Mozilla Firefox® Customer Support Empowered by TikiWiki and Open Source

Citadel Rock Online Communities

When Mozilla® was looking for a wiki to connect their staff and power users together to build their customer support knowledge base for Firefox, they chose TikiWiki to provide the power to deliver their vision.

In July 2007, Mozilla Firefox's web browser market share had grown rapidly, and its increasingly mainstream user base was expecting more customer support than ever before.

At the time, there existed enthusiastic user-to-user support communities that were helping countless people with issues ranging from solving common problems to advanced customization of the Firefox browser.

However, as the number of support letters, e-mails, and voice mails increased, it became apparent to the leadership of Mozilla that existing customer support provided by independent channels weren't scaling to match the popularity of the product. In particular, mainstream users are not as well equipped or as willing to filter through a myriad of sources on the Internet for solutions to their problems on their own. Moreover, much of the information existing on user-to-user forums tend to be written by technical users who may not have addressed common problems in simple enough language. Something had to be done to improve support resources and make them easier to find for all kinds of users.

A project to provide centralized customer support for Firefox was then conceived. Centralized does not however mean closed. Open source culture is deeply rooted within Mozilla and it has been clear from the beginning that for the Firefox Support project to be a success, it would need to leverage resources spread across the worldwide Firefox community, extending far beyond employees of the Mozilla Corporation. The Firefox Support Manager, David Tenser, was in fact hired from the broader Firefox community – he was an enthusiast who used to run his own independent “Firefox Help” website.

The Road to TikiWiki

The self-organizing communities that offered user-to-user support were no strangers to the power of wiki – the technology behind the world's largest encyclopedia: Wikipedia, all the more impressive as it is collaboratively written by volunteers around the world. Wikis along with traditional forums were used by these user-to-user support communities to collaboratively collect, aggregate, and to disseminate information via the Internet to people looking for help.

Based on the positive experience of user-to-user support sites in the use of wikis, the decision was made to make use wiki technology for the new Firefox Support. Moreover, wikis have increasingly been in use by organizations large and small for all sorts of collaborative knowledge work – in teams, across departments, with customers, and the list goes on.

A wiki succeeds where past knowledge management systems have failed. Its infinitely flexible information architecture allows structure and taxonomy to emerge from use, as opposed to being pre-configured. A wiki knowledge base is in a constant state of evolution and is therefore much more likely to be relevant to its users. In a wiki, knowledge is available to others looking for it while it is being created, unlike in traditional systems where extra effort is normally required to share knowledge (which often results in no sharing at all).

The fact that the new support service was to be centralized and therefore officially sanctioned did pose some challenges in the context of a wiki framework. Wikis are typically designed with the primary aim of encouraging and facilitating more open and free contribution. Traditional wikis like Wikipedia depended on large numbers of active contributors who care enough about the content on the site to unilaterally correct inaccuracies and to improve the consistency and quality of presentation. Due to the size and scale of Wikipedia, the quality of content on most Wikipedia pages is extremely high (some analysts have found Wikipedia to have less errors on average than even Britannica), but this high quality is by no means representative of the situation with most wikis.

The new support service was to provide a highly consistent and effective support site for mainstream users of Firefox. This required a degree of editorial control far beyond what traditional wiki sites would impose. For example, support articles would need to be written in a way that could be easily understood by the most non-technical users. The target audience was also expected to have a rather low tolerance for inaccurate information, as they were not likely to have the technical skills to critically discern if what they were reading was correct or represented risky advice. Less technical users also demand more detailed screenshots or screencasts that demonstrate solutions in a more visual way.

TikiWiki was well suited as a platform to tackle these challenges. Unlike most other wiki systems, it provided full-fledged content management and collaborative groupware functionality that allowed for effective control of content editing through permissions. User management was also simplified with easy configuration of groups such as “Contributors”, “Approvers”, and “Locale Leaders” that defined different roles within the support organization.

Citadel Rock helped develop the “staging and approval” feature (now part of standard TikiWiki) that provided a way to help moderators manage quality control of content on a wiki. It remains one of its kind in the wiki world, combining ease of contribution that encourages collaboration, while maintaining stable versions of articles which are reviewed before being published for more general consumption.

Users can self-select themselves into groups. More advanced users can identify themselves as contributors to access work in progress, while less technical users that are simply interested in looking for solutions are shown only support articles that have been reviewed.

Benefits of an Integrated Support Forum

The new Firefox Support knowledge base was launched in October 2007, followed soon after by forums and live chat. While the wiki knowledge base is simple and effective at enabling user self-support, the forum provides a channel for users to raise new issues that are not covered in the knowledge base.

Given the target audience, it was necessary to make sure that users can ask questions and get answers to them in a way that is less overwhelming and unstructured than in most open user forums. TikiWiki's flexible templating system made Mozilla-specific customizations extremely easy to implement.

TikiWiki's forum is tightly integrated with the wiki knowledge base. Not only does this this mean simpler unified user management, it is one less software package for IT staff to maintain. An integrated system also facilitates searching across all support resources, allowing users to find solutions to problems instantaneously regardless of whether it exists in the knowledge base or forum.

Tracking of support issues and metrics across both the forum and knowledge base is also seamless. In Mozilla's case, the support team conducts weekly updates that summarize top issues experienced by users, and measure how effective the team was at addressing these issues. Customer feedback is collected and aggregated using TikiWiki's built-in polling features, customized for Mozilla's specific needs.

The tight integration also facilitates quick turnaround updating of the knowledge base by support helpers, and easy linking of knowledge base resources into the forum. A more up-to-date knowledge base is not just a more effective self-support platorm for end-users, it is also a more useful resource for support helpers in doing their job.

A Better User Experience with Online Chat

Regular mainstream users tend to prefer more interactive customer support. As such, it made sense to provide a means for these users to reach someone in real time to ask questions. However, it was not Mozilla's intention to provide call-centre type support services or to be burdened with a full-scale support operation. Not only could it be costly, it could crowd out potential growth of an ecosystem of support service providers who are more likely to do a good job with it.

With this in mind, Mozilla implemented a live chat solution. This allowed support helpers to handle multiple customers simultaneously through a chat system that operated over the Internet. The format also allowed helpers to conveniently direct customers to web-based resources, including that of the forum and knowledge base.

Mozilla's online chat helpers are drawn from its passionate user community – many of them are volunteers. This itself is a process innovation that could be a tough act to follow for most traditional organizations. Nonetheless, the ability to involve an extended team in customer support is something that many might want to emulate. The online chat system provided a way for incoming support requests to be queued and assigned to available helpers. It also allowed supervisors to listen in to the chat sessions of new helpers, with the ability to interject when it is necessary, providing an environment where new team members are mentored progressively.

Members of technical teams, quality assurance teams, or customer representatives can join in an existing chat (or contribute to the forum and knowledge base) should it be helpful to resolve an issue. Involving an extended team in customer support gets the entire organization more in touch with customer needs, not only improving the quality of customer support provided, but also helping to close the feedback loop with product development.

TikiWiki as a Community Hub

TikiWiki also functions as the central hub for discussions among the support team. A “Weekly Common Issues” page summarizes issues that are being tracked. Each issue then gets its own forum thread where more details are typically provided together with links to source reports. Importantly, each thread also lists questions that support helpers need to ask users in order to help them troubleshoot problems in each specific area. These forum threads are open to wider contribution and not restricted to just the core team, providing an effective way to aggregate the collective intelligence of everyone that is working on support.

TikiWiki also functions as a hub for community development. A community forum is used to discuss operational procedures, propose better ways of doing things, or simply to brainstorm ideas on how to build and grow community. Support Firefox Days, which are events that help to build awareness of the importance of customer support and to recruit new helpers are organized collaboratively using TikiWiki.

Benefit From Open Source

TikiWiki is open source software. Commonly cited advantages of open source include freedom from expensive license fees and the avoidance of vendor lock-in. While these are important, not all open source software is equal, and there are a number of evaluation factors that should weigh in to any decision to use open source.

The vibrancy of an open source community will tend to determine the level of support and maintanence that one can expect to receive. Openness to contributions is another important factor to look for. In the case of the TikiWiki community, there has been a long-standing culture of inclusiveness which provides a conducive environment for independent consultants and companies such as Citadel Rock to participate cooperatively to enrich the shared software platform. For end customers like Mozilla, this is important as they can be assured that any custom modifications that they add to the software will end up being community maintained and cost-shared, avoiding expensive maintenance costs down the road as in the case of custom development of proprietary software.

Data portability is traditionally touted as the cure for vendor lock-in. As much as this is true, open source goes further, enabling not just the ability to switch to another product if necessary, but also the possibility of having other vendors take over maintenance or make further enhancements on the same platform. The ability to fix problems in the software without having to go back to or wait for the original vendor to make the required changes can often be worth its weight in gold.

Citadel Rock Brings Relationships

A traditional vendor brings expertise, but an open source vendor brings relationships as well.

Citadel Rock's close ongoing partnership with many key members of the TikiWiki community makes it is an ideal liaison to represent Mozilla's interests within the TikiWiki open source project. On a regular basis, Citadel Rock taps into resources from within the TikiWiki community for technical advice, to be in touch with opportunities for cost-sharing, to gain visibility into TikiWiki's roadmap, and to propose directions for future versions of the software.

Many companies new to open source are worried over what they perceived as a “lack of control” in the use of it. But in fact, working with the right partners who are actively involved in developing the underlying technology provides companies with a substantial degree of “soft power”. Not the detailed force of lengthy contractual agreements, nor the ability to control resources through employer-employee relationships, but nevertheless a very much measurable and leveragable influence.

Like Mozilla, TikiWiki is International

TikiWIki as an open source project has had a history of being one of the most diverse and international communities around. It's first three members were from three different continents, and it now currently has members from every part of the world. TikiWiki is translated into over 30 languages and is arguably the most multilingual-capable wikis in existence today.

Mozilla is an even more international project. The current Firefox Support site based on TikiWiki has content in dozens of languages and is on its way to becoming a leading multilingual corpus of knowledge of its kind. Localizers from around the world regularly translate support content. This provides leaders of local Firefox communities a quick and effective way to meet the needs of mainstream users who (more so than technical users) demand well-structured support content in their local language.

Citadel Rock is collaborating with the National Research Council of Canada to develop processes and tools for collaborative translation using wikis, directly benefiting Mozilla who uses many of the features from this project as part of its translation workflow. Collaborative translation differs from traditional translation environments simply because the strict workflow that is often assumed in conventional translation do not apply – hence the need for new tools designed specifically to support more flexible, concurrent and dynamic translation in collaborative environments.

On the Roadmap

Collaboration between Citadel Rock, TikiWiki, and Mozilla will in the immediate future lead to a number of new features that will make its way into the next major release of TikiWiki (targeted for April 2009). This will include a customer support profile, which will make installation of a basic customer support knowledge base and forum a matter of selecting a few options as part of a simplified installation process.

Other enhancements planned for the near future include an improved search engine optimized for customer support, a support ticket system, and an improved issue tracking system.

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