How do you handle unlimited sites license and support?
My customers for purchased themes often expect me to log in to their website to see the issue and because they usually don’t send screenshots or detailed explanation it is also easier for me to do that instead of talking.
So I was wondering how to handle this kind of support on unlimited sites?
Not have any bugs 
Is a tricky one and it must be dealt based on the acutal bug or issue that the client has…
One way to solve it is to fix it on one site and if needs to be fixed on the other sites and the client can do it record a video to show how is done if not you will have to fix things…
90% of “bugs” are problems on customer website like theme not updated or plugin or third party plugins compatibility or cache or they just don’t know how to do something. Theme bugs are rare and fixed with theme update, not related to customer website.
I’m talking about situations of grey zone between support and help outside of it and how to handle. I don’t talk about customization that is definitely not part of support.
There must be a practice that I’m not familiar with and I don’t think it is fixing unlimited client sites.
Maybe someone else can help. I only have one theme, so I don’t have much experience on this side of things, and I will never go through the hell of creating a new one again — at least not for Envato. That was a traumatizing experience!
I learned this the hard way, as back in the golden era of Envato, I was answering support questions 10 hours a day, I was thinking that I will die answering support tickets and fixing customer issues…
But I understood that unlimited sites licenses should not mean unlimited hands-on troubleshooting.
If the issue is clearly a product bug, of course I fix it. If the issue is coming from my part, I have to handle it.
But if the issue is coming from something like “my hosting/cache/plugin stack/custom setup broke something”, that becomes consulting very fast and that can eat your entire week if you let it. Especially at scale…
What worked better for me was setting clear boundaries for customers:
Anything else, is not support…
Still, it is pretty hard to filter things out which are “not support”, I don’t say it is easy, but our mental health needs to come first.
In my experience, in the golden era of Envato it was much easier to get good ratings and reviews especially if you had generous support.
Consulting is a very good word to describe the grey zone between support and customization for customer website.
Can you explain “issue reproduction on site” and what exactly you do? Maybe it is easier with plugins than with themes.
By issue reproduction i mean loggin in to the customer’s site and checking the issue with my own eyes, understanding when and how it is happening, so i can try to reproduce it also on my test site (if needed).
Ok but what if one customer with license for unlimited number of sites has different problem on every site?
Yeah, this sounds like a next level problem… maybe stop giving unlimited licenses and give limited number of licenses only? 5/10/20/50/100/ etc
But yeah, if a customer comes with 100 sites, each with a different issue, yeah, this is a pain…
I have a support system where I keep track of how many responses / tickets I’ve solved for a customer.
There are 2 types of customers that have to be treated differently:
(A) The customer who opens 1-2 tickets lifetime or a very new customer who just purchased. That customer gets full attention and in-depth support. Response time is very fast 0-24 hours.
(B) The customer who’s opened 30 tickets and to whom I’ve responded 100+ times in the past year. That customer gets a genuine reply where I point out the most likely issue, I recommend deactivating all other site plugins etc etc.
But my first course of action won’t be troubleshooting directly. Response time might be closer to 3-5 days than 24 hours.
We are plugin/theme developers, not the customer’s own personal website developer - there is a difference in scope.
Or for example if the customer insists there is some kind of bug: I might login to their website and simply deactivate all other plugins and themes and show them how that resolves the issue. That clearly shows it’s a conflict, not a bug. From there, you can politely point them to work with a developer to properly diagnose what is a “site” issue.
I think the right approach is to genuinely engage and make an effort, but the effort is proportional to how much support time the customer has “used”.
Agree, I am on the same page with you on this one!