SUMO Blog

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.

Today we are officially opening our Live Chat support to users of Firefox. Users who can’t find their answer in the knowledge base or the forum can now get real time help troubleshooting their issues with more skilled Firefox users.

When a helper is logged in and ready to help Firefox users, the Live Chat page will show the following, friendly Foxkeh:

If no one is available to help users out, this image will be shown instead:

Opening hours

We’ve set 3 hours a day, Monday through Friday, when our current volunteers can commit to being online to take questions.  As more people can commit to being around at other times, we’ll expand our hours.  This is when we encourage new volunteers to help, but you may find someone available to help at other times — we just can’t promise it yet.

You can be one of those Firefox experts!

In order to provide 24/7 coverage so our users never have to see the “We’re Closed” Foxkeh, we need more Firefox helpers.  You don’t need to be an advanced user, or have experience giving support to help out.  Most of our helpers (and many of Mozilla’s community of developers) started out as Firefox users who had a question themselves.  Many questions asked will already be covered in the knowledge base or the forum, and they either couldn’t find them or just need help going through the steps.  Our software lets you talk to other helpers, and even invite someone else to help you give support if you get stumped.  A good attitude and some patience is really all you need, and soon you’ll be an expert. Who knows, maybe you will end up being a Mozilla developer as well?

A big thank you goes out to Lucy, the SUMO team, Nelson, morgamic of WebDev, and oremj, aravind & mrz of IT for making this happen! Thanks also to all the people who helped us test the software before the launch. Last but not least, to the community of helpers out there already available to help users of Firefox: without you guys, this effort would have been completely fruitless. You rock!

Yesterday, we had our first test day for the upcoming Live Chat component of Firefox Support.  It was a wonderful success. Having so many people come out and stick around for the amount of time they did really let us get a handle on all the features and how things will work when we go live.  While we found that most things work as expected, we did end up finding a good number of small things that we’d missed in our previous testing. In the lead up to going live we’ll be taking the list of issues we found, fixing some of them on our end, improving our documents, and filing bugs upstream with the software provider.

We want to say a HUGE thank you to all the people who turned up today.  We couldn’t have done it without your help.  Everyone that turned up — no matter for how long — really helped, and we appreciate it very much.  We hope we’ll see you all back as we get closer to going live.  If you missed the test day, but still want to check it out, feel free to stop by #sumo on Mozilla’s IRC network and we’ll get you set up.

Today, December 21st, from 1 PM – 6 PM PST, we’d like as many people as possible to test both the software that helpers will use to interact with users, as well as the web interface that users will use to reach help. We need your help to make sure we’ve fixed, or are at least aware of, any kinks.

What we need to test

We’ll be testing both sides if the Live Chat experience:

• the software for Firefox helpers, and
• the web solution for people needing help.

Preferably, people will test both the Spark software as a helper and the web client as an end-user at the same time, so they can see if their actions caused the desired results.  You are more than welcome, though, to only pose as a user, or only test out the Spark client!

See our testing page for more info on what to test and how to report your findings.

What you need to get started

If you’d like to help test the Spark client as a helper, you need to download and configure the client. Once you create an account you’ll be able to use the Spark client right away to chat with other helpers. See this page for instructions on using Spark.

If you’d like to test the web client for users, all you have to do is go to our start page and click on the Foxkeh to launch the chat window, fill in the required fields, and submit the question. See our Live Chat user start page.

Getting help and giving feedback

There are several places you can ask for help, more information, or give feedback about Live Chat.

• For real-time help come see us in #sumo on Mozilla’s IRC network.
• If you’re logged in to the server with the Spark client, you can use it to chat with other people who are logged in as well. On the test day check for a “conference room.”
• To leave feedback, or for less pressing questions, feel free to use the newsgroup or leave a comment comment on this blog post.

Thanks for your help!

We’re getting close to opening the Live Chat portion of support.mozilla.com, and we’re very excited about that.  We’ve chosen a complete software solution that allows users to access one-on-one support through a web applet, but provides helpers with a full featured client that allows them to choose which questions they think they can answer, and call in more helpers for questions they can’t.

Very soon, we’ll be having a test day and we’d like to invite all of you to help us out.  You can test the helper client and see what it’ll be like to answer users’ questions.  You can test the web app to make sure it’s easy for people to use in all browsers. We’d love for people to test both at the same time, then you can really see how each action works for the helper and the user.

If you’re interested, look back here for more details, or come see us in #sumo on irc.mozilla.org for more information on how and when.