scooblog by josh ledgard : Community

Merging Humans with Tools to Slow Down Trolls

jledgard — Tue, 15 May 2007 23:40:01 GMT

This was a great read that I found through Seth Godin's blog.

Troll whisperers aren't necessarily very good at hacking tools, so there's always an opportunity for geek synergy in helping them to automate their hand-crafted techniques, giving them a software force-multiplier for their good sense. For example, Teresa invented a technique called disemvowelling -- removing the vowels from some or all of a fiery message-board post. The advantage of this is that it leaves the words intact, but requires that you read them very slowly -- so slowly that it takes the sting out of them. And, as Teresa recently explained to me, disemvowelling part of a post lets the rest of the community know what kind of sentiment is and is not socially acceptable.
When Teresa started out disemvowelling, she removed the vowels from the offending messages by hand, a tedious and slow process. But shortly thereafter, Bryant Darrell wrote a Movable Type plugin to automate the process. This is a perfect example of human-geek synergy: hacking tools for civilian use based on the civilian's observed needs.

9 Challenges to Making Product Support Transparent

jledgard — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:27:00 GMT

Your customers have greatly evolved since the previous internet bubble, while most company’s customer support models have not grown with them. New, “Web 2.0” paradigms for content creation, publication, syndication, and consumption bring with them an enormous innovation opportunity for businesses needing to talk directly to millions of customers.

Because of this gap between customers’ needs and current offerings, up to 80% of your customer support budget is potentially being wasted. Currently, that money isn’t improving customer satisfaction, driving market share, creating buzz, generating great content, or (most importantly) helping customers be more successful. Most companies current support models no longer match the expectations and behaviors of your customers.

Today a huge percentage of our developer product support is delivered through traditional 1:1 phone connections. My goal is to flip the ratio to a 90% focus on “many to many” customer connections and further our support dollars to touch a larger customer base. It should become an exception when a solution given to a customer from Microsoft is a private conversation, and it should be the norm that solutions are published into our customer communities.

With this goal comes its share of challenges.

1. Culture Shock: Customer communities have been largely ignored in the past. They’ve developed their own culture of free assistance, codes of conduct, and rules that most support organizations have to adapt to. We’ve seen these growing pains first hand while introducing our support staff to our volunteer moderators. A classic example of this is a support org that wants to answer every question and customers that don’t want to do homework for students. The community is right. Your support budget shouldn’t do homework for anyone. J

2. Mixing Paid & Free: Classically the stance that’s been made is “Post in our communities and take your chances or call us and pay”. If you want nearly all of your product support handled in public it means handling paid support in public as well. Clearly there would be value in sharing all the knowledge gained from paid support questions with customers but it also would make it seem like we would be doing so to off-load our support burden to our customers in order to reduce call volume that’s costly. How do you rationalize paid work in a world that’s been volunteer driven? I’ll have follow-up posts on potential solutions.

3. Making Public Mistakes: There is a safety net in 1:1 support. If the answer given by a support technician happens to cause data loss over time then at least the damage is localized to one customer. If the same answer is given in public is has the potential to cause data loss for hundreds of customers and then you’ve got a big problem. Your support organization probably prides themselves in having high customer satisfaction and sorely want to avoid causing dissatisfaction through transparency.

4. Support Contracts can Make you Money: Not all support costs you money. What if you have a model for support that is either a value add for your product that sells more products or if you actually use product support AS your revenue stream?

5. Tools: Most community sites aren’t built around enabling both ad-hoc free for all assistance, discussion, AND paid support scenarios. If you look at the problems we’ve been having lately with our forums you know that these challenges aren’t insignificant.

6. Being Agile With Support: Your customers expectations change quickly so your support process needs to be flexible enough to handle it. Typically, in an outsourced support model you define a very strict process and set of rules so you can make it simple enough to save money and hand off to 3^rd party vendors. Today your customers may expect support in forums, but tomorrow they might expect you to chat with them in real time right when they have the problem. You have to have a way to adapt support process more quickly.

7. Who organizes this customer engagement: Is it really just a challenge for your support organization or should the people that make the product be accountable for the issues encountered with its use? That’s why there is no simple answer to Bill’s challenge. Viewing community engagement as purely a support or purely as customer marketing engagement is wrong. It’s every organizations opportunity.

8. Classic Support Metrics Don’t work and even new ones need tweaking: Measuring per incident customer satisfaction, time to resolution, and engineer utilization efficiency doesn’t work in public. You aren’t answering a question just for one person, there is a different quality versus quantity balance, and rigid metrics don’t generally allow for the agility that’s required with doing support in many to many environments with the help of customer experts. We’ve tried measuring community answer rates versus Microsoft answer rates and I think they are better than some other metrics I’ve seen the numbers have caused problems with users marking answers aggressively.

9. Your product has to be supportable and worth being supported: Don’t throw crap over the wall and expect people to help you sell it. It takes the right product, the right amount of customer interest in the product, and the right amount of knowledge transfer that starts to customers the day you start on the drawing board for your product.

I hope this starts to define the problem for people. Now I have to start answering these questions before 761 turns into 100,000.

What do you think? What challenges would you face if you had this goal? What should I be worried about?

Overheard from the MVPS: More specific Feedback on Forums and Other channels

jledgard — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:07:15 GMT

This is the last of the notes i took at the Summit that I was able to actually write down.

On Forums…

“After posting an answer to a question there should be a link that goes directly back to a the filtered “unanswered” page you started from instead of just back to the forum. “

I think this is just a simple workflow tweak that could be provided in new forum UI.

“How do you know which answer is the best answer if there are multiple answers in a thread”

This goes back to a large debate over answer quality. Not all answers are equal. Lately I’ve liked what yahoo answers does here to show the rating directly with each reply about how good the answer was and then bubbling up the top answer next to the question. Check them out and let me know what you think.

“Be transparent about all moderation”

Yup, that’s on deck. We want the community to be able to police itself and call out users that may be abusing moderation rights.

On Other Channels…

“lots of teams used to do technical chats, but it doesn’t feel like they do anymore?”

This was something that team’s used to self organize and it appears that the investment here really has dropped in the last year. What do you think is a good schedule for product teams to do chats? What sort of topics would you like to see covered? No promises, but I can add some pressure to get more chats on the schedule.

And the related “The web chat control is really flaky”.

“We like webcasts best since they are the most well produced and includes slides, downloadable sample code, etc.

“pages on MSDN shouldn’t take 30 seconds to load when we hit F1 because you’re waitng for a tree view to load that we don’t need”

I talked to folks in MSDN about this and it was recently fixed. Library topics will render first and the tree control will render afterwards. J

MVP Learnings: User Groups, Web Sites, and Feedback

jledgard — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 03:21:24 GMT

User Groups

We do great at participating in our conferences, but we don’t focus on the breadth of developer user groups like we should. One of the better ideas was that we provide “presentation kits” to user groups. We create a topic and a talk with additional materials that could be distributed to a network of user group leads and then they could find people locally to give the talk after learning it. The biggest suggestion, however was how we get more MSFT people to talk at user groups. This led to me saying “you get 200 people in a room and I’ll send you Sara”. J

Web Site Envy

Having a separate site for Asp.net that’s really cool makes it look like we don’t care about other platforms or technologies because they have to use the uncool stuff. There are two components to this. 1^st is that the Asp.Net team has done a great job investing in content that draws people to the site. Other teams could do almost as well just be taking real ownership of their developer center on MSDN.

The second component is the site features. This is a gap that everyone is well aware of and we’re working on closing that gap and going beyond what’s on Asp.Net site. MSDN will become a 2-way street for content where real online community occurs.

The bonus would be that that ideally we can offer centralized services that allow anyone to easily create a focused short or long term site on a specific technology.

I’ll add that MSDN took a LOT of abuse at these sessions that ranged from broken links, to page load times, to the lack of updates, to the lack of functionality for a modern developer community.

What about that feedback?

There were two complaints here:

1. Customers may get an initial reply soon, but then they wait 9 months to see a resolution or a status of the bug changing. What’s happening for that 9 months? Is connect a black hole?

2. One MVP had submitted lots of bugs and had 80% of them fixed. Another had submitted a lot of bugs and didn’t have any of them replied to. ‘

Is the problem with the team that they filed the bugs against or with our communication? I think it’s both. Some teams do MUCH better than others at replying to customer bugs. We’ve tried to goal teams on this and create a consistent experience, but some team’s just haven’t drank the customer kool-aid just yet. I won’t tell you who just yet, but I may start posting our stats more frequently so you can see how we’re measuring teams.

Finally, and I’ve said it before, we need to do a better job of telling you what bugs we are fixing. We do fix a LOT of customer bugs, but it’s not even easy to do a query on those bugs. We should be telling you what gets fixed, when it was fixed, and in what release it’s been fixed.

Customer Support in Communities; From 0 to 761 in a Year

jledgard — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 09:55:18 GMT

Last week 761 developer customer questions were answered in our online communities by members of our customer support staff. These are the folks helping to bridge the knowledge transfer gap for .NET 2.0 and 3.0 that I talked about last week. The effort also represents a shift in our support strategy to start broadening the reach of every support dollar spent.

Rather than most of our money being spent on 1:1 private support we’d like to see every answer we give out help everyone in our community. The effort in the forums that the 761 answer number represents is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s possible for any group that believes in radical transparency.

One year ago today I wrote a slide deck shown to the VP of Support and Soma (my VP) that started with the question “How can Product Support and Development teams cooperate to make customers more successful through online communities?” The presentation went on to show two sides of our communities with the participation of our development teams.

In March of 2006 members of our development teams where working side by side with MVPs helping to answer customer questions. Customers seemed to like it, but we’d hit an answer percentage that couldn’t scale with the new found popularity of our sites… and development teams where soon going to start having to answer questions about an unreleased product named Orcas. Our support orgs needed to share the same goals as the product teams for “community health”. If a segment of your community is focused on support oriented culture then shouldn’t your support team be engaged in that community?

The case was made to fund support engagement in our communities to help “moderate, answer questions, triage bugs, and provide workarounds to customers in our communities”. In November of that year the first person funded from this presentation went live in our forums. It had taken the help of some allies in the support org and at least one other exec review to work out the details, but the idea of filling the knowledge gap became a reality. We’re on the path to hire almost 40 support engineers for this work by July and things seem to be going well according to this chart.

It shows the answer rates in our Asp.Net and MSDN forum communities. The reply rates are around 95%, but our goal with the answer rate is to get to 80% for the seven day rate and 60% for the on day rate. You can see some significant improvements since December. We've also seen more significant uplift in specific technologies where engineers where hired first. Since we haven't hit our goal yet I'll point out that the support engagement is only designed to get us so far.

A true victory is going to require several bullets that aren't the topic of this blog post. Additional bullets are going to be required because with a higher answer rate comes more popularity as more questions per month...

I'm really happy about this and some of the other programs I'll talk about in the next couple of weeks. Sometimes it's frustrating how long things can take at Microsoft, but I find slides like this make me feel better.

I wrote that in the October before Visual Studio 2005 launched! I left off my 5 year goals from this blog post since I have to leave some surprises. What I like about this slide that I keep tacked to my wall is that I'm very confident I'll hit my three year horizon in much less than 3. Although you may feel stuck in the mud when you are working on radical changes it can be uplifting to ones spirit to take the long view back just like you do looking forward to realize that progress is being made. Stay tuned.

Facilitate Knowledge Transfer in Online Communities

jledgard — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 21:44:00 GMT

I'm often asked how products teams can best participate in their online communities. It would be simple to say "go talk to customers" and be done with it, but you can have a more targeted approach than that.

They key to successful support communities is facilitating knowledge transfer between those with product expertise and a customer set who uses the product. Today the process of knowledge transfer from Microsoft to customers is slow because we create artificial barriers by not investing in, supporting, or measuring the success of community support channels.

This following model describes an example of an ideal flow of information throughout a product lifecycle where knowledge starts in the hands of the product groups, transitions to top customers and support representatives, and finally transfers to a much broader customer set until customers know more about the products we shipped than we do anymore. See the end of this post for an example of the initiatives and goals that could be applied over the lifecycle of a product.

*Although it looks like the product groups have to bear a large “support burden” early in the cycle, the actual volume of support requests into the online system is very low until the product is shipped.

**Volume trend based on web forum and newsgroup data for developer products.

There are several initiatives that can be driven in order to achieve the ideal knowledge transfer that’s demonstrated in the model, including:

Forum Question Answering

Providing great answers to questions that are asked early in the product cycle seeds QnA systems with content that can be reused by your community to provide the bulk of your answers after the product have shipped. Throughout the cycle you should focus your attention on the most difficult questions by giving customers a 24-48 hour window to answer before we get engaged the questions.

In Developer Division we’ve goaled that 80% all questions would receive a validated answer in fewer than 7 days. A healthy community will answer 60% of the questions in fewer than 2 days after the product has shipped. In order to achieve these goals, it will require engagement from product team members during the product development cycle in, funding a support team that assists in question answering while the community is scaling up, and a variety of other engagement strategies that are best described in their own post. There is no silver bullet for answering questions in support communities and you are going to have to do a little bit of everything.

Pilot programs with product support in Developer Division have shown that filling in that question gap above is very possible with relatively minimal effort.

Supplementing answers will not only mean you've generated more content, but we’ve seen that, with each increase in answer rate, there will also be a corresponding increase in readership and participation. This means that you will start pulling more people into the category of customers who show a significant satisfaction uplift when they are engaged in online communities.

Public Feedback & Workaround Publishing

Why wait for someone to call about a problem before you author a solution? Since the alpha of Visual Studio 2005, Developer Division has had a public bug database. We’ve kept it open since the release of VS 2005, and we continue to receive customer feedback. One of the hidden features of this bug database is that customers can submit workarounds to the problems which are reported.

Without any proactive effort to drive the creation of workarounds there were 732 customer created solutions in FY06 for the 12,176 bugs and suggestions that we did not address through a product release. To put that number in perspective our own publishing only covered around 200 KB articles in the same time. The community beat us by almost a factor of 4! To make up the difference today and publish the remaining workarounds it would cost us $120,619. You also get the added benefit of these solutions being published publicly as replies to the bug report. However, you should also encourage this behavior from customers by making it easier for them to publish and highlighting the most critical solutions until a real fix is released.

Training Needs Identification & Publication

Feedback and Forum systems excel at delivering reactive support, but you need to pro-actively identify the documentation and training needs of our products. Similar to performing a threat analysis as part of specifying a feature, a “training needs analysis” should also be conducted.

Each specification generated could identify at least one training opportunity ranked by an analysis of task difficulty and newness. Then training should be published for each release of the product that addresses the high priority training needs. A great example of complimentary content can be seen on the ASP.NET site.

Today these efforts are done on an ad-hoc basis by teams but are quickly becoming a best practice. It’s not uncommon for a team to spend a couple of hours producing a video that will be watched over 14 thousand times. You should seek to standardize a process that identifies these needs up-front, so this content can sim-ship with product releases. Time to start working on Oracs training materials. :-)

Transparency with Specifications and Product Plans

Product plans and specifications can be reviewed by product influencers such as our MVPs. Doing so means that these influencers will be able to start learning about the product before any code is written and they will also give you invaluable feedback that may head off issues before a workaround is needed.

Conclusion

In the end the slide I put up for product teams has three key messages:

Monitor community health for released and unreleased technologies
Be primary experts on new technologies & transfer our knowledge to influencers while focusing on escalations and difficult unanswered questions
Support released technologies by filling in CSS and MVP knowledge gaps and proactively providing training opportunities.

Post Appendix

Structured Knowledge Transfer Initiative Example Goals

Keep in mind that these are only suggestions and example goals. I also can't claim that we've hit 100% of these goals, but they are all very possible and have ben proven individually by teams in Developer Division.

1. During Planning

Review Product Plans & Specifications: During product planning MVPs and key partners must review and sign off on product plans & specifications. Respond to 100% of feedback within 7 days

2. In the CTP Phase

Training: Identify training needs by reviewing product level scenarios & feature specifications. All specifications contain a “Customer Readiness Estimate” that will help identify training opportunities.

Spec Sharing: Share 100% of specifications with all customers as features come online in public CTPs and respond to all the feedback within 7 days. You won't get as much as you think. :-)

Forums: Create public question and answer forums and engage product team members to ensure an 80% 7 day answer rate.

Feedback: Open a public bug & suggestion database where customers can post workarounds and vote & fix all fixable issues that generate 90% of the votes

3. Betas & RCs

Workaround Publishing: It’s likely now that bugs and suggestions are not fixable so goal that 100% of valid bugs and suggestions that aren’t fixed have workarounds.

Forums: Maintain an 80% 7 day answer rate and start engaging your product support team to deal with the ramp up knowledge gap in your customer communities. This gap is your enemy in the first two years and must be nipped early. :-)

Training: Product training published. Example: See the recent releases of the ASP.NET Ajax how to videos. 100% of the training published as screencasts on a Microsoft web presence.

4. RTM to RTM + 1 Year

Workaround Publishing: Continue to provide workarounds to customer feedback that’s not addressed in a service pack or other out of band release.

Forums: Enable escalations from peer to peer support to your experts (internal or external). Start measuring 2 day answer rate and goal at 60%. Share your goals with your customer community.

Training: Open training request database and enable customers to self publish training videos on the web site that others can watch. Drive training generation to address 90% of the top voted requests.

Workarounds: 100% of bugs and suggestions that aren’t fixed have workarounds.

5. RTM + 1 RTM + 5 Years

Forums: Product team members are now only engaged to handle escalations from support or key customers on released product questions. Product groups answer 100% of escalations in < 4 days.

Feedback: Support teams now provide 100% responses to and triage customer feedback to ensure repros before sending to PG teams for inclusion in service packs or V.Next products.

6. 5 Years to End of Life

Forums: Support teams now engaged only to handle only “paid for” escalations.

Feedback: Support and product groups only review the top 10% of voted feedback issues for possible hotfix releases.

Goals: Drive for increased customer contributions in all areas.

Meet up at the MVP Summit? Call Josh

jledgard — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:53:19 GMT

I work on the Developer Division Customer connection team. I have no MVPs. There’s a bit of irony to that. This means that it is very hard for me to schedule ANY official time with MVPs at our annual MVP summit. What I can do is steal your unofficial time to talk about developer communities, forums, shared source, etc.

If you’d like to meet up this year here is my schedule.

If you are a team and want me to come chat with your MVPs about developer community stuff... feel free to give me a shoutout as well.

Monday

11:30-1:30 – I’ll be downtown eating lunch with MVPs

Wednesday March 14^th

I’ll crash lunch again @ the conference center.

I’ll be hanging out in building 33 and attending some of the C# community focus sessions

I’m going to crash the developer MVP dinner @ Red West from 6:30pm on.

Thursday

My team will probably crash the finally and lunch.

I’ll be hanging out in building 33 and attending some of the C# community focus sessions

In General

If you’d like to meet up with me or members of my team during the summit feel free to send mail to jledgard@microsoft.com. My cell # is 425-785-9695 if you want to catch me during the day.

Having an open mind towards leaks

jledgard — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:38:47 GMT

Recently a blog post was made by a Microsoft employee who was excited about the new team he was joining. His post hinted at the new product by mentioning the potential competitors. Probably something that sholdn't have been done, but I don't really feel that it should be big news that we would be working in that space. It's sort of a "duh, Microsoft wants to do better online story".

There was a minor uproar on an internal Dl about how we should be educating folks about blogging. Here is my reply.

In this case the blog is not hosted on one of our blog sites. So there is no automated way to catch everyone who sets up their own blog service. There are a few solutions here.

1. New hire education. If we’re going to continue to have our blogging free-for-all it needs to be part of NEO. Back in my day they spent 30 minutes on “press relations”. I don’t know what we do now, but the press game has changed since then and it should probably include education on blogging.

2. Continuing Education. I hate to say this, but those cheesy videos that we produce on other issues like compliance… we need a series (shorter and with more unintentional humor) of videos about blogging at Microsoft. A tour around campus with in-person education couldn’t hurt. I think there is already an ongoing series like this in person that someone in evangelism is running.

3. DL Sign-up. As suggested new blogs on official employee blogging sites should force a DL membership for education and announcements.

4. Realization that leaks and transparency go hand in hand… and that’s OK. If transparency and customer connection is a strategy then some leaks are going to happen. There really is no way around it. The deal is that we have to be OK with the occasional leak like this. In this case it really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that we would be looking to improve our online services. It’s really not news. A bad leak would be more like a feature list, screenshots, or release schedule. Acknowledgement of the existence of a group working on an innovative service… not such a bad thing for the bottom line.

The last one is critical to our strategy to regain customer trust and loyalty IMO. I wrote a series of blog posts on it in 2004. Including one that talks about the problems of having a transparent culture. We have to be as diligent with education as we can, but be OK with the knowledge that asking people to talk to customers AND thinking that every secret will be held sacred is not a reality.

Ship It

jledgard — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 23:15:42 GMT

Scoble is right. All the research, value proposition positioning, and market playbooks can't save you from looking like a copycat. Waiting that extra year or even months to perfect something for the web certainly doesn't win you any customer mindshare.

The read write web means that people become more invested in a web site. If I'm just reading sports news it's easy for me to switch from Espn.com to foxsports. But If I'm posting pictures of my baseball games on flicker and I've built up a post history in a sites community I've just become invested in your site in a way that makes it harder for me to leave. So you're better off being the one with less features and more personal investments than the also-ran trying to win a feature race to make people switch.

Not shipping early also means you subject yourself to the classic "moving target" software problem whereby your clients needs are changing on a regular basis. Spending too much time on the "boil the ocean approach" means your exposing yourself to this risk of putting momentum behind ideas that are constantly shipping.

It's hard to make people realize that Apple's secrecy is NOT the key to their success. I'd wager that their leadership position in the digital audio market has a LOT more to do with shipping a limited, but cool, design... and constantly innovating on top of that design. Even though there are now going to be iPhone competitors it will be Apple's execution that determines if they are the winner. So success is more a factor of timing and consistent execution than world changing platforms in today's web world.

Testing Community Based Open Source projects for corporations

jledgard — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 04:41:30 GMT

John's blog postings on testing open source projects where recently picked up by Mary Jo. Not bad PR for the work our team has been doing and good lessons to read if your team is looking at taking components open.

Our team has learned many lessons about the open source world since we released our first power toy to an open source site. Since that first release, we have had bug reports, feature requests, and code contributions. My suggestions below are based on our team’s experience. I hope you find my thoughts useful.

Source: John D'Addamio's blog : Recommendations for corporate teams developing Community Based Open Source projects

The Wii60 Expereince

jledgard — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 09:24:00 GMT

I alluded to my purchase of the Nintendo Wii but I really didn't talk about the system itself. The Wii is the ultimate party box as far as I'm concerned for those of you that still meet people in person. The innovation of the Wiimote controller gives the system a universal appeal for games in a way I haven't seen any playstation or Xbox game match.

Gretchen and I spent hours playing Wii sports bowling with her mom over the holidays. This is someone who has no interest in "video games", but when we packed up our Wii she started asking where she could buy one... just to play bowling. We also had a small Festivus dinner over our house and probably sold two of them to the couples that came over... just from playing Wii sports.

There is a huge amount of potential in the Wii that, when playing some of the other games for the system, you can tell hasn't been tapped yet. Zelda probably succeeds simply based on the game itself and would work just as well with a standard controller, but none of the other titles we've played come close to Wii Sports and Wii Sports feels more like a demo than a real game.

The Xbox 360 seems to have a universal appeal as well. It's just that the "universal" doesn't seem to apply to the actual games as much. I'll never get Gretchen to play Halo 3, but she uses it as a Media Center extender almost daily. When they start adding more content to the Video Marketplace I predict we'll also be a regular user there as well. The 360 is also a hit at party's but it's mostly for the photo slideshow and music streaming from the Media PC.

The Wii also misses out on the mass appeal of home media streaming. I love the picture puzzle game, but I have to put photos onto an SD card to get them onto my Wii... despite the fact the Wii comes with a wireless card!

What else do I miss on the Wii? I can't play bowling against my friends online and I don't see hints that Nintendo really cares. The Xbox 360 still takes my vote for best gaming platform if you are flying solo locally and want to play games with real humans online. It's a strange touch that, with the Wii, you can create your own characters (something I would love to see with Xbox Live) and they can "travel" to other Wii machines via a series of tubes... unfortunately they leave you behind!

So my advice is that you really need both a Wii and a 360. There is just nothing on the Wii that compares to Gears of War (and original Live Arcade titles) and there is nothing on the 360 that compares to Wii Sports.

Nobody Reads Your Internal Site

jledgard — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 03:10:00 GMT

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but it's probably true. You know that slick site you put together on the intranet? The one you spent time brainstorming about so that every bit of information conveys what you want your teams to know. The one you spent countless hours re-organizing information on. The one site to rule them all... well... no one is reading it and no one really cares.

What led me to this conclusion?

Well, I work on a group that's partially here to improve Microsoft team's connection with customers. We recently realized that despite our team's relative success over the last couple of years there was no central information repository. There was no "home" internally for everything anyone would want to know about working with developer customers. We don't even have a link collection anywhere.

So it was decided we should solve this problem. People needed to know the information we had. People needed to know how healthy their communities are and people should know what their customers are saying about them. Lets create a place for this right? It would help wouldn't it?

After a fun hour spent brainstorming I volunteered to sponsor, lead, schedule or whatever you'd like to call "run" the project. My assumption was that I needed to understand how team's use existing intranet resources in order to understand how to best build a new one. So I got access to the server logs and stats of the most used internal portals in developer division. If you work here you would know them as http://devdiv, http://teamstats, and http://answerme. Http://devdiv being the "big daddy" where all of our specs, team information, product plans, etc are stored off of. Between the 2,600 people that work in Developer Division and the thousands of non developer division people on teams we work with you'd expect that. People must use these resources right?

"nobody" is only a slight understatement. Here are the usage patterns on these sites.

The most popular site is teamstats. roughly 60 people a day go there. Generally these are the same 60 people and they are generally looking for two bits of information. 1. How is their team doing on bugs? and 2. What's the status of build integration?

With http://devdiv there are less regular visitors but site usage follows the general pattern. Team member A visits to post a document. Team members B, C, and sometimes D visit to review the document. Finally, team member A refines the document and it's occasionally looked at by team members B and C again. The point is that the usage is very localized around specific bits of information that is generally forwarded to folks via e-mail. Imagine this pattern of 4 users being repeated by 6-8 different groups of users a day and you know what's going on at this site.

Http://answerme is most likely used for one purpose by the same 30 people daily. They go there to look at their team's answer rates on the MSDN forums. They don't go to look for unanswered customer questions or other information. They just want to see what % of C# questions are getting answered today. I don't know what they do with that information... just that they like to see it. :-)

This is not to say one's internal presence need be sloppy or unrefined, simply that it would be a mistake to invest to heavily in updating the user experience of these sites.

Am I wrong? If we built it (a better customer connection focused site) would you come? What sort of customer focused information would you like to see on an web site?

What the data tells me is that the best thing for an internal customer connection web site would be a simple site with an RSS feed of a daily stat and maybe a link to one best practice documentation examples we have. Anything else feels like overegineering.

Update #1: Over the holidays I did spend some time collecting best practices internally and mocking up a site. Check out http://codingmavens if you work for Microsoft and let me know what you think.

First two reviews of my Thinkweek paper

jledgard — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 01:32:09 GMT

I've received the first two reviews of my Thinkweek paper. One of them was posted to the paper site (http://thinkweek2/Details.aspx?subId=1299) and the other submitted directly to me. They were both positive and I thank you both. No comments from Bill yet, but he's got a lot of submissions to go through. :-)

I'd like to thank those of you who've read my paper on "The Evolution of Customer Support" to date and encourage anyone else who works at Microsoft to read and send me feedback as well.

Here is a quote from the first review that made me feel a lot better after submitting the paper.

"This is a great idea that draws a clear picture and provides specific data to support the claims. It recognizes the increasing prevalence and power of community developed content and the importance for Microsoft to empower the end user and allow him/her to share knowledge and help other members of the community. It’s a great way to simultaneously increase customer satisfaction while reducing support costs."

My Thinkweek: The Evolution of Customer Support

jledgard — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 22:44:29 GMT

I've been doing a lot of writing lately. All that extra keytapping, however, was going towards a Thinkweek paper that was submitted just thirty minutes prior to the deadline at 4:30pm yesterday.

My paper, entitled "The Evolution of Customer Support", is the sum of a body of work that myself and others have put into defining what customer support ought to look like in a world where "You" are Time's Person of the Year. Or, as my subtitle put it, "How product support can evolve to match the changing needs of Microsoft’s customers and leverage new content creation and consumption paradigms "

If you work at Microsoft you can read the paper and submit your reviews here: http://thinkweek2/Details.aspx?subId=1299. Here are a couple other snippets that I can post publicly.

"If this (support) content helps one person out of the many thousands who call each year, it can be assumed that it would also help many thousands of others who otherwise never would have called product support. In today’s search-oriented, content rich web, the cost of publishing has been driven down, and we should take advantage of this benefit. Publish everything."

"While we (Microsoft) publish social media (podcasting, screencasts, how to videos, etc), we don’t encourage the generation, sharing, and aggregation of this material by customers. Finally, we don’t proactively engage in support through customer blogs."

There is also an exploration of new technology and ideas that could facilitate knowledge transfer between customers and Microsoft. This writing spree was partially conducted by candlelight last Thursday after the power went out. First I ran my laptop battery out of juice, then plugged into my desktops' UPS system, and finally used Gretchen's VIAO for a couple of hours. :-) Enjoy!

For those of you that don't know what Thinkweek is... here is what we're told about Thinkweek and why it's a cool idea.

What is "think week"? It is a week that BillG sets aside roughly every six months to think deeply about a range of topics impacting our company and the industry. Microsoft full time employees are encouraged to submit papers for think week - topics for the papers are broad ranging: new product ideas, promising research, trends that will affect Microsoft or the software industry, explanations of new technologies, suggestions for improving product development, etc.

What if the MSDN Forums where based on Live QnA?

jledgard — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 07:26:00 GMT

Just indulge my thought experiment here. This is not a commitment or even a direction, but more of a... "brain fart" if you will. What if the MSDN Forum site, instead of forum like, was more live QnA like? What if we just used Live QnA? If you haven't checked out Live QnA yet then you can try it out by replying to the same question that I've posted here....

http://qna.live.com/ShowQuestion.aspx?qid=B39B1993FCBF409593E3E0701317F98A

Here is what I noticed:

The tag browsing and tag suggestions when asking a new question clearly beats trying to find a forum on a site with more than 150 forums. MUCH better for newbies.
They also have suggested answers to cut off duplicate questions.
The editor doesn't format code very well, but neither does the one on the MSDN forums today.
I'm not sure I like killing the discussion after 4 days.
I love how the best answer is a community vote and is always shown right next to the question.
They have points and a reputation system built in.
I'm not sure how things are moderated or if things can be re-tagged after the fact.
I like the related questions list below the question when you are browsing.
They have messenger and spaces integration.

Thoughts?

http://qna.live.com/ShowQuestion.aspx?qid=B39B1993FCBF409593E3E0701317F98A

Sometimes its just worth having thought experiments like this when you are thinking about the future direction.