@Strat

Just to be devils advocate here, I'm quite sure if I asked my 21 year old brother what a 'diplomatic protocol' was he wouldn't have a clue!

He'd probably say "Is that something to do with instant messaging?"

The trouble is that there aren't really equivalent non-technical terms for a lot of the issues being discussed in here. I'm sure most people will be happy to offer an explanation if asked (which isn't happening as often as I might expect, given the number of times this question has come up).

How about if we made a sticky, or wrote a blog with links to google and wikipedia (and possibly a form to submit queries directly, without having to leave the community forums to do a search and then come back)? Would this, along with people's willingness to explain, help to bridge the gap somewhat?

Hi Bob,

I’ll try to keep this as non technical as possible, but I’m afraid that it will be polysyllabic, but hopefully easy enough to understand!   I have a very set writing style, owing to the way that I was brought up, educated and how I taught myself to write over the years.  I suppose that’s really how everyone is apart from those clever people (that I aspire to) that are able to tailor their style of writing to adapt to the relevant situation. I’m not quite there yet

You’ve obviously raised various concerns over the last few weeks.  I remember from the Open Day that one of your main gripes was the fact that we use forums as a means of communication.  This is central to our Business Model.  We like to be able to “touch” as many customers as we possibly can through various means.  This include telephone calls, online tickets, blogs, forums, newsletters and so on.  So by our using forums it just offers an extra level for customers to communicate with us – an option which a number of our customers love.

I wasn’t really into forums at all until I started working for Metronet (then PlusNet) in 2004.  At that point my boss showed me the Metronet ADSLGuide forum, of which I was aware of, but he encouraged me to read and post where I felt that I could be of assistance.  Thus my fascination with the online communities began and ultimately led to my getting the job which I currently do.

From my perspective having read various forums for 4 years or so, your “regular” forum user will be of more of a technical nature, especially with our earlier group of customers, these people tended to be more of a technical nature due to the way in which we ran the PlusNet business in our earlier days.  As such, our responses and ways of writing and communicating with our online community is often of a more technical nature.  I’m certain that we can learn some lessons here in being able to tailor the ways that we write to adapt to the reader.  But we do also have to remember that whilst we may only be replying to one person, there may be hundreds that read our response so the response often has to be aimed at a larger audience.

You’ve certainly raised many perfectly valid concerns regarding the way that the Postini trial was conducted.  Initially it was certainly a trial, but then we took the approach to touch as many people as possible with this “trial” by mentioning it on the front page of Community and in the newsletter email that we sent out.

During the trial nature of Postini, our forums were absolutely the right place to be discussing this, but only with our forum users.  As such as we went for the larger audience by emailing customers about it, we, in my opinion (IMO!) started to let ourselves and our customers down.  We should have involved our Content Team more so that they were able to prepare relevant web pages, explaining various aspects of the Postini service, such as telling our customers in easy to understand terms how to do things like being able to read and understand email headers, what to do if there is a problem, how to identify if there is a problem and so on.

Of course once we were rolling out Postini to a larger audience, we should also have given more dedicated training to our Customer Support Centre (CSC).  Bob has been doing an absolutely fantastic job of keeping the CSC informed as to what is happening with Postini, but without a dedicated training resource taking them through the ins and outs of how Postini works then this would never be enough, leaving Bob almost as a single point of failure which is unfair on him and also puts the CSC under pressure when dealing with Postini concerns.  Obviously now that we’ve been running Postini for awhile now, the CSC have abetter understanding of the system and how to address concerns and queries raised regarding the Postini service.

Could we have done things better?  Of course we could have done and we’ve been looking into this throughout the trial and after you raised your concerns with David.  We absolutely have not ignored what you have told us and like I said earlier, I feel that you have raised some very valid points.

You may well have missed it, but I posted some meeting minutes for a Content Team Workshop that I attended at the start of the week.  For your reference you can find these here:

http://community.plus.net...ex.php/topic,59796.0.html

In this meeting we discussed for a couple of hours a number of ways that we felt that we would be able to improve our support pages and make them easier for our customers to be able o find information regarding a wide aspect of technical and non technical aspects of our services.  I’m a little disappointed that noone has replied in that thread yet as I and the Content Team are very keen to discuss how we see things moving forwards over the coming months.

There will always be instances of support pages targeting the more technical audience.  This will always happen when the query is of a technical nature, for example configuring htaccess on your web site (don’t worry, I don’t really understand this either!).  Now, there will always be ways where we can improve our existing pages.  Some may be out of date or some could be explained better and we’re always feeding back to our Content Team who are then able to make improvements after taking on our and our customers feedback on board.  It’s not a quick win and it really is very much work in progress, but I hope over time you will start to see the improvements that we will be making.

We do have to make things clear though.  We can’t be responsible for educating everything at the best possible level.  We will always try to help our customers, of that there is absolutely no doubt.  But if there are occasionally things that you don’t understand, like technical words then there are plenty of other places where you can find definitions of these.  I’ll always use either http://dictionary.com or http://wikipedia.org if there’s something I don’t understand, they’re always really helpful.  Like I say, we do and always will try our best to make sure that we are explaining things to our customers, but the nature of what we are explaining will often decide the tone of the way in which it is being described.

Hi Neil
I suppose I was thinking in terms of us old silver surfers rather than techy wizz-kids such as yourself


BTW I'm thinking of reporting Mr Taylor to the RSPCA

Yup, and that too 

I'm honored and flattered to be a techy whizz-kid while 30 and totally bald 

All that and the moon landings too eh?

B.

A very tricky problem as many have pointed out.

Damned if you make the response to 'Techy' by one section of the Community, Damned by those with more Technical knowledge if you make the response too simple!

Some topics e.g. (for example) the extremely detailed and precise exchange of information on the Postini (an Anti SPAM Service provider) problems by a small group of users and PN (PlusNet) staff was able to keep the content both accurate and succinct by using terms well understood by the participants.  Attempting to write this level of detail in form suitable for general readership would have presented a real challenge  and IMHO (In my humble opinion) been nugatory. 

A two speed set of forums?   

A well maintained Glossary?  Tried that on PUG but it soon became unwieldy and a pain to maintain.  So as others have said 'the web is your friend'.  I'm well into 'silver surfer' territory but with a long (too long!) involvement in IT, and find most of the more general terms second nature - BUT, progress is relentless so even with this background I find I have to resort to some research when newer bits of technology is discussed.

The Customer Panel is a sound idea, but needs to be careful not to make all of the output too simple.  The recent foray into video help is an excellent example of how to pitch much of the General Support information in a way that is easily digestible and repeatable at the Customers speed.

My 2p

Maurice

To be honest when a customer says to me that they are a novice, new to computers or as one lady put it yesterday "Rubbish with computers" then i simply match the customers level and explain things as easy as possible. I find people appreciate it more if you match them.

We speak to customers of all ages, I believe a gentleman i was talking with yesterday was 86.

Ofcourse if a customer is tech savvy then that's great too.

What is it they refer to this as? "Blinded by science"?

::Edited as spelling is failing me today :::

OK you guys, You have proved you know the meanings of the abbreviations.... I shall have to bookmark this page, "just in case" I need to know the decoded versiond.  However, I still maintain, it would be a good idea to have a place on the main forum index page that said  ABBREVIATIONS AND TERMS. so that those who come later have a place they can easily go to for reference.... Yes, you guys on the phone can ask questions and find out if the person you are talking to knows what you are talking about, and adjust accordingly (hence the graph results) but I have never spoken to anyone on the phone, and probably applies to many many more PN (oops `) Plusnet customers.  I Read many of the forums, to try to gain knowledge, and it would be nice to go to the reference point to find out what the abbreviations mean, without feeling either stupid, or going to another (or same) to ask the question.

You may be able to "look under the bonnet" but even if you know what the plugspanner looks like, it`s no use trying to set the points gap with a lolipop stick.

Even instruction books that use abbreviations have a Glossary somewhere..... ever seen an Ordnance survey map?

As has been mentioned, changing the forums is fraught with difficulties whichever way you go.  Though I wonder if the plug-in used in the blogs could be used?  So it automatically picks up acronyms and technical terms and makes them so if you put your mouse on them, a little box appears and floats over the top with a short explanation.  This wouldn't solve the problem, but with a relatively limited set of explanations and terms, could improve things a little.

As for a Customer Panel to review help pages, why not publish them in "beta" for a few weeks, and allow comments and discussion from everyone on the Community site?

Current Help pages are quite varied in their content, tone and purpose.  Some are quite basic, or are designed for beginners, and have screenshots detailing how to enable things on the portal for instance.  And some are quite advanced, or with lots of technical details and have shell commands and php code examples for instance.  This is a good thing - so could this be highlighted?  Maybe colour coded headings/links to them (advanced, medium, beginner)?  Or formalise the different types of pages which are already used - how-tos, FAQs, step-by-step setup guides, lists of technical settings, etc. - and give them different icons?

Just a few ideas from me! 

Martin

Hi Martin,

I've passed your feedback onto our Content team.

Neil Armstrong said,


Well Neil; my Mum used to say. "You can't have hair and brains"

regards,
Bob

...or grass never grows on a busy street

Thanks for the feedback Martin, it's always appreciated.

James has posted information about our most recent Content Workshop here:

http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,59796.0.html

We're still awaiting comments on the ideas that were mentioned.

Posting beta versions of articles for Community feedback is definitely something we're interested in, where feasible. Obviously we need to make sure this wouldn't stop us getting information out in a timely fashion for some aspects of support.

The tone of our articles has changed in more recent times and we are trying to make them more approachable and warmer. Our 'voice' has become more defined now and ongoing we'll be updating existing articles accordingly.

We're definitely wanting to highlight articles intended for beginners - we'll be producing many more videos this year as these are getting very good feedback. I'm not sure colour will be the best way to do this - we have coloured templates for different support sections already and our links need to be consistent to match both our company style and avoid introducing confusion.

That said, we will be doing something to label articles, guides and videos and this way. I can see merit in using icons for that as well as for the article type. I bought my better half a Nintendo Wii for Christmas and I've been very impressed by their use of icons, not least that it is so consistent across the whole range of products.

One of the ideas is to streamline articles more - instead of going into a support section and seeing a whole raft of article, we'll start with a basic introduction and then that would provide links to articles that are more specific. A good example would be email - the first article would provide the settings required and then link to step-by-step guides for the most popular mail clients.

This also would be a good place to link in the idea of Community support articles. We do try and cover the most popular pieces of software, but if someone wants to use something more obscure, they could ask in the forums if help is required on setting it up.

We can also use this approach to provide articles of a more technical nature for those who would like to read more on a particular subject.

If you do have any more ideas on this, please add them to the Content Workshop post ( http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,59796.0.html ) and we'll take things from there!