An all new user guide

Along with the release of WooCommerce 1.4 today also see’s the release of our new plugin documentation and user guide, efficiently housed in a Wikeasi theme installation. It’s a work in progress that we plan to constantly update, but already it’s a huge improvement over our existing user guide and codex pages.

The Wikeasi powered WooCommerce docs.

A WooCommerce public forum

After careful deliberation we have also decided to open a forum available to all WooCommerce users who freely register on the WooCommerce page to download the plugin. This forum will be supporting the growing community BY the community. We cannot guarantee any support to be provided by our ninjas, however we will be closely monitoring the threads for bugs, feature requests and general recommendations. We have a lot of active, passionate, and helpful WooCommerce users who would love to interact with likeminded individuals. Perhaps you’ll even meet someone in the forums to work on a WooCommerce extension or a client project together? You never know.

Simplify. Work out the kinks. Re-focus.

That’s our plan for 2012, discussed in meticulous detail over the past couple weeks during Magnus’s visit to Cape Town. Exactly what that entails remains top secret for now. What we hope will increase happiness levels amongst our users is our quest to make our support structures more efficient. Working out the kinks.

With 123 themes and 123 theme docs, and other support resources including a knowledgebase, FAQs, a support forum, tutorials and a video library catering for over 130,000 users it’s very much a daunting work in progress that we are tackling one resource at a time. Below details some of the work going on behind the scenes recently.

Talking 2012 strategy with our latest board member - Adii Junior.

Email

Mid last year we implemented Assistly, a customer service system, to manage our pre-sales and administration email. Previously, we simply used Google Mail and thanks to IMAP between myself, Adii and Ryan we managed to keep the mailbox under control and synchronised. We still use Google Apps to deliver our mail, but thanks to Assistly we now have a sexy, fast interface to use, we can assign mail easier, track response times and draw all sorts of interesting reports on customer interactions, resolve email threads, as well as manage our social media channels, like Twitter, without worrying about numerous staff members replying to the same tweets. There are a wealth of other facilities we are yet to tap into, but hope to explore soon.

Capacity wise we now have Ryan in the United States, Sven in China, and Adii overseeing the inbox here in South Africa – covering all time zones helping us deal with the 150+ emails we receive and keep our response times impressively fast, averaging under 3 hours.

Reports gathered thanks to Assistly.

Support Forums

With the launch of our own custom membership system late last year we re-developed our forums. In the short term that meant lots of small bugs and hassles as we took the database structure of bbPress, stripped the unnecessary code and built on top of it. In the longer term it is now meaning we have far more flexibility in terms of how our forum threads are presented, managed, answered and assigned.

The team can now assign topics

Previously we used Lighthouse to track bugs/feature requests and assign to our developers/designers, but that meant logging into another system and no direct automated correlation between a user reported issue and it’s fix. We now have the assignment of threads and conversion into bug reports automated within our forums.

We also have various admin views for quick access to support threads that need attention, and a ninja leaderboard to help encourage the team when they aren’t performing as well as the rest of the team know they are capable of, so we  can pat team members on the back and reward them when they are doing well, and keep track of their targets they have to meet each month.

Useful forum tools and stats available for the team.

We’ve also implemented strict controls on who can post on a user’s thread – only the support ninjas and the user who started the topic. This may seem impractical to some, reporting the same query again, but it helps us keep track of what is resolved, with only the original poster able to open the thread again. Having a closed forum also avoid answers that might be wrong or off topic from other members, which in return ensures that we can deliver proper support from our WooNinjas.

Only topic author can reply to a topic.

A user also needs to wait for a support ninja to reply before they can comment on a thread again. They can of course edit their post, but by limiting further replies allows the support queue to stay in order. Our ninjas try to reply to the oldest posts first and as soon as a follow up post is added to the mix it goes to the back of the queue again = unhappy customer.

After posting, members are asked to wait to avoid bumping threads.

These revisions may sound rather minor, but they’ve had significant results on support levels. We are still struggling with overwhelming numbers of support queries at the moment, but have hired a new support ninja we hope to introduce soon, as well as headhunting a more senior support manager which we have no doubt will help increase capacity and customer happiness levels even further.

Videos

Some of the WP101 titles available to all our users in the support section of the site.

Video tutorials are an important part of our support resources, a more visual learning experience. We’ve recently updated our video library with our good friend Shawn Hesketh’s latest WordPress101 series that can be used by our users to train their clients, or even themselves. The WordPress101 series is geared for WordPress 3.3 so is up-to-date and hugely helpful in getting to know the WordPress system.

And there you have it, a small glimpse into the recent behind the scenes happenings at WooHQ in trying to ensure happy customers, and the often hard graft that entails.

I was specifically thinking of our “Custom Logo” function, which is included in every single theme and allows the user to quickly & easily replace the theme’s default logo with their own. No frills, no fuss. This isn’t a very glamorous feature and as far as usage goes, you’d probably find that almost all WooCommunity users have used it. The development that went into the feature is also minimal, since it’s not the most complicated function that ever needed coding. This obviously also means that support enquiries for this feature is pretty much non-existent.

Could this be the perfect feature? Maybe.

We’re not saying that we don’t believe in the more expansive, elaborate & complicated features which we include in themes like Listings, SupportPress & the likes. But in the search for which theme features are most used across the whole WooCommunity, simple may be best. Less perhaps sometimes is more.

What is your favourite WooThemes feature? What simple features do you think we should include in more themes?

So much goodness.

It’s been only just over a month since Jay and Mike released FaultPress – an advanced bug tracking application theme, but they didn’t just stop there, they went straight back to the drawing board, read all our community’s recommendations and suggestions and started developing a new, more general usage support theme catering for a wider range of niches. We are proud to release that theme today – introducing SupportPress.

SupportPress, our second application style theme is designed to create a clean and simple, yet powerful help desk using WordPress core functionality. Customers can submit support requests, but are encouraged to check an intuitive knowledgebase to learn if their issues have already been resolved. Agents (your staff) administrate tickets by setting priorities and delegating tasks to fellow team members.

The solution is perfect for web designers, hosting companies, app developers, training academies, to name but a few examples. It takes WordPress as a content management system and turns it into a basic customer relationship management system.

Once again Jay has worked his magic with the intuitively laid out responsive CSS3 design, tested on iPhones, iPads, and MacBook Pros set at various resolutions, not to forget all the uglier web browsers (you know which ones we’re talking about), whilst Mike has done an astounding job in building a stable help desk on top of the WordPress core framework, keeping the code clean and bloat free.

Another responsive beauty coded by Jay Koster.

The knowledgebase can house commonly asked questions, and the feature I really like is that you can even convert a support ticket to a knowledgebase article at the click of a button if you are an administrator. You can also easily set your latest blog post as an alert if, for example you are a host company experiencing downtime – this will appear at the top of your homepage for all site visitors.

You can also make your whole site private, accessible only by registered members of the help desk, this is set in the SupportPress theme options.

Adding a ticket with SupportPress

In SupportPress you can even communicate with your agents and manage private information with messages. Think of messages like a blog, but one which is only accessible by your own team. Nifty.

A ticket, with the ability to 'watch' it to receive further communication on this support query.

Deciding what to screenshot and preview in this blog post has been difficult, as there is so much functionality packed into this theme that deserves highlighting. I haven’t even touched on the professionally styled email messages agents and customers receive.

The best way to get an understanding of what is achievable with this theme is to view the demo, read more about the functionality if offers on the theme listing page, and even test it out on the theme playground.

As an administrator converting a support ticket to a knowledgebase article is easy. Take note of the sexy, animated CSS3 buttons.

Competition Time (Again)!

As with Editorial’s release last week, we’d like to give you the opportunity to win a lifetime Developer Subscription to the WooThemes club by simply sharing the news about SupportPress’s release and telling us what you think of this new functionality in the comments below.

Use the coupon code “SUPPORTPRESS11″ to get 11% discount on your purchase of SupportPress (valid until 11 July). Come on, we know you want to…

So what we’ve done is to do internal “audits” of our various activities trying to identify any gaps or inefficiencies, along with tweaks & improvements that could result in us being a better WooThemes. From these audits and extensive internal discussions, we’ve made a wide variety of decisions which will be implemented in the next couple of weeks.

Since these decisions directly affects the WooCommunity, we wanted to be as transparent as possible with our goals & aims during this process. As a team we’d like the WooCommunity to hold us accountable and keep us on our toes, so in this 2-part post, we’re hoping to share our goals with you.

Here’s what we had in mind for support…

• Quality over quantity. Answering a question quickly is something we strive to do, but a question that is perfectly answered the first time is of more value. We’ll rather take 10% longer to respond and then take the extra time to attempt to answer your question completely the first time around.
• Collaboration. Everyone on the WooTeam has a varying development skill-level, with only Jeff & Matty being able to efficiently take care of the most advanced queries. The WooTeam will be working closer together and collaborating to tag-team the difficult tickets and get all users quality feedback as efficiently as possible.
• Accountability. We’ll be implementing some new functionality in the forum soon, whereby a WooTeam member will take responsibility for an individual query and will then be held accountable for providing the user in question with a favourable & efficient response.
• Moderation. We’re attempting to moderate all of the content & exchanges on the forum much more, which should result in the forum becoming more searchable and helpful (without the need to necessarily create a new ticket for every query).
• Help on modifications. You’ll notice that we’re becoming more strict in applying our Support Policy, especially with regards to modifications. We’d like to be as fair as possible to all users and whilst we’d love to help every user with their modifications, we simply can’t do that in a way that is unfair to another user in the WooCommunity. Every user deserves equal time & attention and as a result we’ll only be providing support on very minor modifications (we have the Affiliated Woo Workers & WooJobs to help out with advanced modifications).

Beyond this, we’re working on some initiatives to improve our passive support resources. This means you can expect tweaks to theme documentation and FAQ’s, while we’re also toying with the idea of establishing a WooWiki of sorts and adding contextual theme help to the WordPress Dashboard screens.

What do you think? Anything we’re missing?

As you know, e-mail overload is a massive problem for most of us. And when you have a community of 45 000 passionate users that wants to get stuff done immediately, e-mail overload simply becomes a nightmare… This is how we solved it.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve been spending a lot of time with Shawn Hesketh to re-do a bunch of our tutorial videos / screencasts, whilst also expanding on our collection of videos. WooVideos is now the new home for that, after we initially only hosted these on our Vimeo channel (and scattered the rest across the WooThemes pages/posts).

We wanted to create a central resource for all of our videos, since we believe that they offer a helluva lot of value, and finding different videos wasn’t always obvious before. With this little addition, we’re just hoping to further build on top of our existing support infrastructure, as we hope to continue improving your experience with WooThemes.

What do you think of WooVideos? Good idea? Valuable resource? Would you like to see more of these little (but continuous) enhancements?

Since the very early days of WooThemes, we’ve always focused on releasing the odd freebie, which has normally been in the form of free themes, icon-sets and more recently our WooTumblog plugin. There’s currently 12 free themes available, from our total collection of 86 themes, which isn’t a bad ratio (one out of about 7 themes are free) we believe. And the beauty of those themes, is that they’ve been released completely free for you guys & girls. Built on the same WooFramework that powers all our themes.

But how much do those themes cost us?

If you consider that we’ve had about 400,000 downloads of our free themes this year already, you’d think that there are quite a few blogs out there running our free themes. And yes, you can rightly point out that this is great publicity for us, and that at least some of these free users have converted to paid customers (that’s part of why we release free themes). But is there perhaps a cost associated to this for us?

We get so many e-mails on a daily basis from users who are trying to get support for our free themes, that either want to modify them, or are simply struggling with one or two features. Whilst the free theme’s documentation is publicly available, that is also unfortunately the only resource that we can commit to users of our free themes. If we had to provide technical support to 400,000 users free of charge, we’d soon go out of business…

And therein lies the “cost” for us; perhaps it is better described as a slight risk… When we end up not answering the questions of our free users, we run the risk of losing them from WooThemes forever. Even though we can try explain our reasoning, and the rationale of our support policy, we still risk alienating them enough to have them never come back to WooThemes. That’s the double-edged sword: support them and run the risk of over-committing time / resources or don’t support them and potentially lose them forever.

So if you have used any of our free themes, always consider the behind-the-scenes considerations, risks and associated costs that we’re faced with offering something for free!

An example: WP.org vs WP.com

Other screencasts by WordPress101 for WooThemes

• How to Install WordPress
• Installing a WooTheme

More to follow soon!

We have worked with Shawn from WP101 to produce these videos as improvements of our old stuff. So we hope that you’ve been finding it beneficial.

Meet Michael Krapf, WooNinja

You would’ve noticed in the last couple of months that we’ve been focusing on one recurring topic: more value for existing users. And with this latest announcement, we’re hoping to further build on that strategy in the hope that all WooUsers will find even more value & pleasant experiences within the WooCommunity.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve noticed that the forum is being pounded by more & more support requests as the WooUsers kept modifying, tweaking and breaking (!) our themes at an alarming rate. Because this is however our exact aim with our themes (they’re meant to be customized), we figured there was only one way to improve support in this regard: hire another WooNinja.

So with that, we’d like to welcome the newest addition to the WooTeam, Michael Krapf, who will be helping out Tiago, Kirstin & the rest of the WooTeam in making our support function an even better experience!

Meet Michael

Michael has been working with WooThemes for quite a while now and has been an active community member (especially in terms of helping out other WooUsers on the forum) since the very beginning. Having become quite a prominent figure in the WooCommunity, Michael also became an Affiliated Woo Worker shortly thereafter and established himself as an extremely valuable resource for the WooUsers that chose to work with him.

As we’ve always preferred growing the WooTeam from within the business and community, Michael was the perfect candidate to help us out in terms of supporting the WooUsers in an official capacity.

Michael absolutely loves Canvas and has handled quite a few client projects built on top of it; so you’ll most definitely be able to find him answering a few Canvas-related queries on the forum.

With that, we’d like to welcome Michael for one last time and we hope that you’ll soon have the opportunity of interacting with Michael. We also hope that your experience(s) with WooThemes will just continue to grow & improve.

As part of our continuing quest to add value for our users – not only via new themes, but also via the surrounding WooThemes resources – we’re proud to announce the new addition of the WooCodex to our support offering.

Since standardizing all of our themes with the implementation of a core set of functionality via the WooFramework, we’ve been finding ourselves using the WooFramework for all of our projects; not just in our themes. The reason for this is simple: The WooFramework already includes so much functionality, which makes it perfect for any kind of WordPress-powered website.

So as an added benefit, we’ve made the WooCodex available to all of our users, which will allow them to use the core WooFramework functionality to further extend their WooThemes modifications, or even use it for websites that don’t even use one of our themes. As an example, the WooCodex includes information on adding more theme options, modifying the custom write panel or bending our image / video embeds to your will. We believe that this resource now makes using these functions even easier and more accessible to the vast majority of our users.

The WooCodex is still under construction and we’ll update it as we go. Feel free to leave suggestions & feedback about the WooCodex in the forum and we’ll update it accordingly.

Otherwise, check out the WooCodex now.

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!)

But as the company has grown, we continue to need more hands on board when it comes to providing a top-notch support environment to our users. So that’s why we’re dipping into the talent pool again, in search of a support ninja to work with Tiago & Magnus to continue providing amazing help to our users.

We are looking for somebody who has the following qualifications:

• Good knowledge on WordPress and WordPress themes, preferably WooThemes
• Skilled in HTML, PHP & CSS
• Good english language writing

So if you’d like to work more closely with us, then drop us a mail on info@woothemes.com, and let us know a bit about you and what skills you posess. The position is part-time in the sense that you can work whenever you want and we’d just want you to handle a certain amount of support tickets per month, but we’re not fussed when you do that during the day (we would however expect daily activity from you). We also believe that the remuneration would be a nice addition to any freelancer’s earnings and you also need to consider the doors that are opened to you for doing (paid) modification work (on our themes) for Woo users.

We’re a fun bunch and we can assure you that not only is this an extremely fun position, but that the flexibility in terms of workload particularly makes this a great job!

Look forward to receiving your applications.

Note: Tiago has now been with us for one year and we’d like to thank him for all his hard work. He’s an integral part of our team and without all of his help, we would definitely not be as awesome.