A few years ago I was working as a staff photographer at a daily newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas. I was helping my friend and mentor, Bill Snead, out with a portrait and his subject was quite self conscious in front of the camera. Noticing the situation, Snead took action.

“When you look bad, I look bad. And I don’t like to look bad,” said Snead.

It was a simple, yet powerful statement that essentially transfered the success of the photo shoot from the subject to the photographer. Consequently, the subject relaxed and Snead worked hard to make great photos. In the end, the photos came out great. It was a brilliant move. A double win.

At Graph Paper Press, we work hard to build beautiful WordPress themes and we understand that the success of your website depends greatly on the support you receive from us along the way. When questions pop up, we help you out. When you find an issue, we get it resolved. After all, when you look good, we look good. Looking bad isn’t an option.

Improvements

So earlier this week, we implemented small changes to improve our support system to make sure you get the answers you need, fast.

1. Fix or FAQ – This is a new policy we’ve instituted internally. It essentially means this: If our users ask the same questions over and over again, we must be doing something wrong. If that’s the case, we’ll fix it. Otherwise, we’ll mark it as a FAQ entry or make the thread public.
2. Public or Private – Also a new internal policy. All support tickets are now a private two-way conversation between you and our support team. Some users we’re occasionally posting sensitive data in our forum, which was public. Our support team does have the ability to make a private discussion public. We will use option to highlight quality, resolved discussions. This will make our support forum far more useful for finding answers.
3. Clearer Support Policy – We’ve clarified our support policy and made it available on the homepage of the support forum for easy reference.
4. New Customization Options – If you don’t know code, but want to customize your WordPress theme, you have two options: If you need a small change that requires coding, you can hire a Tweaker. If you have lots of changes and need full-blown site customization, you can hire a Customizer.

3 Tips for Fast Response Times

When the initial question our customers ask is helpful, we can provide a fast response time, which helps to solve the problem in as few steps as possible.

1. Write short, concise questions. One sentence is ideal.
2. Post one question per ticket.
3. Always provide your URL.

Our goal for customer support is simple: Make sure all questions are answered as fast and accurately possible. We hope you find these small improvements helpful. If you have ideas for improving on what we’ve outline above, we’re all ears. After all, when you you look good, we look good. And that is our goal.