Thoughts on "premium" plugins?

[chipbennett]

I like those categories Chip. That is making me change my current plan of attack re: support.

I'm curious to know if that approach works. The imperative is to find a way to make support scalable. "Hand-holding" type support inherently does not scale. I think the key is finding the right balance of when to shunt off support queries into the "custom" (i.e. much-more-expensive, hourly rate) category.

[Ryan]

One thing which bugs me with providing a flat rate support fee, for example for a paid support forum, is that you don't normally have a way to cap how much support you are willing to provide to one person. I've been burned a few times lately with this approach as some people really push the open nature of a paid support forum a little above and beyond what is reasonable. For example, they'll pay a flat fee of US$100 and yet I end up doing 30+ hours work for them, so that works out at about US$3/hour for me which I'm not particularly happy with. Thankfully over an extended period, the time-consuming people are mostly outweighed by the number of more reasonable non-time consuming people, but it is an awkward situation to be in when I have to essentially refuse to continue answering questions for people, or at least slow down my responses despite them having paid for a flat month long fee.

Ironically, it is those time-consuming people who always seem the least happy with the support they receive :(

There are other solutions, such as ticketing systems where they only get to ask individual questions and are limited by the number of questions to ask, but that seems quite annoying for the end-users. Personally I would much rather have an open limit on support questions rather than worrying about wasting support tickets. Plus it's open to people jamming lots of questions into a single question just to work the system.

[commentluv]

That's exactly what I did! I even spent a week crafting explicit instructional error messages that told the user exactly what happened, what to do about it, why it happened and how they could prevent it from happening again and do you know what they did?

"dear support, I got this message -"error with your url, you may have spelled it wrongly or left off the .com part. Go back and enter your exact site url" , what do I do?"


Basically, people find it a lot easier to ask you what an error means that actually read the error.

I used to try and educate them or guide them through it so they wont need to ask the next time. I would say something like, "What does the error message say?" and they would copy and paste it without even reading it! so I would reply back with the exact same wording as the error message that they just sent to me and guess what? because it was in the context of an answer to a support ticket, they were able to actually take note of what it said and follow it and then they'd send back an answer, "wow, that wurked! your orsome!"

I can usually spot a freebie at a hundred yards now just by how the ticket is worded, or even easier is if the site it's asking about has something to do with MLM or internet marketing and I let them sit for a couple days. More often than not, they reply back a day later saying, "never mind, I fixed it"

If someone starts by saying, "I tried x but it didn't work so I looked at y..." then I know I can help them, someone who is at least willing to give it a go themselves before asking for help is usually the type of person that really appreciates help and I'm more than happy to go the extra mile for them.

My next site will have a more organized way of support...

1. here's the FAQ
2. you can read the forum.
3. if you're a paid member then you can ask questions in the forum..

charging even a dollar will stop 90% of lame questions dead in their tracks and they'll go read the FAQ another time.

[Ryan]

charging even a dollar will stop 90% of lame questions dead in their tracks and they'll go read the FAQ another time.

I'm not sure if that was a serious suggestion, but perhaps that could nip the problem in the butt immediately? If a support forum charged you $1 for each question, it would immediately remove all the riff raff wanting to ask silly questions yet keep it cheap enough for the average punter to happily ask away when they need help.

[webbyrobster]

just because you pay for a plugin or because it is called premium, doesn't mean it's better.

Like the above statement, that's the trap I fell in as a newbie to Wordpress, but never again.