There is one simple thing that you can do to reduce the support load on your support agents - something that can probably be done in five minutes on most help-desk plugins or systems.

To understand why the suggestion we're about to give you works you need to understand the behavior of your users.  Many users will do a search on your site for a solution to a non-billing or non-order related issue before contacting you.  But there is still a decent percentage who do not do that - in fact, they don't even bother to look for the documentation or FAQ page at all!

For most companies the answers to many support questions are already present in the FAQs or Documentation pages.  So, here is the one thing you can do to lighten the load on your support agents - push the links to the FAQs and Documentation pages to them as soon as they open a support ticket.

Most help desk systems (including Awesome Support's) send out an email to confirm receipt of a new ticket.  Its trivial to update the email to show the link to the FAQs and Documentation pages. Just add a simple note in that email that says something similar to: "Hey - thanks for your ticket.  You can get a resolution much faster by searching our FAQ (link) and Documentation (link)."

Now, obviously the benefits of this idea would vary from company to company.  But even if it prevents 3% of tickets from being pursued its still a decrease in your costs.  If your agents cost you 50.00 per hour and you reduce your load by 1 ticket per week that's still more than 2K per year in savings.  Many small companies, especially those with plugins and themes on wordpress.org, don't even bother with this simple idea; even large companies with large customer service departments such as the Wall Street Journal might not even do it as well.

So, what do you think - would this idea work for your company?

PS: You can also check out our other articles with ideas on how to reduce your support load - a bunch of single digit improvements quickly add-up over time!