As an "Employee" for Mozilla for over a year (I'm not actually under their employ), this 37 signals thing makes several very valid points. For example, what if the Microsoft Xbox team did support under the Microsoft Xbox name, and someone complained that they didn't have a product for Microsoft Word and weren't answering their questions for Microsoft Word?
People (mainly this one guy who loves sunbird) keep complaining that Sunbird isn't listed as a product, and he honestly believes that since it's not listed as a product nobody's asking questions about it (believe me, we will get questions about a product regardless if there's a checkbox for it or not) that it's being 'dropped' in favor of development on lightning.
The problem is, Sunbird isn't a Mozilla Corporation product. It's not really a Mozilla Foundation product either. It's just a side effect of the Lightning project. There's no official support, because it's not official. However, there's no way to list some products, but make it when you click on them you're taken to the proper location for help. For example, there are some very helpful people on the Weave forums under Mozilla Labs, but people decide that they want to post Weave questions here instead. None of the Labs Loons (as I'll call them for now) want to leave their Lair (hey!) and help here too, because it's too much hassle. Likewise, 37 signals made a great point:
"At the very least they should allow companies with existing support infrastructure to claim their Get Satisfaction page and automatically and instantly redirect customers over to the official support site."
This is a great thing, and one of the first things that should be done when a new company is added. When I add a company (which is rare), I get the privilege of finding all the appropriate links, like the official page, contact page, FAQ page, and anything else relevant. I gladly do so! I know not all companies have the resources to help here as well, so I want people who find the page here to be able to get help REGARDLESS!
Here's an idea for Get Satisfaction: highlight those links on the bottom! Why are they on the bottom, where no one will find them? If a company hasn't claimed their page, the links to the FAQ and Contact page should be FRONT AND CENTER! This has an added bonus, you can instruct their customers on Get Satisfaction to ENCOURAGE the company to claim their page. Woo hoo!
Not to mention the large disconnect between the GSFN widget and the company page. If you don't regularly go to company sites looking for the Get Satisfaction widget, you may not have noticed that customers on those external pages can write PRIVATE support e-mails! That's right, Get Satisfaction isn't always 100% open. And what's wrong with that? There's a lot of discussion about "private get satisfaction", and I'd seen someone with a law firm mention the need as well to have secret posts. However, it's pretty odd that you can only access this from within the widget.
Also, duping threads shouldn't cost money.
April 01 @ 03:01 AM | 0 Comments | Trackback