How to Get Faster Response from Technical Support

When you encounter any problem during development, there are few things that you could do to elaborate your problem before contacting technical support. One is producing screenshots, second is to reproduce the problem in a new project and send the test case over.

There are advantages by attempting to reproduce the problem in a new project or test case:

  • You may find that the new project is working but not your existing project so either you or others can check out the differences.
  • You might end up find out the solution by yourself while trying to reproduce the problem.
  • You can remember the steps better, and figure out what exactly causing the problem and describe only the necessary steps to technical support.
  • The newly created project is normally smaller hence easier to send as email attachment.
  • You don’t have to send out the existing project which might contain P&C information and hence protect your trading secret.

Project or test case needs to be compressed before forwarding, but it’s not quite possible if the project zip archive contain any *.exe or *.js files as it may be blocked by many types of mail server. We recommend you to use 7zip format instead, 7zip compression format produces very much smaller compressed archive, it could be as much as 3x smaller in certain targeted source file type when comparing ordinary *.zip to *.7z file format. You are advised to forward a project using any cloud base storage or otherwise the attachment will be blocked by mail server.

One of the good thing about 7zip is it doesn’t need to know the compression file format based on the file extension in order to extract. So the mail recipient (support team) doesn’t even need to put back the correct extension before extracting the email attachment. Oh yes, 7zip program is one of the must have utility that also works with many other common compression formats like zip, rar, gzip, tar and etc.

7-zip context menu extract to sub folder

Screen shot showing unknown file type (with additional underscore) can be extracted by 7zip.

Also try to describe the steps to produce the problem. Some works can be achieved with many approaches, some problems only occur in specific steps. As such clearly describe the steps in producing the problem is important.

Last but not least, please specify the expected outcome, avoid to use ambiguous terms like “the outcome is unpredictable”, “the result is screwy”, spell out what was predicted, describe what’s the expected behavior.