We just published our first WP theme on the market and we are really excited.
We are located in Asia, however most of our sales have been to US customers.
Providing timely and professional customer support is one of our biggest goals,
however we have only two people on our team who are fluent in English.
The other members could be considered moderate in their language capabilities.
We would like to rotate our team to provide 24/7 customer support and cutback on
our response time. However, this would mean that the grammar quality of our
responses might drop a little bit.
So which would you guys suggest is better, faster response time with occasional
mistakes, or a bit slower response that is written in a more professional manner?
I would like to know what the average response time of experienced authors are.
It definitely matters when it comes to writing product descriptions.
Maybe this is just me, but for me the most important thing about dealing with anyone in a support role is feeling like they are a real person, who’s genuinely happy to be working with me and good at their job. Not just going through a script.
To that end, I’d suggest actually calling it out within the support tickets.
“Our team is based in Asia, and whilst English isn’t our first language, we aim to provide the best support we can to everyone!”
I’d be less worried about the grammar in replies and more about if someone who’s English is not their first language is correctly understanding and addressing the question. (Especially when they may be replying to someone else who’s English and ability to explain their issue may not be fluent).
I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Yoda has decent English, but poor grammar… and nobody thinks any less of him. Luke wasn’t like “This dude’s grammar is terrible, I wish Ben was still around”.
He probably did, but he would have regretted it when they got to the “run around with the jedi master on your back, like a backpack” stage of his training. I wonder who Yoda had on his back when he did his training all those years ago… funny if it was some seven foot jedi Wookie.
