We turn useless feedback into useful: working with the Plesk community

All software developers agree that they need to listen to their users. But not everyone knows how to organize this process so that in hundreds, even thousands of messages coming through different channels, find a rational grain. As a result, for many companies, such a popular and generally useful tool for collecting feedback, such as forums, turns into a mess of messages, and communication in other forums comes down to holivars. In this post we will describe how to organize the process of communicating with users on the Internet in order to get the most valuable information about the product (even if the user doesn’t particularly want to share it) - using the example of working with our Plesk community. And also give useful tips based on personal experience.

We have always wanted to create a sustainable and constructive community around our Plesk automation panel. The work on its creation began a few years ago, and its main goal at that time was to get useful feedback from Plesk users. In a nutshell: we help you with your problems, and in return we want to hear your feedback, recommendations, suggestions, criticism. Then inside the team we analyze, draw conclusions and make decisions on the further development of our product. To implement the entire project, first of all, we used a corporate forum , built then on the vBulletin engine (and now on XenForo) and with the English language for default communication. A separate employee was assigned to work with the community, coordination and mediation between developers and users (this is me).

Problem number 1: people only talk about problems

It arose first, immediately and remains to this day. People carried many technical problems to the forum without giving anything in return. Feedback, in the form in which we would like, could not be obtained. The forum has become a free Support Helpdesk. I, as a moderator, for the most part served as a supporter, by bit choosing valuable information from a stream of technical problems. My responsibilities included a primary analysis of these problems, the creation of reports to developers on problems that look like bugs, on problems that are encountered most often, feature request, etc. Real bugs were repaired by developers, Knowledge Base articles were created for frequent problems, Feature requests got into special considerations. The system built in this way worked, but it did not bring much real benefits.
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What did:

1. Created a team of Plesk experts. I already knew many especially advanced and reputable users in the forum who received the status of Plesk Expert. There are not so many of them, but they took over most of the functions of solving technical problems of users, which enabled me to focus on issues of interest and discussions. For experts, a special closed section of the forum was created, where they could informally communicate with representatives of the Plesk development team, express their wishes, recommendations, and discuss issues. Instead, they received direct access to product developers (including - for solving their own problems) and the right to free certification for Parallels products . Especially distinguished experts are invited to the annual Parallels Summit conference in the USA. On holidays we give and give presents - branded T-shirts, mugs and so on.

These people are from different countries, mainly from Europe. But there is a very reputable expert from Uganda, for example. Everyone has different motivation. Someone works for their own development, someone uses this opportunity to advertise their own hosting or support-services, and someone directly requests something substantial from us for their work. They are similar to supernovae - as a rule, they have a small overactive period, when they write and help a lot and are useful, and then - either complete extinction, or a sharp decrease in activity. In general, this is expected, and my task is to maximize their period of activity. With some of them, quite intensive and productive personal communication is being developed through Private Messages. During my vacation, the experts assume some of my responsibilities in the forum. In the case of some emergency situations in my absence, they have the opportunity of direct access to my leadership.

2. Made the presence on the forum of Parallels employees mandatory and noticeable. At the forum, besides me, there are many other our employees who answer particularly specific, narrow questions. The newcomer who came to our forum, the constant presence of Parallels employees in addition to the very experienced and authoritative experts who are ready to help, makes an impression. They see that there is a lively, active, serious community of professionals and that their voice, their question will be heard. Yes, there are situations when it is extremely problematic to help a person in the framework of the forum discussion. It requires a long and detailed study of his problem directly on his server. In such cases, we try to gently convince the person to contact our official technical support service. Moreover, in especially difficult and interesting cases, I myself create a ticket for the user in Support Helpdesk and his problem is handled by the support in the usual way. If in the process of working on this problem, the support finds a bug, a lack of functionality, or something else interesting for us, then we get new, useful information, and the user solves the problem in the form of free support.

Problem # 2: Other Forums

Objectivity of the received information is extremely important. It’s counterproductive to cook in your own juice from your rules, colleagues, expert experts on your cozy site. Thus, our expansion in creating the Plesk community has been extended to other reputable online resources related to the hosting business. In this case, we are faced with the expected problem - the existing communities there and even the moderators can not always be configured friendly to your product.

As decided:

1. We have significantly expanded our presence on various Internet resources , where issues of hosting, hosting panels, the work of service providers, etc. are discussed. We began to actively attend the WebHostinTalk forum, participate in discussions related to Plesk on Reddit, Quora, Stackoverflow, ServerFault, Amazon Web Services forum and others. Of course, we could not use the social networks. Twitter , Facebook , Google+ are easy to find.

It should be noted that at first it was not easy to get into the communities of some forums. Local users and moderators instantly recognized in me “the very guy from the Parallels forum” and began to treat my posts with some degree of skepticism, they say, this is a Parallels person what to take from him. For example, I was warned by the moderators for posting information about new Plesk releases with links to the Parallels website, and after my objection that the authors of posts with exactly the same content about competitors' products were not pursued, was temporarily banned. Later I was informed that nobody knows about those authors that they are employees of competitor companies, and everyone knows about me.

Later, the attitude towards me softened there, loyal to Plesk users appeared who often supported me, and their reasoning for our hosting panel was convincing and professional. Thus, even though we were not able to make a dent in the strongholds of unfriendly forums, our presence there has become noticeable, and now more and more people are interested in Plesk, asking good questions and getting serious, thoughtful answers from the established circle of loyal Plesk users.

2. Abandoned comparisons and holivars. For us, the main rule of participation in various discussions of our product has become a complete and principled refusal to participate in a holivar on the topic of comparing our products with competitors. We avoid unconstructive altercations in topics like “Some sort of hosting panel against Plesk” and prefer to inform the community more about our strengths and advantages, accept any business criticism and try to help solve specific problems of users. We believe that we should prove our advantage with deeds, concrete proposals, and not with useless altercations with users who prefer to use other solutions.



However, this does not mean that we do not read such discussions. Yes, their level is usually low, there are a lot of categorical statements, declarations. But often there you can meet very valuable opinions and criticism in our address. We carefully read these topics and collect all the important and useful information from there.

Problem number 3: language barrier

Separately, I would like to talk about the aspects of communication. Plesk is focused on the external market, there are relatively few Russian-speaking users, therefore, English was originally the language of communication in our community. It is clear that a huge number of members of our community are not from English-speaking countries at all, and this has caused some peculiarities of communication within the community. Often people write extremely bad English, and it is very difficult to understand what they need. Often newcomers come and simply write in their own language. I noticed that most often these are the Russians and the Germans.

As decided:

1. Yet English. In such cases, I, necessarily in English, politely ask to continue the discussion in English, arguing that the problem under discussion may be of interest to many other people who do not speak the language that was used by topstarters. In addition, I believe that it is not necessary to make separate sections of the forum for different national languages. English should be the only default language. There is a fear that many non-English users will disperse in their language sections and their contribution to the community will be lost for us. A single language of communication should consolidate the community.

2. But simpler. In the answers, I always try to use as simple as possible English with the construction of short, easy to read phrases. In my opinion, very good knowledge of English here can be even detrimental. The Intermediate level is quite sufficient as a kind of golden mean between very bad speakers and English speakers and native speakers. People with bad English can be frightened off by a misunderstanding of your refined turns using rather rare words, idioms, and terms. I should note that in private messages, the level of communication often becomes completely informal. People understand that only the addressee reads them, and they open up more easily and willingly. In such discussions, informal English skills come in handy. I highly recommend to develop these skills for such cases. To use informal English publicly is not worth it, although a certain amount of jokes, humor and even sometimes sarcasm is always perceived very positively. The terminology used should be clear to everyone, although funny things happen. For example, once, in one lively discussion with one very emotional user, I used the word atavism. For the interlocutor, it became a discovery. It got to the link to Wikipedia. As a result, my interlocutor wrote - "I will try to remember that word and impress someone with it :)" Simple, polite and restrained style in public discussions without becoming personal and informal communication in personal correspondence, if, of course, the interlocutor admits - your key to success in productive communication with the community.

3. Without becoming personal. I highly recommend in public discussions to tell something personal about yourself, about your work, about your plans. Such familiarity may subsequently lead to the use of this information against you and to other unpredictable results. Disclosing detailed information about the features of the new version, exact release dates, and other insider information is also strictly not recommended. There were cases when I gave people some exact dates, but in the end they were not executed for reasons beyond my control, and I had to get out and apologize.

4. Love-hate relationships. There is a special category of users who have been using Plesk for a long time, they know a lot about it, they ask very serious and deep questions, but at the same time they are negative and even aggressive. With such people you need to work extremely accurately and accurately. Answers should be as verified and verified. The slightest flaw in the answer they instantly use for new quibbles. Sometimes it comes to the fact that you realize that it will be better to stop the discussion. Fortunately, there are very few such users and such discussions.

5. When the problem is already known. I also have a very useful rule. In the case when I have to inform the user that the problem he is writing about is already known, and the developers are working on it, I always give him the ID of this bug report from our internal bugtracker. Yes, it is not available to the user, but he can use this ID in further discussions with representatives of our company, with support, and so on. In addition, in the published Changelog for the next update, he can find this ID in the list of fixed bugs. There is an idea to add these IDs in the header of the thread, so that anyone can immediately see that the problem is in the work of Parallels developers.

In general, it is very interesting to communicate with people with varying degrees of loyalty to our products, with different temperaments, which sometimes so overwhelms that their vigorous gratitude for help sometimes discourages.

I wrote this article to talk about our experience of working with the community and inviting me to discuss its shortcomings. It would be interesting to hear stories about working with communities from other IT companies, their problems and methods of overcoming them. Write in the comments how it works for you.

Yes, you can also leave your feedback on Plesk in the comments to this post. Just remember our rule about holivarah.