Support expectations, more demanding?

Has anyone noticed a shift in the attitude toward support recently? Typically I enjoy support (for the most part) and in a way the feedback drives me to do better work, but recently it feels like less customers asking for help and more of them demanding it.

This could easily be an anomaly or my imagination, and I’m not saying all customers. I have plenty of polite questions and lots of “thank you’s”. However, it seems there’s an increase in customers “telling” me what my theme (and I) “should” or “better” do for them, and how, and when. I noticed it bothering me recently and I wanted to ask if anyone else noticed a similar trend. I’m not pointing fingers or singling out any customer. However, if this is happening across the board I thought discussing it may be helpful. Perhaps we can figure out a reason customers are responding this way, or if something I’m doing (or all authors) has caused this?

I’ll also mention, it seems predominantly WordPress customers and most of them are not quite the expert they believe. That’s not a big change considering the high number of beginners WordPress attracts, but this feels like more than usual and much more aggressive. I don’t have a problem with someone being a beginner, we all start somewhere, but a trend of “less than polite” exchange does concern me.

You know what man – I have seen the same thing – more along the lines that the buyers seem to think we work for them now – not all buyers – but some and it seems to be increasing – as you stated it’s either one of 2 things I get – first being buyers who have no experience and don’t understand why the menu doesn’t appear in wordpress 3 now (they don’t know that you have to setup your menus in wordpress) or it’s your theme does this but I need it to do that so you need to fix it because it’s not what I want, which brings me to the statement of thinking we work for them rather than ourselves.

I’m all for feedback – and I guess that’s where I feel it’s changing, before I would get a “hey it’s a great theme but wouldn’t it be awesome if it did this also – maybe you can consider as an upgrade at some time” – now it’s a it doesn’t do it so you need to “fix it”.

I dunno really – I do think it would be beneficial to Envato, buyers and authors if they had some real basic tuts right here on the marketplace for installing wordpress – setting up menus – creating pages – posts etc – you know, the basics – I know there are tuts sites and they want to drive traffic to them but it’s lame to expect buyers to hunt for this stuff or authors hunt and supply links – I think a nice “Learning” section would help buyers and everyone and maybe bring more new customers also – they could advertise the more in-depth tuts+ articles on the pages via a banner or link to the tuts sites which again would drive traffic to those sites – everyone is a winner!

Just some thoughts.

And before someone says you could put this info in your documentation – I don’t want to do this – my manuals would turn in to ebooks teaching people how to use wordpress, it’s not my job – and I understand there is a codex and the wordpress site etc but really for most buyers it’s about 2 miles over their heads trying to read that stuff.

I agree here. A lot of newbies in wordpress, but as long as it takes me about 10 minutes to solve the issue is no problem, i enjoy having satisfied customers and having a good relation to my buyers. I have changed some theme structures that may have taken a little longer but untill now i can’t say that i dislike it. Will se in the future, but +1 for some wordpress basic tutorials.

I agree. It boggles my mind that a buyer (not most buyers, but some) who has paid somewhere around $35 for a theme expects hours and hours of support from the author. I mean, at these rates, once we’ve given 30 minutes of support we’ve essentially given our theme away for free (that is, what we earn per theme doesn’t even cover half an hour of our time in most cases). Especially when this support is asked for (demanded) either out of laziness (won’t read the documentation, won’t do a Google search) or is actually a customization (“make the theme do xyz”, “add/change/rework the feature set”). Of course, if there is a bug or something hasn’t been explained well in the docs, those support requests are legitimate and help us build a better product.

I think part of the solution is to better manage buyer expectations. I think it should be made clear that support (apart from bug fixes or the like) is available from the theme author at an hourly rate. Or perhaps when a user buys a theme there is a separate option to buy a support package with it (for an extra X dollars). Not that I would actually expect many users to buy it, but it’d at least set the expectation that support is not free. Of course, the obvious downside to that particular scenario is that authors would be obligated to provide support if users buy it, which could end up making the problem even worse

Anyway, I think many buyers simply assume support is free because it isn’t stated otherwise. However, the majority of buyers are reasonable people – if it’s just made clear that support costs a particular amount, I don’t think the majority of buyers would have a problem with that. When people think support is free they get lazy and don’t try to solve problems on their own first, and that’s the really frustrating part. Better management of buyer expectations might greatly alleviate this issue.

jonathan01 said
You know what man – I have seen the same thing – more along the lines that the buyers seem to think we work for them now – not all buyers – but some and it seems to be increasing – as you stated it’s either one of 2 things I get – first being buyers who have no experience and don’t understand why the menu doesn’t appear in wordpress 3 now (they don’t know that you have to setup your menus in wordpress) or it’s your theme does this but I need it to do that so you need to fix it because it’s not what I want, which brings me to the statement of thinking we work for them rather than ourselves.

I’m all for feedback – and I guess that’s where I feel it’s changing, before I would get a “hey it’s a great theme but wouldn’t it be awesome if it did this also – maybe you can consider as an upgrade at some time” – now it’s a it doesn’t do it so you need to “fix it”.

I dunno really – I do think it would be beneficial to Envato, buyers and authors if they had some real basic tuts right here on the marketplace for installing wordpress – setting up menus – creating pages – posts etc – you know, the basics – I know there are tuts sites and they want to drive traffic to them but it’s lame to expect buyers to hunt for this stuff or authors hunt and supply links – I think a nice “Learning” section would help buyers and everyone and maybe bring more new customers also – they could advertise the more in-depth tuts+ articles on the pages via a banner or link to the tuts sites which again would drive traffic to those sites – everyone is a winner!

Just some thoughts.

And before someone says you could put this info in your documentation – I don’t want to do this – my manuals would turn in to ebooks teaching people how to use wordpress, it’s not my job – and I understand there is a codex and the wordpress site etc but really for most buyers it’s about 2 miles over their heads trying to read that stuff.

+1

Its loss of time to have to explain each buyer how to install even how to upload the theme. I think its a great idea that envato publish articles for beginners.

I’ve also had an influx of buyers who are demanding support rather than asking nicely.

They find out some rare plugin doesn’t work with the theme and they lose their minds. “What is the meaning of this?!” As if they’ve paid thousands of dollars for a custom solution that all of a sudden doesn’t work. Sadly, most of the time their issues could be cured by just reading the help file.

I’ve simply stopped responding to those people. I can see by sales and compliments that 99.9% of my buyers are happy and I’m glad to help them. The guy with the attitude can take a hike .

I think it’s slowly evolved into something that everyone does, as it garners more sales. Since most authors now offer support, the buyers have come to expect it with their purchase.

Apparently some guy managed to get a refund from us after we didn’t reply due to his particular rudeness.. It came from his own words though, so it’s possible they never even issued a refund.

Most of all, I think it’s people who are very misinformed. They just see that authors offer support, so they automatically assume that it’s part of what they’re paying for. I think they also get a sense of self-righteousness from supporting us. As if we would be nowhere if that specific individual hadn’t purchased our theme.

We’ve let buyers know that we are not obligated to offer support, and that we do it purely as an appreciation to our customers. Their attitude changes completely after this.

I should iterate that this is only a small number of the people who require support from us. And we’re thankful for that. The rest of people requiring support are polite and usually thank us for replying afterward.

I’m experiencing a lot of the same issues you guys are. What I’ve tried to do is group a lot of the same kinds of requests I get form people together and create resources for those things (like some of you were discussing above).

Ex 1: Like for example, a lot of people say “Is it possible to accomplish [fill in 6 random simple CSS changes here]?”

So I say “This sounds like a CSS customization. It’s definitely doable. Maybe this tutorial would be helpful to you.”

Ex 2: Many times people ask about some error message when they install the theme, and I’ll then link them to a couple video tutorials I’ve made about installing WP themes.

Ex 3: Many people ask all kinds of questions about putting in their logo. So, I link them to a video about putting in their logo.

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By giving buyers short responses and links to resources I’ve created, I generally don’t hear form a lot of them again. So, I feel good that I could give a nice answer, not waste a lot of time, and they seem to have solved their problem. Over time I’m creating more videos and articles to link to based on common questions I get, and it seems to be helping a lot. You can see the kinds of videos I’ve started making that seem to help a lot and reduce support requests here.

It would definitely be awesome if there were some community resources though to link to

I dunno really – I do think it would be beneficial to Envato, buyers and authors if they had some real basic tuts right here on the marketplace for installing wordpress – setting up menus – creating pages – posts etc – you know, the basics – I know there are tuts sites and they want to drive traffic to them but it’s lame to expect buyers to hunt for this stuff or authors hunt and supply links – I think a nice “Learning” section would help buyers and everyone and maybe bring more new customers also – they could advertise the more in-depth tuts+ articles on the pages via a banner or link to the tuts sites which again would drive traffic to those sites – everyone is a winner!

I believe something along these lines may already be in the works. What would actually help speed up the process though, would be if a few of you amazing authors got together and came up with a list of tutorial topics to cover that you’re consistently being bugged with.

I am not an amazing author , but a tutorial with firebug usage and basic css changes will be amazing for everybody.