I have had some support problems, and am looking ways to get rid of support tickets. (like have a onsite knowledge base). What are some ways that you have tried to 'educate' your customers and decrease the number of support tickets? Thanks a lot.

I'd suggest getting some flash tutorials and promoting them heavily on your site :)

www.demodemo.com is good for that :)

Good luck.

Funny! I was just about to suggest demodemo, and then saw Elix's post! So I second that! We have Flash tutorials on our site that have been done by demodemo and they're excellent for educating users on different aspects of our service.

I'd suggest the use of the helpexec (http://www.helpexec.com) knowledgebase software. We've been using it now for approximately 2-3 months so far and it seems very well coded and accepts standard html in the articles so it's very easy to write in articles for and also parses fine. The template setup includes standard html files which have the tags for the calling of the php scripts, thus you can easily table them and align as you like. It's coded by solidphp who also does phpaudit thus I'm sure it will be around for quite awhile.

So far to date not had any major problems, won't comment on support much as I only needed to grab a tech on AIM for a brief moment in helping getting the initial license sorted/setup which was fairly prompt.

TrionHost best of luck in whatever software you select to run.

One new feature we're looking to rollout in the next couple months is a new helpdesk software ( http://www.auraclesupport.com ) which reads the ticket that the user is submitting, and witll suggest answers from the knowledgebase before they submit the ticket. It also works for e-mailed tickets.

I believe Kayako also does this, which can greatly help to reduce tickets.

Knowledgebase without a doubt, a comprehensive knowledgebase with flash tutorials for common issues will go a long way in reducing support tickets.

Having a well documented welcome email that explains some of the top 10 things you know customers are going to ask will be a good way to prevent support tickets.

This assumes the customer(s) will actually read what you have for them. In my experience customers don't read a whole lot.. At least 50% of our support tickets are issues that could be solved by looking at our FAQ section right above the help desk button..

So if you get rid of support tickets, what happens when your client requires something not in your knowledge base? Are you going with an email only approach?

So if you get rid of support tickets, what happens when your client requires something not in your knowledge base? Are you going with an email only approach?
I think the OP just wants to reduce the amount of support tickets he recieves.

This assumes the customer(s) will actually read what you have for them. In my experience customers don't read a whole lot.. At least 50% of our support tickets are issues that could be solved by looking at our FAQ section right above the help desk button..
Then maybe you need to change the location of those FAQ questions, put them in a knowledgebase or something.