Our in-app Support Chat is one of the fastest ways to get answers to your questions. 24 hours a day from Monday to Friday, members of the Smartly.io team are monitoring the chat so that we can respond to you within minutes, answer your questions, and provide solutions for your problems as quickly as possible. You can read more about how we do it in our blog post – A Look Behind the Scenes - 24h Support at Smartly.io.

Sometimes, you can help us to be faster in the chat. This article contains some tips on how to get the most out of your support experience with Smartly.io. All of them are optional – we always try to be flexible – but they help us to serve you faster and are greatly appreciated!

1. When to open a new conversation (and when not to)

There are no strict rules here – we will do our best to serve you whatever happens – but here are a few tips to help everyone stay organized:

• If you have a new problem that you have not discussed with us before, start a new conversation instead of using an old one.
• If you have discussed the same problem with us previously, try to restart the previous conversation on that subject instead of opening a new one. If you can't find the old one, just start a new conversation and let us know that you've brought it up before. That way we can at least try to find the old conversation, for context.
• If you are experiencing more than one issue simultaneously, it's probably fine to use one conversation for everything. But if the issues are completely unrelated (say you have a question about launching a new campaign on one account and a separate question about syncing audiences on a different account) – it might make sense to have separate conversations running in parallel.
• You can find your previous chats by clicking See all your conversations.

2. Explain what you were doing (or trying to do), and where

If we understand what you're trying to do, that makes it much easier for us to help you. We can always ask you for more information (and we try to do this whenever needed), but having the context up front helps us to determine what needs to be done next. The sooner we fully understand the problem, the sooner we can focus on how to solve it.

So instead of, "I got this error message", it can help us if you say, "I was trying to launch my campaign when I got this error message" or "I was trying to add a new creative to my campaign when I got this error message" or "I was trying to create a new audience when I got this error message".

Also, let us know where you were in the tool. Sometimes we're able to figure this part out for ourselves but it's often very useful if you can share with us your current URL and/or links to relevant campaigns, drafts, and catalogs. A lot can depend on your context so sharing this information with us proactively can be a big help.

3. How to share error messages

One of the most common reasons why people use the Support Chat is that they have encountered an error message while trying to do something in our tool. When this happens, it's really helpful if you can copy and paste the text of the error message (including the Request ID at the end, if there is one):

Having the Request ID means we can quickly zoom in on what happened in our internal logs – it helps us to find more clues as to what happened and figure out what to do next. If you send us a screenshot of the error message, we have to type the Request ID out on our end, which is, of course, possible but it slows us down a bit and is more error-prone.

4. The official support language is English

We're a very international company and there's a good chance we have somebody on the team who speaks your preferred language. However, we can't guarantee that they will be available for Support duties at all times and even when someone is available to speak to you in Finnish, Spanish, or Mandarin, for example, we prefer to keep the conversation in English if possible. This is because sometimes, cases will need to be handed over to other people. English is the only language spoken by everyone at Smartly.io. Having said all that, we're here to serve you so we'll do our best to make your Support experience as comfortable as it can be.

But as they say, "a picture is worth a thousand words" – screenshots and even screencasts can be a great way to show what you mean instead of writing it. At Smartly.io we like Monosnap and Jing for annotating screenshots and recording screencasts. Let us know if you recommend any other tools for this purpose!