Blender Support Desk

Hi!
Today I am launching my new website, the Blender Support Desk.
Basically it’s an online support service, where you can go when you need support on a project or quick help on a specific problem. It uses the screensharing software Teamviewer for remote support and Skype for communication.
Currently this service is still under development, so expect some bugs and problems here and there. :o
http://cdn.blendernation.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/bsd_ad-e1291101707526.jpg

Thats awesome.
I hope I get answers once I need it ^^.
Usually my questions in the support forums get hundrets of views and remain unanswered because the questions seem too much in depth.

I’ll do my best to answer every question!
And if I cannot answer immediately I’ll do my best to hunt down the problem for you!

Isn’t this a little to much for you alone?

You will get payed for every 15 minutes, right?
How do we know that you are not wasting time on the problem?

Well sure, it’s an experiment. I don’t know how the feedback will be and how many people want to make use of it.
That’s why on the first 2 days of this service I am offering free trial sessions of 5 minutes and a discount on the first couple of days.
Hopefully after that I will know if there is a general interest in something like that and if I can handle that alone or if more people are needed.

Well and as for wasting time… Wouldn’t you notice if I just babble useless crap during the support session?
I will try my best to give good support.

I see a few problems there :smiley:

  1. As the possible clients problems don´t know anything about the free trail sessions and discount, as a matter of fact the problems don´t have any selfawareness :D, it is doubtable the problems will crop up in that time.
    Or is the discount/trail a per client basis. I understood its based on the site launch.

  2. We got a vast international community, bound to CET you miss quite a few peeps. You should get partners involved from other timezones, also various languages would be an advantage, just judging from BA there are quite often some lingual barriers. :smiley:

  3. My understanding was that one has to pay before he gets your service. What is one supposed to do if you idd “babble useless crap”… No offense, I know you´r BFCT, just hypothetical speaking, but I think that’s something potential clients would like to know. Experience tought me customers need to be re-assured on every occasion.

Thanks for your input!
Lots of good points.
I will take it into consideration, as I know there is a LOT of room for improvements. :slight_smile:

to 1) Yes, true, it is based on site launch. Although I start to think that maybe I should change that in a per client based free 5 minute trial session during the whole start period.

to 2) True.

to 3) Hm. That could be an issue, which would be solved by the per client free 5 minutes I suggested in 1).

I guess Sebastian want his customers to be satisfied and continue to buy his services. Ripping off client isn’t very profitable in the long run…

Well, that depends on the rippoff sum, but I doubt he can retire and lay low on various caribbean islands with scamming 5 Euro out of the blender community :smiley:
jk

It is not about that. It is about generating an inital trust in Sebastian and his service to generate a customer base.
Ya know, the usual “customer satisfaction guaranteeed, money back blahblah” ^^

I guess Sebastians customer is supposed to be a freelancer, or maybe studios that got Blender in the pipleline like ours, rather than the default beginner which is unlikely to spend money.
If I go to my boss and tell him to use this service he wants assurance he gets his money back if he´s not satisfied and he wants ANY kind of assurance that he gets a quality service. It doesn´t matter that he´ll never charge back 5 euros or can judge the quality of the service himself. He just wants it. ^^
It is the salesman babble that is missing. Personally I hate marketing strategies and slogans but it is a necessary evil.

On the other hand you got to be careful not to make the page look suspicious by overadvertising.

Personally I got the site bookmarked, you never know ^^
The idea is, well not new generally but to blender its a premiere, however it´s awesome finally someone does kind of an professional support for blender, IMO a thing that´s not allowed to be missing for a 3dpackage that wants to be taken serious.

OK, I read thru some of the stuff about how the site and your service works. I’m just a hobbyist and most problems I run into, I’m able to figure out the answers to. It’s the ones I can’t figure out that I would be interested in using your service for. Now the beta rate of 5 euro per 15 mins is fine, what will the rate be after beta phase? What if I present a problem that requires more than 15 mins? Say a problem that would require you to spend time to research and find the answer? And ultimately, what if you cannot solve a problem I present?

Just curious,
Randy

I’m still not sure what the final rate will be. That will totally depend on the demand and feedback during beta-period.
The rate of 5€ will be raised to 10€ after the first couple of days. But I guess it will be raised even more later.

If support takes longer than 15 minutes that will add up to the bill. If I have to do research for that it will usually be included in the bill. If it takes more than a bit of research we can make a deal.
If I cannot solve a problem at all I will not charge anything for that.
But hopefully I can already judge from the problem-description in the request form if I can solve it or not.

These are all things I still have to work out.
That’s why I am really thankful for all your feedback!

This sounds very interesting.

As I’ll be working on some projects next year that will involve some fairly advanced uses of Blender I would be interested in this, however the pricing scheme of 5/ 10 Euro’s per 15 minutes would probably make it a little unworkable, as the projects are student projects, and hence don’t have a source of income, if it’s possible to to pay monthly for say several hours of support, this could just be email support, then I could see this being a pretty attractive service. Also email support would perhaps allow you to hire some other people for less time critical issues, where a response may take a few hours, or up to a day.

Yepp, that is really an issue. It can be hard to find the right balance between advertising and modesty.

But as for the money-back thing:
I thought about your ideas and found you were right, that’s why I changed the policy.
Now every new client will get 5 free minutes. Every extra time will then be invoiced after that.

@Daniel8488
That sounds like an interesting idea. Especially the email based support is probably something to consider. This whole service thing can be extended much further I think. But first I try to get this website running and later add more options to the site. I think subscriptions could indeed be a good idea. Still have to figure some things out here.
As for the pricing, 5€/10€ are rather the lower end IMHO. In the end I have to get a sufficient wage out of that. But the pricing scheme itself can be adjusted, maybe minute based rather than chunks of 5 minutes. Maybe also to something like an upfront purchase of support-minutes. Could be probably be easier to handle for both sides.

Maybe you should consider a paid ticket service.
There are modules out there for various CMS like:

http://www.theticketpaymodule.com/features/

It would handle account management, the support tickets and billing.
But I guess thats a leap too far ahead…