Firefox Support Blog

During the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about how far we’ve come with Firefox Support since we started. Since the SUMO team was formally created, we have grown from a fairly buggy web site managed by a tight group of people, to a truly community-powered support channel with over 70 active contributors per week. This is an amazing achievement that really shows the strength of the Mozilla community.

Mission complete? Far from it. From my perspective, we’ve just started. I’ve thought a lot about what we should do to take SUMO to the next level, something I playfully called SUMO 2.0 when discussing this with the team at the summit (people familiar with our roadmap know we haven’t actually hit 1.0 yet). Ideas were collected from many different places and people, including of course the amazing SUMO community. After looking at the list of ideas we’ve gathered so far, I realized that posting it all in one big chunk would be too much to digest to really be interesting to people, so I’ve decided to do a series of blog posts instead. Behold, for you are reading part one.

The most important reason why Firefox has been so successful over the years is our focus on the user. All features in Firefox have been designed with the mainstream user in mind. Back in the early m/b and Phoenix days when the user-base was marginal (think 5-6 people), the Firefox team could simply ask friends and family to collect user feedback.

Today, over 200 million people use Firefox, so maintaining a user-centric focus becomes more challenging, but at the same time more important than ever before. SUMO will play a key role here. To truly become a successful support channel for the most popular open source project in the world, we need to keep listening. As hard as we can. Some things we should start doing straight away:

Identify the most common support issues and requests and share the insights with the rest of the Mozilla community

SUMO is in a very powerful position when considering our direct connection with end-users. There are a lot of insights we can make by just paying close attention to what our users are telling us. What are the most commonly reported issues our users are experiencing with Firefox? What are the most common complains? This is invaluable info for the development and QA teams, as it can tell us exactly what we need to do to make the most impact on our users. By fixing the most common issues, we get happier users.

Monitor and improve the quality of support using customer satisfaction and performance metrics

How is the SUMO community performing? Are we making the right priorities? Are we better at some things, and worse at others? Getting a better insight on how we’re doing is critical in determining our overall quality. We’re currently working hard to get some of this implemented, but there are more things planned. I’ll get back to this later on in this series.

Monitor and respond to user feedback and support questions in the forum, Live Chat, e-mail, letters, and Hendrix

Of course, we are already doing this to a large extent, but we can do even better. We should be looking at user feedback from all these channels and combine the gathered data to get a better overview of what we’re seeing. We should help people who ask for support in the wrong channels finding their way to the solution.

Thoughts? Please send me your feedback! Stay tuned for part two…

It’s been busy for us in the last few months.  Not only was Firefox 3 released, but the software we’ve been using for Live Chat is now open source! We’re looking forward to being able to dig in and help make some of the improvements we’ve been waiting for. In the mean time, we’ve made some smaller changes that we hope improves the Live Chat experience for everyone.

Max chat lowered to 3 - 4 chats at once was still too hectic, so we’ve lowered it again to 3. As always feel free to take fewer if you need to. We’re working on hooking up UI for helpers to set their own max if they only want to take 1 or 2 at a time so that you don’t have to leave old chats open or keep rejecting incoming requests.

New Advanced queue - We’ve created a new Advanced Queue that users who have been waiting more than a certain amount of time will be transfered to. To start with, admins and room monitors will be members of the Advanced Queue, though anyone who is comfortable helping with any chat should also be in this queue. This will allow us to focus on monitoring and helping our support team, but we’ll also be able to jump in and pick up the oldest chats if the queue gets overwhelming.

New patch! Position in queue - To take advantage of the new Advanced Queue we needed a way to see which queue a chat was coming from. Thanks to zzxc, we killed two birds with one stone and now we can see what position someone is in the queue. Currently the server offers chats based on which chat was offerend to a helper last and not based on position in queue. When helping out, please take users with a position of 3 or lower. For now you have to keep hitting reject until you see someone with a low enough position. In the future we hope to fix the offer system so that it offers the chat with the lowest position by default.

Come see us in #sumodev if you’re interested in helping us make more improvments!

In other development news, zzxc and mzz have been working on a build of gajim that works with Fastpath. If you’d like to help test it (or even hack on it) please find zzxc on IRC and he’ll get you started.