Why you should give Mozilla Live Chat! a try

On Friday, I participated in our first Support Day at Mozilla.  My last post talked about what I had hoped to accomplish during the day.  I’m proud to say that I did nearly everything except upload a screen shot to an article.  (I use a Mac and found that most of Mac-specific SUMO support articles also had great accompanying screen shots.)  I thought I would use this post to relay some observations about Mozilla’s support day.

Most of my day was spent doing Mozilla Live Chat! support.  After a few training sessions where I observed a member from our SUMO community doing live chat, I was cleared to take support requests from end-users.  I was struck by the importance of this experience — interacting with our users, answering what might be considered simple questions from within the walls of Mozilla, and learning a lot about our product.  My experience also begged the question, “Is the end-user part of the Mozilla Community?”.  Some may claim that the question is not really something to debate.  Of course, the end-user is part of the community, right?  Or, is our community simply the world of volunteers who help make our product ready for end-user?  You be the judge:  I learned from them just as I learned from those who help localize our software or help others write extensions.  And, I found myself asking, “How easy is our software to use and how well is our software designed for user interaction?”.

Here is an excerpt from a support session, in case you’d like to read about just how one went.  I’ve changed the end-user identity and edited out some parts to keep it short:

Friday, April 11, 2008

(12:43 PM) sethb: hi end-user51
(12:43 PM) end-user51: Hi.  Can you help?
(12:43 PM) sethb: so you cannot view your adobe documents with your browser?
(12:45 PM) end-user51: No.  The message reads”Cannot use reader to view document in your browser.  now closing.
(12:46 PM) sethb: let me do some research on your issue. i’ll be back in a second.  ok?
(12:47 PM) end-user51: ok.  Trying to get my proof of insurance so I can register my car.
(12:47 PM) sethb: ok…we’ll try to do this quickly.
(12:48 PM) end-user51: Thanks.  Work graveyard at a casino.  Had to stay up in order to do this.
(12:49 PM) sethb: ok.  what version of Adobe Reader are you using?
(12:49 PM) sethb: can you find that?
(12:49 PM) end-user51: Will check
(12:49 PM) end-user51: 7.0
(12:50 PM) sethb: ok
(12:50 PM) sethb: can you do one thing for me?  open a new tab in Firefox and paste (or type) about:plugins into the URL bar where you would type a webpage.
(12:50 PM) sethb: let me know when you’ve done that
(12:51 PM) end-user51: ok, got it
(12:51 PM) sethb: i am going to see if your Adboe Reader plugin is enabled.
(12:51 PM) end-user51: ok

I quickly found out from end-user51 that the plug-in was enabled.

(12:54 PM) sethb: is Adobe open?
(12:54 PM) sethb: try this:
(12:54 PM) sethb:    1.  In Adobe Reader, choose “Edit -> Preferences -> Internet”.
2. Deselect “Display PDF In Browser” and then click OK.
3. Choose “Edit -> Preferences -> Internet”
4. Select “Display PDF In Browser” and then click OK.
(12:55 PM) end-user51: sorry.  Got kicked off firefox.  Had to restart session.
(12:56 PM) sethb: no problem.
(12:56 PM) end-user51: ok. give me a minute.
(12:58 PM) end-user51: will retry my proof
(12:58 PM) sethb: ok.

The end-user followed this recommendation and responded:

(1:00 PM) end-user51: Yeah, it works!!  Thanks so much!!!!!!  Was stuck huh?
(1:00 PM) sethb: so now you can view your Adobe docs?
(1:00 PM) sethb: great.
(1:01 PM) sethb: if there’s nothing else, please go get some sleep and take care of me next time i visit the black jack tables.
(1:01 PM) end-user51: didn’t have to restart to get it to work.  Thanks again.  Good training excersize?
(1:01 PM) sethb: great exercise.  thanks.

A few remarks and observations about this conversation and my experience with Live Chat!:

1. “end-user51″ has a life!  Brilliant observation, I realize…  But, after reading that this person had been working the graveyard shift and had stayed awake to figure out this problem, I was somehow even more motivated to solve this quickly.   It took about 20 minutes for me to figure it out, but with more familiarity, I bet I could have answered this in under 10 minutes.
2. Why wouldn’t this person deserve anything less than a consistent, polite, and helpful experience from Mozilla?  That was my main objective.  If this person is coming to us for live support, there is a good chance that they are on the verge of frustration or even anger.  Maybe the person is even ready to ditch Mozilla for (gasp) “other browser”.  What a great time to recapture a user’s loyalty, no?
3. Is Live Chat! scalable?  To provide quick and superb support to end-users, it seems like we will need to have a big, reliable, and well-trained Live Chat! community.  Going forward, I will be dedicating a piece of my week to participate in Live Chat!, in hope to make it scalable.  Please join me.
4. Live Chat! is a great way to get your head out of the weeds and learn about how the product impacts the lives of end-users.  My guess is even the most gifted developers would learn how to make Firefox better if they participated.
5. Another shout-out to the community…  The articles that have been written to help end-users solve issues and the active members of the community who were online behind the scenes to help me help end-user51 were critical to my success.  Thanks to everyone!

I didn’t spend all day on Live Chat!.  My day ended by scanning five articles in the SUMO knowledge base and providing minor edits when necessary.  I competed the task, but again, I found that many articles were really well written and required only minor tweaks.  This is not to say that SUMO is in perfect condition – a lot of content still needs to be created.  But, what’s up is pretty darn good.  David Tenser (our fearless and ebullient SUMO leader) and I want to continue to build the SUMO community this quarter.  We’ll be trying creative ways to get more content on the site and to get more of you involved in the process.  Interested?  Then just ping me, please.

Tags: planet, SUMO | Categories: Uncategorized