Getting your WooCommerce Support Ticket Answered

We have a support problem. It’s something I get quizzed about at our London WooCommerce meetups. It’s something I see ANGRY CAPS about on twitter.

It’s something we need to address. By ‘we’ I mean the community of customers that use Woo; developers and store owners.

I’ve already talked about setting our expectations with WooCommerce Support, now I want to talk about how to get a good answer from support.

Getting past the first line of defence

Support is expensive. It requires time. There’s only so much that can be done to automate and speed up the support process. The good news is Woo have been investing in support big time. They are poised to bring out some tech improvements.

They have upcoming education plans and the acquisition by Automattic should provide the resources to grow support even more. Things are setup well for support and expect them to get better.

That said, the support ticket itself is often guilty of causing slow downs.

At WordCamp Europe in Seville I saw Mika Epstein talk about hosting support. There are a lot of parallels. She talks about the problems of being a support technician where she see’s tickets which complain the site is broken.

That’s all it says. It’s broke – help!

If the ticket elaborated upon how it ‘broke’ and what happened to cause it to ‘break’ then that would massively help. Even better if they could describe what they have done to remedy the problem. You instantly improve the success rate for support tickets.

I highly recommend watching her talk as it applies to support across the web:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty6JQaVtwbg

Writing the perfect WooTicket

Writing a concise, contextual and comprehensive support ticket is the single most important thing to do get better support. There are a number of other guidelines that should also be followed for Woo tickets:

• Submit the WooCommerce Systems Status report
• Double check plugins and themes all updated
• Create an admin login and password for the support technician
• Back up the site (or even better; provide a staging site)

Things you may get asked to do

Changing Theme Support will try and find where the problem lies and to do this they might need you to revert to the default theme. The default theme for WordPress is called 2015 (or 2014 etc..). Head to Appearances > Theme to switch to this theme.

Deactivating Plugins If the above doesn’t work then your support query may be caused by plugins conflicting. You can deactivate plugins in the Plugins section of WordPress but it is not ideal as you may forget which plugins you deactivated. That’s why we built the Bulk Deactivate plugin (which is free on the WordPress repository).

This plugin will deactivate all plugins and then reactivate with a single click. You can even exclude plugins (like WooCommerce) for testing purposes.

Setting expectations

“I don’t mind paying for support, I want to. I’m not moving to WooCommerce because they don’t provide good support.”

That’s something I’ve heard a few times. I’ve actually written a blog post about what you can expect from WooCommerce Support – check it out.

The key thing to remember is WooCommerce do provide support but they wont hand hold you. That’s where a WooExpert comes in. The WooCommerce support is about getting their products installed and configured. Beyond that, you’ll need an expert.

Visit our WooCommerce Help post for more information about where find an expert.