Customer support
What a support ticket really costs: the math
Cost per ticket is your fully loaded support cost for one month, divided by the tickets your team handled that month. Fully loaded means salary plus payroll cos..
Forum Cat
6 min readAll Posts
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Customer support
Private vs public community: what you gain and lose
An online customer community can be public or private. A public one is readable by anyone, including search engines. A private one sits behind a login, so only ..
Forum Cat
6 min read
Customer support
How to moderate a customer forum without a full-time moderator
A customer forum with a few new posts a day needs one person for about fifteen minutes, once a day. Read the new posts. Take out any private data. Fix titles no..
Forum Cat
6 min read
Customer support
Ticket deflection rate: how to measure it and what is good
Ticket deflection rate is the share of people who needed help and got it without opening a ticket. Take the help-seekers who did not write in, divide by all hel..
Forum Cat
7 min read
Customer support
Community guidelines: a copy-paste template with examples
Good community guidelines fit on one page. They say what the forum is for, what gets removed, and who decides. Twelve clauses cover a support forum: what the fo..
Forum Cat
7 min read
Customer support
How to seed a new forum so it does not look empty
Seed a new forum with the ten to twenty questions your inbox already answers. Post each one in the customer's words. Answer it yourself. Mark the correct reply ..
Forum Cat
6 min read
Customer support
How to switch forum platforms without losing your rankings
Rankings follow URLs. A URL is the address of one page, like example.com/questions/refund-policy. Google builds its trust in those addresses, not in the softwar..
Forum Cat
6 min read
Customer support
A forum software requirements checklist
Judge forum software by five jobs: reading, asking, answering, moderating, and owning. Check each job while you try the tool. Do this before you compare brand n..
Forum Cat
7 min read
Customer support
Open source forum software: a calm comparison
The five names you will see most are Discourse, Flarum, NodeBB, phpBB, and MyBB. All five are free and open source, and all five are good software. Discourse is..
Forum Cat
6 min read
Customer support
What free forum software really costs
You can run a forum on free software. phpBB, MyBB, Flarum, NodeBB, and Discourse are all free to download and install. They are mature projects with years of ca..
Forum Cat
6 min read