Am Donnerstag, den 26.06.2008, 17:52 -0300 schrieb jeff:
> nodata wrote:
>
>> Am Donnerstag, den 26.06.2008, 16:30 -0300 schrieb jeff:
>>
>>> Kevin Fenzi wrote:
>>>
>>>> Thats just a few ideas to get things going.
>>>>
>>> I've always thought the following idea would be cool to implement.
It's not
>>> IRC, but I figured I would throw this idea out there, especially now since
you
>>> now have
talk.fedoraproject.org.
>>>
>>> What about *free* telephone support?
>>>
>>> A rough outline:
>>>
>>> * newbie user has problem. Has no clue what IRC is. Knows what telephone is.
>>>
>>> * supergeeks live on IRC, read every message in fedora-devel (well, almost)
and
>>> have VoIP software with
talk.fedoraproject.org account.
>>>
>>> * Each supergeek, when available, goes to a webpage and clicks
"available" to
>>> let fedora asterisk know they are available "agents" (in asterisk
speek) that
>>> can receive calls from the support queue.
>>>
>>> * noob calls local number via the majick of a bunch of $2 DIDs around the
world
>>> which connects them to the fedora asterisk server. "Welcome to the
fedora
>>> telephone server..." They hit "1" for support.
>>>
>>> * fedora asterisk looks at all the available agents and routes the call to
one
>>> of them.
>>>
>>> "Thanks for calling Fedora support! This is supergeek $foo. How can I
help?"
>>>
>>> Just an idea....
>>>
>>> -Jeff
>>>
>>>
>> Wouldn't this shift the focus away from users finding answers for
>> themselves (RTFM, essentially) and us writing good documentation?
>>
>> I can only see this being useful if it fed back into a knowledge base.
>>
> Well, depending on their problem it could be as easy as just to say "open your
> browser and go to
http://wiki...." if there is a solution there. Newbies have
> trouble even finding what doc is relevant to their problem (well, not just
> newbies either....)
>
> -Jeff
>
>
Then is phone support useful?
I mean phones are very inefficient/disruptive (and not the "good"
disruptive) for this kind of thing since they prevent you from being
able to queue requests (like on irc, jabber, email, etc); they require
an instant response. Giving URLs over the phobe won't be fun either.
My two cents...
Pros:
- It's there
- It uses infrastructure that we control (we don't control the phone
system, but we control our Asterisk setup)
Cons:
- As pointed out by nodata, it's sometimes hard to communicate over the
phone
- There is an expectation for an answer, you may not know, all forms of
communication online, allow for you to say to someone "I'm sorry I don't
know but if you stay a little while someone else might" or (in private)
"Hey guys, I don't know the answer for X anyone know and mind taking
it?" followed by a transfer.
- If your having a bad day, anger is a bit more predominate over the
phone too, and can leave someone with a bad impression of Fedora/Fedora
Community.
In essence, to much work to too little gain (phones anyway).
- Nigel