This document is for anyone who supports users of GOV.UK Notify. Everyone on the Notify team can help with support, if they want to.
Users come to us via our support form (which creates Zendesk tickets) and on cross-government Slack.
Support is about helping our users. But it also helps us: by looking for patterns, we can identify ways to improve the product, the guidance, and the service we offer.
Be human
You’re both people, working on delivering better government services. You just don’t sit at the same desk.
Show empathy
This person is coming to you because they have a problem or are stuck. Show that you’ve read and understand what they’re saying.
Be helpful
Answer the question they’re asking. If this doesn’t solve their problem, then offer alternatives that might. Don’t send out general information.
Have a conversation
Write in the way you’d talk if you were helping this person over the phone. Make it feel like it’s not a big deal for them to follow up with more questions.
Talk their language
Use the same terminology as the person asking the question. If you’re introducing something unfamiliar, use same terminology as the Notify interface.
Copy and paste with care
Remove anything not specifically relevant to the person and question you’re replying to. Whatever you send should read and look like one message.
Don’t be pushy, don’t be salesy
We increase adoption by understanding and meeting people’s needs, not by trying to create them.
Developers see all tickets and decide whether or not a ticket is an emergency.
If a ticket is an emergency it needs a reply within 30 minutes, even if it’s just to say we’re aware of the problem. You might need to raise an incident too (the process for incidents is documented separately).
When you pick up a ticket, start drafting a reply straight away. Other people looking at the ticket will see your draft and know that you’ve got it covered.
If a ticket isn’t an emergency, or doesn’t need technical knowledge to answer then assign it to the ‘GOV.UK Notify product team’. You can still reply to these tickets if you want to. Questions get a reply within a day. Someone having a problem gets a reply within 2 hours.
Some problems happen because of a small bug, or unclear documentation. If there’s a quick and obvious fix which will stop the problem happening again, go ahead and make the change.
Some problems will take longer to fix, or could be addressed in a number of different ways. Have a discussion with the team before working on these. They might not be the highest priority, and we need to tell the user how long they should expect to wait.
Find out about the history of Notify by reading the core brief.
Our controlled vocabulary details the words we use and don’t use when writing for users of Notify.