About Support and CMS Users

    About five years ago, a friend of mine was an employee of a mobile operator. One fine summer Friday evening, we agreed to meet in order to drink kvass in a cafe, but he was always late at work and I stopped by him so as not to lose time. Walking along the corridors of the cellular company, I noticed a subscriber support department, which was like an aquarium, behind a transparent wall, but quite soundproof. There were about ten people, mostly girls, all with headsets on their heads and with very worried faces. Until that moment, I didn’t really think about how it works when I call in support of a mobile operator with my cellular problems and a girl answers me. But then I thought. Indeed, in fact, round-the-clock support, thousands of subscribers, people are addressing completely different problems. And the operator must be correct, accurate and ultimately help the subscriber. I did not find out any particularly interesting details about the work of their technical support at the time, although I tried. :) But now we have our tech supportdiafan.CMS and over three years of work, we have accumulated a lot of interesting things, which I will share with you today. So, technical support from the inside, with supportive eyes.


    First, some numbers.
    We have a little more than 1000 users . Just a multiple of percent.
    But the technical support calls for 2011 were not a round number: 3617 questions. On average, almost 10 per day. For months and days, more or less evenly. :)

    In the picture: the number of technical support requests per month with a monthly distribution.
    Distribution of questions by month

    Moreover, only 378 out of a total of 1000 asked these technical support questions. Accordingly, this is only 38% of the total number of our users.

    Interestingly, this is only 42% of users who have purchased a license for CMS. That is, it turns out that the remaining three fifths of the users who bought diafan.CMS silently install it, configure it, use it and do not ask any questions. For comparison, in 2010, 54% of buyers contacted technical support, that is, only less than half of users went without questions. So, our work on the Frequently Asked Questions and documentation is not in vain. :)

    We go further. You might think that all questions are asked equally evenly and these are 10 questions per user, but no. Exactly 20% of users asked only one question, and 80% asked 2 or more.

    In the picture: distribution of technical support requests by users
    Distribution of questions by users

    This illustration shows that 80% of users ask 20% of the questions (well, maybe a little more, 27 percent), this just meets the Pareto golden rule. Accordingly, the remaining 80% of the questions came from 20% of users, especially pedantic, inquisitive, or simply lazy. :)

    Here the reverse schedule is just visible.

    In the picture: TOP users by the number of technical support calls
    Distribution of users by the number of hits

    In the table, I publish another important parameter - the number of diafan.CMS licenses purchased by the user. If there are about 10 or more licenses, it is most likely a partner who creates sites for their clients on the basis of diafan.CMS and then the number of questions asked is justified and logical: the partner digs the essence, finely tunes various sites, and therefore asks a lot of clarifying questions. Again, from partners, these may be requests asking to change the domain in the license and other service requests. But the presence in the top of users who bought one CMS, obviously for their own site, and asked one and a half hundred questions is discouraging. :)

    I think that in any technical support there are such subscribers, without which the day of the service specialists can not do. And obviously, someone calls the same mobile operator every two days and asks questions like “Why did I have 4 signal strength sticks on my phone yesterday, but today only 3?” :)

    We also come across funny questions and messages in tech support . For instance:
    • User: How do I install a server?

    • User: And why do I have a unit lower than 6 and G in the inscription “TMG 16 KVA”?
      This is a technical guide, not a restaurant menu, and these beauties are inappropriate.


    • User: I apologize for not immediately answering - I was waiting for you for more than an hour, and then left the computer because I was upset because of a failure in work.

    • User: Why do I have long images on the text open?
      Technical support: you simply upload non-optimized photos, for example, a photo of size 3024 * 2016 takes the volume of as much as 4.5 MB. Although it may take 100kb, 45 times less.
      User: Where can I get the optimizer. 45 times smaller photo?

    • User: My site is crookedly displayed in IE6 and normal in IE8. What is the reason?

    • User: I reviewed our correspondence from the very beginning. November 1, you told me about some mysterious jquery. I will not pretend that I understand this bird language, so say it again in Russian.


    Of course, it is ideal when the service provided is so good that it does not force the user to seek help at all. We are striving for this, but I'm afraid this is a utopia. If there is technical support, they will always contact it.

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