Get Satisfaction is an awesome site. However, often I see people getting very confused about how the whole site works. Ape Shit's confusion is probably one of the best examples, and the most recent is over if posting to a thread will automatically e-mail you about new posts to the thread. @mlanger honestly believed that she was being e-mailed about a thread she had never participated in or chosen to follow, and asked to no longer be e-mailed about it, and in doing so, she opted in to being e-mailed about it. By saying "do not contact me", she said "contact me".
How did this happen? I already knew when I saw her post pop up in my inbox, I knew that she had seen this post in hers, and assumed she was already in the thread (while in fact, she was being linked to a different thread that contained the technical terminology that scared the pants off of her). This all comes down to, how stupid is the user? As we can see from Ape Shit (he's changed his name since, he's now Chimpanzee and screwing with microsoft, mozilla (twice), among others like photobucket and twitter. After being helped extensively (by me, and I received assistance throughout from others in irc.mozilla.org #sumo like lucy, djst, and zzxc, who verified I was providing correct assistance information which he refused to follow), he got helped by someone on justin.tv (and didn't disclose the assistance, possibly because he just didn't want to admit that assistance I gave was correct?).
Another situation: REAL! Dana didn't understand how to use reply (even though I went through their history and found out they did), so each 'response' was posted as a new thread instead. As well, instead of providing needed information (so she could be helped), she remained cryptic and decided to switch to Internet Explorer instead of have her problem solved. I would complain that perhaps replying is too hard, but I have no idea how that could be. One conclusion was she wasn't saving her login, and the "please login to post this reply" does not work with autofill, so after going to the regular login page, she posted her response in the huge 'new topic' box.
My goal in figuring out why users do stupid things is not to call them stupid (while that is fun), it is to figure out what is confusing them, and un-confuse it. Get Satisfaction's interface really is more conducive to new threads than it is to finding existing threads, especially with it's "limit 5 results" type here and we'll try to find already existing threads. There is supposedly a fix on the way (and has been for fucking months) that allows you to merge threads. I wonder if they'll let some superusers (curators) help out by nominating threads to be merged, especially for larger companies like twitter (mdy, I'm looking at you!)? Hope so!
August 21 @ 12:21 AM | 2 Comments | Tags: getsatisfaction | TrackbackOverheard is a service of Get Satisfaction, which utilizes the Summize API. It pulls in tweets to your company twitter account (like @mozillafirefox), and it can also scan for keywords you list (like firefox, thunderbird, and mozilla). Then, it will show you these tweets, with a button that will let you turn the tweet into a conversation (be it a Question, Idea, Problem, or just a Discussion). Afterward, it will message the user with a twitter @reply and, if they check their replies page (or use an external Twitter application, which by default shows you the replies), they'll see it and know they can go and continue the discussion.
This is great. Let's say I'm having an issue with Firefox and, as I really don't care to update to Firefox 3 as Firefox 2 is working fine, I tweet something along the lines of "Firefox 3 isn't ready yet, I'm downgrading to Firefox 2". A mozilla representative can take that out and say, "What's wrong, what would make Firefox 3 ready for you?". If they choose to answer (and a few do, but when the twitter replies API system is down, like it is now, it's hard to say people are ignoring what they might just not even be seeing), I might say "oh, well, uh, it crashes with gmail sometimes". The mozilla rep can then tell me "Oh, do you have Skype installed? That has an extension that messes with gMail, here's how to disable it." as well as perhaps link me to the support page for issues with gmail crashes (if it exists).
The end result: Customer retained, made happier that someone cares and is looking out for them, and is damn impressed that their cry of anguish was met with a helpful response. And you know what? They tell their friends. One by one, two by two, they become Firefox users simply because of this excellent word of mouth.
Support Bug 442861.
July 02 @ 09:37 AM | 65 Comments | Tags: mozilla, getsatisfaction, overheard, twitter, customerservice | Trackback