While out walking the hounds, I was thinking to myself… back in the day, support was a very organic process. You could support people if you wanted, not support them if you didn’t, there were no set fees and all that jazz. Now it’s very structured, there are set fees, and you pay the fess you get the support, you don’t then you don’t.
As young Frankie was sniffing around in the undergrowth, it occurred to me that with thousands or tens of thousands of Themeforest and Codecanyon authors, buyers are getting thousands or tens of thousands of different levels of support. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years is that buyers like good customer service and to an extent, they like consistent customer service. Based on a lot of the posts in the forums from buyers, some think that they are buying an item from Envato, rather than from individual authors, so if they get poor or inconsistent support then that reflects badly on Envato as a whole.
If people have a bad experience then they usually don’t complain, they just go elsewhere.
Now, I’m sure that 90% or 95% or 99.9% of authors are providing great support, but I think it would be good to have some kind of best practice document when it comes to customer service, so that people have a bit of guidance on what’s expected.
Like I say, it might be that 99% of people don’t need this or want this, and I’m not saying we should teach people to suck eggs, but I think some kind of official document/training/guidelines could help the 1%. Or there could be the odd nugget within such a guide that a lot of people might have not considered that could come in handy.
Happy customers are more likely to buy more stuff than unhappy customers, so this could be good for everyone. And if people are now having to pay for this support, then there’s a higher potential for them to be unhappy. When support was free, there was probably a kind of ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ and ‘you get what you pay for’ mentality… now they’re going to have to put down cold, hard cash… they’re probably going to have higher expectations.
Wotcha reckon?
