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Behind-the-Scenes: WooThemes Support
30. Nov, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in 5 Minutes With Woo
By now you know that we’re a pretty open & transparent bunch when it comes to running our business. We’d like to believe that the experiences & knowledge we’ve shared has added value, that exceeds that of our products individually. So with that in mind, we’ll be doing a few “behind-the-scenes”-type posts every now and again, to give you a more in-depth look at the different aspects of WooThemes.
To kick this off, we wanted to share some thoughts on our Support processes…
Support Resources
Since our themes are GPL licensed, there’s a big emphasis on all of our support resources (which includes the forum, our knowledgebase, tutorials and also our Affiliated Woo Workers). You’ll note that you’d only be able to see those pages if you were a WooThemes customer, because those have been “locked down” for general public use.
Why? Well, as mentioned there’s a massive emphasis within our business on creating top-notch, valuable resources that are only available to WooUsers. Since piracy is becoming more and more of an issue (plus legally our themes are allowed to be distributed), we need to make sure that only paying customers get the benefit of these fantastic resources.
In the same vein, we’ve been spending quite a bit of time of late improving our theme documentation, as that is probably one of the most valuable resources that our members have available to them. Our focus is thus on maintaining and improving these resources, which further justifies the price tag associated with being a WooThemes member.
E-mail Support
Another thing we encounter quite often, are e-mails requesting technical support. Even though our contact page clearly mentions that these kind of requests need to be directed to the forum, people are sometimes ignorant and / or lazy… So whilst we always decline those requests (again – directing them to the forum instead), we’re not doing so because we want to be unhelpful; instead we’re just looking after our business. Here’s why we do things this way:
- Firstly, we need to make sure that only paying customers are getting support from us. This is done to be fair to our customers (as they paid for support) and also to safeguard the sustainability of our business.
- Secondly – if we had to answer every question via e-mail, that valuable information / solution would only be available to one person. If we answer it on the forum, we cut out publishing duplicate solutions, plus we make it available to all of our users, instead of just one person. This again increases the sustainability of our support function, as well as creating an extremely valuable (and extensive) knowledgebase.
Does that make a little more sense? Doesn’t seem like we’re monsters in any way, does it? 
Fact is, as WooThemes is growing, we need to make sure that the business (and all of its processes) scales along with the growth in user numbers. If we don’t scale the business properly, you’ll begin to see a drop-off in quality, as well as quantity relating to new themes, answering support requests, new blog posts and even tweeting. So by getting the right boundaries in place, we’re just increasing the likelihood that we’ll scale properly…
(Note: This however doesn’t mean that we won’t continue to walk the extra mile for our customers!)
17 Responses to “Behind-the-Scenes: WooThemes Support”
30 November 2009 at 7:51 am #
All very logical Adii and thanks for the support that the forums offer – however not everyone is best served by a forum. Particularly when it comes to requests for new functionality.
I’ve suggested a feature which I know would be a lot of work and I think doing that in a forum would then make it a bigger list.
Thanks for continuing to go the extra mile. Bought the developer license on Black Friday and support to tell me where to find it after I’d purchased was first class.
30 November 2009 at 7:56 am #
Fair enough, but feature suggestions could go to e-mail. It’s only really technical support questions that we direct to the forums.
And great to have you on board as a member!
30 November 2009 at 8:17 am #
Great read. Both are the very important points and I would also add effciency here. Sometime, in technical support we do need to add code lines, image screenshots etc. and the conversation keeps going. Having that in forum is efficient way to help the customers.
Ofcourse, once the problem is solved, rest of the members can benefit from this forever.
30 November 2009 at 11:59 pm #
Spot on!
I just wish that some users would actually search & read more, but guess that’s part of technical support.
I think the most important thing for us as a company, is the fact that we really pride ourselves in providing only the best support resources; so we really do try go that extra mile for our customers, whilst just balancing that with running a sustainable business.
30 November 2009 at 8:26 am #
People always seem to think there question is more important- hence the email.
30 November 2009 at 1:29 pm #
I can definitely understand the need to keep the sustainability of your business going by offering good support to the people who buy.
Another thing to note is that a lot of time the pirated versions of themes have extra crap in them, they are outdated, or provide holes that hackers can use to compromise your Wordpress.
Always a better option to pay the small price for a theme. Plus it allows the theme company to continue making themes – otherwise they’d go out of business and you wouldn’t get any more quality themes.
1 December 2009 at 12:00 am #
Ditto. If we didn’t make money from WooThemes, we’d need to get full-time jobs and only work on Woo when we have time to. That would mean we’d never be able to release 3 / 4 themes per month and we wouldn’t be able to work with the best web designers on the planet either…
30 November 2009 at 3:38 pm #
If had one wish for the forums… I wish the forums would email me a notice when someone responds to my post. Sometimes I lose track and spend a lot of time searching to see if my posts have responses.
1 December 2009 at 12:01 am #
This is something that we are working on for 2010 and we hope to rock some awesome new functionality next year.
30 November 2009 at 7:23 pm #
Everything you wrote about should go without saying and I’m a bit surprised to think the points expanded upon needed to be explained.
Going the extra mile to explain things, like you have in this post, will keep loyal paying members loyal while the non-supporters will go elsewhere.
1 December 2009 at 12:03 am #
I believe that we run our company in a very open, honest & transparent way. So posts like these (whilst most people would’ve known this already), just clears any kind of misconceptions that may exist.
I also think there’s an element of knowledge-sharing involved in this and I hope that some of our readers would benefit from sharing in our experiences in growing our own business.
1 December 2009 at 9:54 pm #
I think you guys go the extra mile by helping us newer designers with wordpress related code and css. You could easily say, “hey kid, go learn the template tags and stop bugging us.” But you don’t, instead you guys (props to tiag) guide us through each process and explain it the whole way for a very good rate. Thanks.
30 November 2009 at 7:37 pm #
I should add that I’m very pleased, to say the least, with Woo Themes and the support that comes with each theme.
30 November 2009 at 11:05 pm #
Hi.. I just took over a site that is using the Aperture theme… I assume the original developer purchased the theme, but don’t know for sure… so the problem I have is that there is a glitch in the theme under certain circumstances when viewed with Firefox (IE is okay.. shocking)… anyway I can’t access the forums.. I know that an email won’t be responded to (and I understand the reasons for that)… so what do you recommend for someone like me?
1 December 2009 at 12:05 am #
Well, we would’ve responded to the e-mail; we just couldn’t give you any technical support!
In your case, you have two options: 1) get the original developer to transfer his WooThemes account to you; or 2) purchase Aperture from us directly.
You’re more than welcome to drop us an e-mail (which will definitely be responded to) for some help in getting access to the support resources.
1 December 2009 at 10:40 am #
The support through the forum works fine, but the search functions of the fourum could be better. And also thanks for responding to questions that are not always related to a certain theme.
1 December 2009 at 11:09 am #
Agreed on the search-functionality; this is definitely something that we’re hoping to improve on with some of the things we’re working on in the background at the moment.