Summer support matters

Hello guys, this is my first year here in Envato and of course the first summer.
Everything proceed perfectly, but support is becoming very pressing in these months.

I want to ask a thing to authors that receive 5/10/20 (or more) support requests daily. How do you handle them in vacation time? Do you stop doing support for a period?

Thats a good thing, because it means you have sales

Of course but is quite a curse in August!
I cannot enjoy 2 days of holidays because the request queue becomes huge..!

I know its a big task but setting up your own forum means other people who have knowledge can answer for you and you just have to fill in the blanks which is less time consuming.

I use Ticksy that is not a forum (but is simply great!). Anyway is not a good solution IMHO .

First because I don’t think there are customers that want to do support for free and moreover because support is a veeeeery serious thing. at least half of your success depends on support.

So I want to be sure that everything is done in the best way.

Look into hiring someone to help with support. I have a guy that helps a couple of hours every week. If I need to leave for a few days, then I just tell him to keep an extra eye on it.

mordauk said
Look into hiring someone to help with support. I have a guy that helps a couple of hours every week. If I need to leave for a few days, then I just tell him to keep an extra eye on it.

Hi Pippin, I was just looking for an answer from someone like you (I know that you’re married and you’ve a child ).
You’re experience hiring a “support guy” is good? He can manage the issues with your codes?

I’m a bit perplexed on this. Because many issues require a perfect knowing of the plugin/theme codes.

LCweb said

mordauk said
Look into hiring someone to help with support. I have a guy that helps a couple of hours every week. If I need to leave for a few days, then I just tell him to keep an extra eye on it.

Hi Pippin, I was just looking for an answer from someone like you (I know that you’re married and you’ve a child ).
You’re experience hiring a “support guy” is good? He can manage the issues with your codes?

I’m a bit perplexed on this. Because many issues require a perfect knowing of the plugin/theme codes.

You definitely need to find the right person. I found one that already knew some of my plugins reasonably well, so that helped a lot.

As long as the person you hire is a good developer, they won’t have any problem learning your code. They will also get better and better over time, so what we did was just start him on the simple tickets (how do I configure this?!) and then slowly advance them to more complex tickets.

Thanks Pippin, very useful answer.

(and BTW , good luck with you’re son. I’ve your same age, but thinking to have a child make me crazy )

LCweb said
Thanks Pippin, very useful answer. (and BTW , good luck with you’re son. I’ve your same age, but thinking to have a child make me crazy )

Daughter, actually