Customer Responses

How I would answer customers aka answers to 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10

Writing Exercise

The customer from question 5 replies to your response with the below: “I’m so frustrated. I’ve been trying to make this work for hours and I just can’t figure it out. It must be a platform issue so just fix it for me instead of asking me questions.” Please write a follow-up reply to the customer.

Hello Customer!

I understand your frustration after working on this for several hours. I will try to help you sort this out. I have checked our internal sources and I can't see any issues with the platform at the moment, but I will continue investigating.

Meanwhile, I will be setting up my own test to try to achieve the same as you and see if I run into the same issue. As I asked earlier, could you explain to me what you are trying to create with this project? Did you get to work at all before or has it never worked?

Did you use any documentation to set this up? If so, could you link it to me?

Thank you for your help!

Kind regards,

A customer writes in to the Helpdesk asking "How do I do a redirect from the /blog path to https://example.com?" Please write a reply to the customer. Feel free to add any information about your decision-making process after the reply.

Hello Customer,

There are several ways you can do redirects, but one easy way is to use Edge Redirects. You can read more about that here: https://vercel.com/docs/edge-network/redirects

I can see that you are using one of NextJS templates as well, and it's easy to do redirects that way as well (either via the pages router or via the app router).

More info about that is available here: https://nextjs.org/docs/app/api-reference/functions/redirect

Let me know if you have any questions!

Kind regards,

A customer is creating a site and would like their project not to be indexed by search engines. Please write a reply to the customer. Feel free to add any information about your decision making process after the reply.

Hello Customer,

I can see that you are still using the preview deployment URL (no domain has been set up yet) and I just want to let you know that these are not indexed by search engines.

However, when you do deploy and add your domain, it will be indexed. To prevent that, you can follow the guide we have here: https://vercel.com/guides/are-vercel-preview-deployment-indexed-by-search-engines#x-robots-tag-header

Let me know if you have any questions about this or if you need any further assistance.

Kind regards,

Questions

What do you think is one of the most common problems which customers ask Vercel for help with? How would you help customers to overcome common problems, short-term and long-term?

I think you get the full spectrum of customers (those who know very little up to pros). Since you offer a free service, this means you probably get a lot of customers who are trying it out for the first time.

I think these customers might have some questions about Github/GitLab/Bitbucket and might get stuck on the tutorials, so I think it's important to be good at explaining things.

I think a lot of customers are interested in Vercel Functions as they can do a lot, so I think they ask a lot about how to integrate this with their current projects.

Being in support for 10+ years, there's one thing that builds long-term customer knowledge of the product and that is documentation. There's nothing more frustrating for me as a customer when there's no documentation available for something I want to deploy.

Support runs into questions all the time that should be in the docs, so we must listen to our gut feeling when it comes to this.

My rule of thumb: is this the second time I hear this question? If yes, documentation is needed.

How could we improve or alter this familiarisation exercise?

I have done a few of these tests in my days and I must say that this is a good one. My only recommendation would be to have some tasks that are in the dashboard. In this training exercise, we were barely at all in the dashboard (which is where customers spend the most time) so it would be good to have some questions about that.