Once again, happy belated 2015 – this time wearing a slightly different but equally awesome hat! In this series of blog posts, I’m going to set the stage for User Success in 2015 and beyond. Let’s start with a couple of quick clarifications:

• SUMO = support.mozilla.org
• SUMO != User Success

SUMO has come to mean a number of things over the years: a team, a support website, an underlying web platform, and/or a vibrant community. Within the team, we think of SUMO as the online support website itself, support.mozilla.org, including its contents. And then the amazing community of both volunteers and paid staff helping our users is simply called the SUMO community. But we don’t refer to SUMO as the name of a team, because what we do together goes beyond SUMO.

Crucially, SUMO is a subset of User Success, which consists of a number of teams and initiatives with a shared mission to make our users more successful with our products.  User Success is not just our fabulous website which millions of users and many, many volunteers help out with. User Success is both proactive and reactive, as illustrated in this hilariously exciting collection of circles in circles:

Our job starts as soon as somebody starts using one of our products (Firefox, Firefox for Android, Firefox OS and more). Sometimes a user has an issue and goes to our website to look for a solution. Our job is then to make sure that user leaves our website with an answer to their question. But our job doesn’t stop there – we also need to make sure that engineers and product leads are aware of the top issues so they can solve the root cause of the issue in the product itself, leading to many more satisfied users.

Other times a user might just want to leave some feedback about their experience on input.mozilla.org. Our job is then to make sure that this feedback is delivered to our product and engineering teams in an aggregated and actionable way that enables them to make the right priorities about what goes into the future versions of the product.

The proactive side of User Success consists of:

• User Advocacy – A team looking at all our user interaction points, from support, social media, telemetry and other data to better understand what our users need so we can then help engineering with getting bugs fixed, eliminating the need for reactive support for these issues in the future.
• Education – This includes things like our in-product information, tutorials, how-to’s, and other Engagement content we collaborate with other teams to create).
• Self Service – This includes our vast knowledge base of solutions to common problems users experience when using our products.

The reactive side of User Success consists of:

• Community Support – Our forums, the Army of Awesome on Twitter.
• Helpdesk – Paid staff looking at issues that others aren’t able to answer.

When you add up our reactive and proactive initiatives, you get the complete equation for User Success, and that’s what I’ve been calling my team at Mozilla since 2014.

Next up: User Success in 2015 – Part 2: What are we doing this year? (Will update this post with a link once that post is published.)

http://djst.org/2015/02/20/user-success-in-2015-part-1-more-than-sumo/