Eight to ten a week that say something went wrong with an attached screenshot of a red box, no browser, no account, no steps. Every one turns into two days of back and forth to find out they were on a phone the whole time. I am considering an in-app form with required fields, and I am aware that might just annoy everybody. What actually reduced the round trips for you?
We auto-attach the environment to every ticket raised from inside the app: browser and version, operating system, screen size, app version, account ID, and the last route they were on. None of it is asked for, all of it is in the ticket before I read it.
Round trips on vague tickets dropped hard, because the two days of back and forth were nearly always establishing facts the app already knew. The remaining vague tickets are the ones emailed from outside the app, and there are far fewer of those.
Log the last twenty lines against a session ID and put the session ID in the app footer. Ask for the footer number. Two seconds for them, everything for you.
Error IDs. Every error the user can see now shows a short code, the code is written into the log line, and my first reply is one sentence asking them to paste it. Ninety percent do, and one lookup gives me the account, the endpoint, the input and the stack, which is everything the form was going to ask for and more.
It took an afternoon to add and it is the single best change I have made to support. The customer feels helpful rather than interrogated, which is the difference between a form and a code.
This is going straight onto the roadmap above three actual features. The interrogation framing is exactly what was bothering me about the form.
Put the code in the screenshot region too, meaning inside the red box rather than in a footer, because people screenshot the error and not the page. Learned that the hard way.
One social trick that works better than any tooling: reply with your best guess at what went wrong and ask them to confirm. People who will not answer a list of questions will absolutely tell you that you are wrong, in detail, with steps. It feels backwards and it halves the round trips on vague tickets.
Careful with required fields, because they will make your metrics look wonderful for the wrong reason. A form with six mandatory boxes reduces vague tickets by making a chunk of people close the tab, and those people do not become happy customers who figured it out, they become quiet customers who churn at renewal. If you build a form, make everything optional except one free text box, and put the auto-captured technical detail in behind the scenes where it costs the user nothing.
This matches what I saw. Ticket volume fell 30 percent when we added a structured form and neither our churn nor our reviews improved, which tells you where those tickets went.
@ask_first_ari · 6d ago · 2 replies
Until you build that, fix the first reply. Mine is a template that does three things: says what I am going to do while I wait, asks for exactly three specifics, and gives an example answer for each so they know what shape of thing I want.
The example answers were what changed the response rate. Asking what browser are you using gets me the word Google. Asking what browser, for example Chrome 130 on Windows, or Safari on an iPhone, gets me something I can act on. People are not being unhelpful, they genuinely do not know what you consider relevant.
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@spreadsheet_tabs · 6d ago
Also ask for a twenty second screen recording rather than a screenshot. Every phone and laptop can do it now, it takes them less effort than typing an answer, and it shows you the three things they did before the error that they would never have thought to mention.
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