the info they need to provide us to help them solve the problem and that’s why they can’t say everything in a simple email message. And when we don’t have all the info we have to ask, and by the time we find out all relevant facts there are already 4 to 6 emails in the inbox that haven’t solved the real issue. In most cases we have managed to avoid this situation by using a different support request submission form.

When problems are solved with a first reply email, you can get:

  • a happy customer
  • a lot of positive feedback
  • less time spend working on support requests (we all work on many different things in A51, but customer support is our top priority, and as soon as we clear our inbox, we can devote to other tasks)

It’s a win-win situation for all parties! And all because of a small and insignificant thin, such as custom contact form.