SUMO Blog

With SUMO, we make it a practice to regularly reevaluate what we’re doing well, and what we still need to improve on.  We’ve made some changes to the Live Chat software in the last little while, like playing with the max number of chats a helper can take, and changing how long a user can wait in the queue. We think these changes have helped things along, but it’s time to dig in and see what else we can do to make Live Chat a smoother experience for our users, but especially for our invaluable volunteers.

Have you been helping out with Live Chat on Firefox Support (SUMO) lately? If so, we’d love to hear your thoughts on what obstacles we should look at tackling next in making Live Chat easier to use. Was there anything in the process you found hard to grasp, or were there things you simply found annoying? Is our hands on training approach enough, or should we have more documents about how to help with Live Chat? Are there particular improvements to the software we should focus on?

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this suggestion – do you know of great software that would be perfect for us, or are there any other needs for coordinating hours that I’ve over looked? – or any other suggestions for what you think we should work on next.

And as always thanks for your help and hope to see you on Live Chat!

This week and next week (April 16th to 25th) I’ll be leading a “trial” shift from 10am to 12pm PDT (19:00 to 21:00 CEST) to give our European community a chance to help users through Live Chat. At this time we can only provide support in English,  and of course you don’t have to be European to help out during these hours.

These hours won’t be added to the official hours just yet, as we’re trying them out, so you don’t have to worry about being overwhelmed by lots of requests.  At the same time, whenever we open we always get some users looking for help, so there should still be chats to go around.

If you’ve already checked us out but the current hours don’t work for you, please stop by.  If you’re new and have been waiting for a chance to try us out, read here to find out what you need to get started.

For some time now, users have been redirected out of the queue if one of our helpers hasn’t accepted their chat after 4 minutes.  Obviously this is a very short amount of time given the number of requests we can get and the fact that we usually only have a handful of volunteers on to answer them.  We’ve wanted to raise this limit but haven’t been able to figure out how.

I’ve heard back from Jive support today, and it seems that there was a setting I was overlooking.  There are actually several places to set a timeout, but they are defaults that are inherited by new queues.  I had to dig in to the queue settings to change this timeout on an existing queue.  A very big thank you to Chase from Jive for figuring this out!

As I said this should be fixed now.  If anyone still has any problems with dropping from the queue before 10 minutes please let us know, either here or on irc.mozilla.org in #livechat.

We’re happy to announce that the transcript feature for Live Chat is now enabled and working.

When your chat is finished, the closing page will now include a field for you to provide an email address to have the chat history sent to you.  Please keep in mind that each transcript will only include the details from the current chat, so if you get disconnected or have to restart the chat between steps you’ll need to request a transcript at each stage to have a complete record.

The Firefox Support project (a.k.a. SUMO) community has grown lately, with new knowledge base content writers and localizers, forum moderators, and live chat helpers. This is really exciting news, as the project depends heavily on the community to succeed. Thank you to everyone who has helped us help Firefox users so far!

With the release of Firefox 3 coming up soon, we will need even more people to handle the increased load. One thing we’ve talked about for some time is to host a full day event, where new people get together with existing contributors to exchange knowledge, get to know each other more, and have a good time. Let’s call this event the SUMO Day!

The step in the planning process where we are right now is figuring out the best day for the SUMO Day event. If you’ve been contributing to SUMO in the past, or if you’re just interested in learning more about the project, please help us deciding when the SUMO Day should occur. The dates to choose from are:

• Thursday, April 3th
• Friday, April 4th
• Thursday, April 10th
• Friday, April 11th
• Thursday, April 17th
• Friday, April 18th

Fridays would be preferable, because they give us the ability to catch up with the increased load during the weekend. Please comment on this blog post to let us know the day that would be best for you. Thank you!

We’ve created a spreadsheet of the issues we felt would be worth having fixed in the next 3 months.  Beside each issue is a priority number which corresponds to the description in the legend.  If something isn’t on the list and you think it should be, or if you think a priority on an item is incorrect, please let us know ASAP, so we can discuss it and make a decision about it before we choose the list of issues we’d like to ask Jive to fix.

Spreadsheet is here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=ptjORwt3Bhd3zdNMyhTzgMw

Reply to this blog posting with any feedback. Ideally the list is finalized Friday.

As the, fairly lengthy, title of this post indicates we’re having a phone meeting to hash out which bugs and missing features in the Live Chat software are most important, or are giving us the most trouble currently.  The goal of this meeting will be to create a list of the most important fixes we’d like to see so that we can discuss them with the software’s developers at Jive.

The meeting will be tonight (Tuesday, Feb 19th) at 7PM EST/4PM PST

Call in details will be the same as our weekly meetings, except we’ll use conference room 309#

• California: 650-903-0800 then extension 91
• Toronto: 416-848-3114 then extension 91
• Toll-free: 800-707-2533 then password 369

Then, enter the conference number: 309#

IRC channel: #livechat (please join this if you are able, it makes linking to documents etc much easier)

We’ll be looking at this list of missing features and bugs in the current software, making sure it’s current and prioritizing each item to figure out which fixes we would like to have taken care of in the next 3 months.

For those that can’t make the meeting, we’ll link to the list we ended up with at the end of the meeting and more feedback will be welcome.

As most of you already know, SUMO is volunteer driven, and Live Chat is no exception.  Because of this, we’ll be constantly revisiting our officially offered hours to make sure they are the most convenient for our helpers and that they offer users the best chance at getting support.  Now that we’ve been in full swing for a month and a half our helpers have been getting a better idea of how much time they need to set aside for helping with Live Chat and when they have that time.   As such, we’ve had to make some not minor changes to our hours, but we feel they’ll be much better for everone.

The new hours are as follows:

Monday – Friday

• 1pm to 4pm
• 7pm to 9pm PST (GMT -8)

The hours are now the same Monday through Friday.  While we lose the advantage of having more varied hours, it makes it much easier to remember for users and helpers alike when we’re open.  We’ve also added an evening shift, which is more convenient for students in North America, and for many on the other side of the world.  While we’ve retained our afternoon shift, we’ve had to drop our morning hours.  Our hope is that the new consistent hours will make it easier for new helpers to become involved and that it will only be a matter of time before we’re expanding our hours again.

As always, our hours are only the times we’re trying to guarrantee someone will be around to help.  You can help, and get support at many other hours in the day.  If you find you can help during hours we aren’t already covering let us know and as soon as enough people have signed up for those times, we’ll add them.  See our article on helping with Live Chat for more information.

I posted earlier about our system for doing Live Chat approvals. Unfortunately this fell apart for two reasons. First being, I’m the only one who can flip the switch on accounts. Second being, most new helpers were coming around after hours, which is great, that’s when we need more helpers, but that also meant I wasn’t around. We quickly realized this wasn’t going to work.

The ideal solution needed to take several things into account:

1. New helpers shouldn’t be able to open help without a Room Monitor to supervise
2. They need to be able to get to users without waiting for me to approve them
3. They need to see the same UI as they would in a regular help chat

We stuck our heads together, and came up with what we think will be a working solution. So with many apologies to those who signed up and were never approved, here’s how it works now.

1. Sign up for an account though the Spark client as always. Instead of being automatically added to the support group, or having to wait for approval, you’ll now be added to a “trainees” group.
2. Join the Contributors conference. Let people know that you’re new and would like to be invited to help chats. You can also let us know in #livechat on irc.mozilla.org
3. Watch for invitations to join help chats. When we’re open and taking requests, the trainees group will be invited to shadow these chats using the same alerts and UI that you’ll see when taking requests yourself.
4. Help out a few requests to learn the ropes. Once you’ve followed and helped with enough chats to pick up how things work, the helpers you’ve been working with will let me know that you’re ready to help users on your own. I’ll add people to the support team when I’m around. This will usually be within 24 hours of being told you’re ready.

If you’ve already signed up for an account but were never approved, please let me know here, send me or someone else a message on Spark, or let someone know on IRC. I’ll make sure to take care of these accounts ASAP. Again, I apologize whole heartedly for the process fail. Please let us know if there are still issues with the new process.

If this is new to you and you’d like to help out, get started here.

For those of you not yet familiar with the new Live Chat software, we have it set that while everyone can sign up for an account to help, only people who have been approved can actually take questions from users. Last week we didn’t do any new approvals, and we apologize for the delay to those of you who have been signed up and waiting patiently. The software is new to us as well and we took the time to familiarize ourselves with the user control options that are available (and which ones aren’t). This helps give us an idea of how many approvals we can do at once, while still making sure we’re providing a quality service to our users.

We’re doing new approvals this week, so if you’d like to help, drop by during our hours of operation. We’ll only be doing a few at a time so that we can monitor new helpers, and guide them. If you have any questions you can find us either via the conference feature in the product, or drop by #sumo on irc.mozilla.org.