After two and a half months on the job and in the process getting immersed in Mozilla Messaging’s initial implementation of Get Satisfaction for Thunderbird community support, it’s time for some reflection.
At Bryght and Raincity where we used Get Satisfaction sparingly, I had a vague sense of happiness with it but it’s only until you actually use something extensively as I have, given the veritable “flood” of Thunderbird support, do you have a sense of how it really works and how it works well:
- Get Satisfaction is a community support solution and was designed that way. Forums which we tried to use at Bryght, are not. Forums are more akin to town hall meetings and town hall meetings are great but not for support.
- Modern technology makes a difference. Some examples: Get Satisfaction has tags which are a great, great way to track support requests as well as for the community to self categorize support requests. It also has full RSS and email notifications. And a full REST API (which I am using currently on a personal basis for metrics gathering but that will be used more by the Mozilla Messaging web presence in the future)
Of course nothing is perfect, I (and others) have lots of suggestions (e.g. APIs for Last Employee and comments) for improvement some of which I have filed with Get Satisfaction in Get Satisfaction of course and more to be documented soon.
This has been a big mistake. While we may trust Mozilla because of its history with users and its philosphy, no similar situation has been defined by this outside organization. To force users to get support from this group is unacceptable.
Support is still provided by the Thunderbird and Mozilla Messaging community; we are just using the Get Satisfaction platform.They don’t provide support services just a platform for support.