I had the pleasure of working with Christophe Villeneuve aka hellosct1in the beginning of February this year and he wrote a great review about his experience during the first two weeks in the Social Support Program. If you are on the fence about joining the Social Support program, check out this testimonial for what to expect in the first 15 days of the program. It can not only be rewarding it can be pretty easy to get started.

To get started check out the guidelines page to get started.

This is a good read for those of you that are interested in what the program is like.

From the desk of Christophe:

Since I joined the group “Mozilla Social Support” at the end of January 2018, I realized that I was already doing user support without really contributing to the support part. This was reflected mainly through my presence at events, media (press, radio…), answering questions after my talks or just just with my presence in some shows.

I’m going to give you a little feedback on my 15 days of activities, impressions and the process that I have in place at home to answer all the messages.

Before 2018

Before, of incorporating the team, I have been busy since the launch of Firefox OS in France in 2013, I took care of answering technical messages to arrive little by little to contribute directly on the Twitter accounts of @mozilla_fr and @firefox_fr. In addition, I do the same thing with the Facebook account FrMozilla and the Mastodon account @mozilla@mamot.fr.

I noticed that the majority of messages that arrive on these accounts were not tagged #fxhelp.

Tools

Tooling is important to answer easily, and it is not uncommon to have hundreds of tabs when we follow the news or make support. (On average I have 800 to 1,200 tabs).

That’s why, I pinned some tabs to avoid looking for them in my favorites or containers, like this I pinned Tweetdeck, the forums of mozfr (Mozilla fr), etc.

The point is to be able to quickly, and from time to time consult important pages to view new messages.

By the way, I installed alerts using IFTTT to retrieve the messages coming from these networks because I am not always connected with my computer. These alerts arrive directly on my Telegram account that I also use on my mobile phone, so I can react quickly, instead of waiting several hours (or days) for the person who is waiting for his answer.

Today

Since my arrival, 2 weeks ago, I have already closed more than 220 messages. This happens as follows:

I continue to respond on twitter, which is the first resource of my habits and I answer through the official accounts (@mozilla_fr, @firefox_fr) with serious answers. I do the same thing for Facebook and Mastodon.

Then I go to the ‘army of awesome’ page to answer the tagged questions #fxhelp and here I use my nick @hellosct1.

I can note a small regret [in the Army of Awesome app] about the number of characters available for the answer because I find the input area quite small compared to a twitter account that accepts 280 characters.

Finally, I go to the site ‘Buffer reply’ to process messages that are in French, and answer the different Firefox questions – my answers are made with my @hellosct1. In addition, from this account, I can check if all the questions have been answered and thus close the conversation.

Note the Army of Awesome app is still planned to be removed, the development of this has been post boned. Currently further development has not been prioritized.

Follow-up

Sometimes the user answers a question I asked for more information, or to thank me or to rest another. During the exchanges, we lose the hashtag #fxhelp that I try to put back if I answer, but it is not always intuitive, which means that there is a point to improve on the follow-up.

One of the ideas would be to replace the #fxhelp with @fxhelp with the risk of having an increase in the traffic or the volume of the messages.

During the exchanges, it is necessary to test more thoroughly a problem or a question that has been raised, until declaring it in bugzilla if the problem could be reproduced and qualified.

In summary

The Firefox browser must be pre-configured with the pinned tabs, allowing quick access to the media interfaces, which are for me:

Tweetdeck

Army of Awesome

Buffer Reply

forums.mozfr.org

etc.

Of course, this is a first comeback because I have little perspective on this activity, it is always possible to question me or to have more details.

Christophe Villeneuve aka hellosct1

Mozilla Reps

Team WebExtensions / Addons

Team Mozilla Social Champion

Team community Communication French

Team MDN Web Docs

Team Mozilla Social Support

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