Another Sensational WA Support Experience

byTimchop

235 followers

8 years ago

So I've picked a niche, a theme, shedloads of plugins, watched" some" of the training and proceeded to do all the fun stuff with site design, shopfronts, fancy buttons and finally a bit of content. All going well, Google indexed the site and I'm ready to double down on keywords, links and in theory build up to making a little money.

While trying to do too much of the pretty stuff with the site I tried to remove post dates as I'm writing evergreen content. Found generic stuff outside of WA then found specific training inside WA. Without thinking, I'm neck deep in the theme editor playing with code and testing live. None of this back up stuff for me, I'm invincible.....

THEN... Complete site failure, locked out of WP-admin access, locked out of site manager access, error loading pages, website down.

Just before panicking, cleared history, cache, tried other browsers and device. It's all over.

Last resort as I swallow my pride, WA Support as I remember they take back up images nightly and I'm on the other side of the world to them, so the back is probably pretty fresh.

Hit support, explained the problem and my foolish method of creating it and apologised for now making it their problem.

With no clue as to how long ticket response times are, I figured that's me for the night, I'll shut down and check for a response later. Maybe I'll actually do some of the training tasks I've been ticking off without actually completing.

LESS THAN 60 SECONDS LATER

A message pops up simply asking if they can change the theme to correct the issue. I said, "yes please" and thought I'd test this in real time by going to a new window and hitting my site as if I'm a new visitor.

IT'S BACK UP AND RUNNING!

A few very gracious and apologetic messages back and forth to the support engineer, I simply loaded my previous theme and KAPOW! everything is back as I left it, no missing content, no re-design required, absolutely perfect.

I just have to shout praise to the masses for this WA function. The support is truly out of this world.

Imagine if I didn't join WA and had followed one of the thousands of landing pages out there saying, "go to this web host and pay your $3.99 / month, then install this drag and drop freemium theme, then add this content-mill juice, back links and fiverr logos and you'll make millions!" ???

One cheeky bit of .php copy and paste later and I'd be royally #$%^.

Seriously, my day job is as an exec on the board of tech company. We have 6 figure support contracts with government and enterprise clients. Our priority 1 (site down) response time contracted agreement can't go close to what I just experienced, let alone our resolution times. Damn!

Sensational, world class, industry leading support team WA. Well done and keep it up.

To anyone requiring the support team's help, don't be shy, but please consider the following as you raise a ticket to ensure you give the engineer both the right information and the right attitude to make your day better:

1. Introduce yourself

2. Explain the symptoms

3. Explain the method leading up to the issue

4. Explain the current state of affairs (locked out etc)

5. Describe all relevant components (in my case, theme name, where I was when editing it, what I changed, what error message I'm getting etc)

6. Describe what you have tried to fix it yourself

7. Attach screen shots of any error messages or relevant info

8. Offer to help if required (testing or more info etc)

9. Sign off respectfully

10. Read it again and remove any anger or blame (it's easy to make something someone else's problem, but hard to take back poor attitude)

Karma bonus: when they fix it, thank them sincerely.

Thank you for putting up with this giant post.

All the best.

Tim.