Tips and Tricks HQ Support Portal › Forums › WP eMember › WP eMember Tweaks › The Importance of Carefully Written Help Pages
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March 9, 2016 at 12:38 pm #13338jharriesMember
This is not a request for support, but rather an attempt to give back for great plugins and support at a great price.
When we first started using WP eMember we had a terrible time supporting our members. Not a day would go by that at least 3 or 4 members (out of 1000 at the time) would not have a problem with logging in, joining or renewing their membership.
And worse still, at least 75% or those members requiring support were angry and threatening to cancel their membership.
We carefully analyzed what was going on and found:
1). There was no weaknesses in the plugin that was causing the problem.
2). People were already angry because of the poor way they are treated on the internet by large companies they must do business with like banks and communications companies—they were simply primed to be upset and therefore took it out on us and eMember, even though 99% of the time they had done something wrong that caused the situation.
After figuring out what was going on, we set out to write a set of help pages. This is a lot harder than it sounds. Even though I have a background in software support, and we are writers.
But two years later support emails are down 90%, even though we have over twice as many members, and we almost never get an angry one. Most start with “I know I have done something stupid, please help me”. The difference is huge.
A few key points:
1. The help pages must be very personal, so that members understand we are just a small business run by a couple who really care, not some faceless corporation.
2. They immediately understand that we are there for them and we will solve every problem.
3. The wording is personal and relates to them. So a link might read “I Can’t Get Paypal to Work” not “Help with Paypal”.
4. Login problems are the most common and his was the hardest to crack. The breakthrough was when we realized that the HELP link must be right next to the login link, not in a separate menu. You can see that here: [https://www.morganscloud.com] (top right).
Anyway, our pages are here: https://www.morganscloud.com/member-help/
Feel free to copy any part of the text. Please note that the image of the angry guy came from Adobe stock and is not available unless you licence it from them.
If tips and tricks would like to put a link in the eMember documentation, that’s cool to.
One note: If you copy our text verbatim make sure you use a rel=”cononical” tag in the page header pointing our original page. Otherwise Google may label one of us (probably you) as a scraper (duplicate content) and it may hurt your pagerank.
March 12, 2016 at 2:50 am #72709adminKeymasterVery nice. Thank you for sharing.
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