We continue the cycle of articles “Testers Calendar” , where each month Contour testers share experience and working secrets. In a previous article, Maxim Zakharov told how to disassemble backlog.

This time, Ilaria Tarasova and Maxim Kolodkin from Kontur. The Elbe will tell you why the tester needs to communicate with the client and what tools for this purpose exist in the Kontur. In order not to miss a new article, subscribe to the telegram channel .

In our team, the developers themselves write tests well and quickly. Therefore, we do not spend time on automation, but we strive for the quality of the product in everything that concerns interaction with users.

Now we have several communication channels. For example, technical support communicates by phone, responds to messages in the mail, telegram and online chat in the service. All the collected problems are analyzed by our expert and transferred to the team in the form of ready-made statistics.

For 8 years, the number of users has greatly increased, and therefore the number of consultants has increased. Now there are 70 of them, they work according to strict rules and regulations for the sake of efficiency. On the one hand, it helps to build the work of a large team, and on the other, it makes the process very inflexible. The consultant may solve a specific problem, but he does not have enough time to think more broadly and find its true cause (for example, in the interface). As a result, such problems do not emerge in the monthly statistics, and lie on the bottom until a critical mass of dissatisfied users has accumulated.

In addition to technical support, we have Likes and UserEho. Now both channels lead technical support. We used to do this before, but now we rarely answer, rather using them in read only mode, and as testers we get a lot of buns from this. We will tell you about them, and you will see that close contact with the user improves the quality of the product (if you know what I mean).

Likes

This channel was invented by designers as a tool for assessing the emotional component of a page, that is, a personal sensation of comfort-convenience or annoyance-misunderstanding. It looks like a small "ear" with the ability to put a like or dizlike, and also write in more detail what you liked or didn't like.

"Ear" with likes in the upper right corner of the page.
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Clicking opens a form for a detailed comment.

All requests from Likes come to a separate email box with information on which Elba page the user left like. In most cases, the page context helps to immediately understand the problem.

Over time, users began to use this channel as a regular technical support, so we gave Laiki at their disposal. But we are still looking at what we wrote on a separate page.

There is a big plus from fast and affordable feedback - this is mobility. Imagine that we have released a new feature and it is not completely clear to the user. Laiki start receiving messages about this, we monitor them and ask clarifying questions to users, if necessary. Find out the reason, and work begins with the team. At this point, the tester is not easy to click through a set of scenarios, and begins to interact with the team to alleviate the pain of a large number of users.

If tech support was involved in this, the feedback process would be possible only if there was an individual accumulating treatment, and this would delay the work.

Likes are a way to see the current “average temperature in the hospital”: to understand where the symptoms are and where it is time to call the doctor.

Well, a couple of side advantages in addition:

• When you read the messages of people, you get up in their place, and over time you accumulate even more test scripts. Sometimes you wonder: it turns out that this is how they use features! And at the next run, you remember those people, and, trying to think like them, you check more test cases. It also helps in our discussions in narrow circles, which Sasha Akhmetov spoke about.
• Solving a user's problem, you begin to better understand how different parts of the system work. So, if you want your trainee to better understand the service, let him rake a little bit :)

UserEho

Another communication channel is UserEho .

For us, this is a bank of problems and a long-time desire. This service, as a social network of users of Elba, allows you to create a topic for everyone and vote for other people's topics. Thus, we have a quantitative assessment of the wishes of clients: it is problematic to wind up votes there, so the data can be trusted. When a task goes into development, the topic status changes from “Under Review” to “In Work”. After the end, it goes to the “Completed” with an explanation of what we have implemented with screenshots from the service.

If there is a specific number of people needing a feature, then you are more likely to convince everyone to do it. Or at least ask a usabilityist to conduct a study on this topic and confirm or deny the hypothesis.

Yes, by the way, there is no need to even look for respondents for such testing, they have already unsubscribed in the comments to the created topic. The only problem is that these topics become obsolete, and over the years there is a feeling that we are not doing anything. A typical comment in such long-lived topics: “The topic has been out for 5 years now, and you have not coded! There’s a couple of minutes of work, I know, because the programmer himself. ” And with this something needs to be done so that there is no negativity from old users and demotivation from new ones.

What did we decide to do about it?

After 7 years of doing this channel, we wrote an honest text:

Here the Elba team collects suggestions for improving the service. To decide which task to take in the first place, the developers take into account changes in legislation, the complexity of the task and its usefulness. Sometimes wishes help us on UserEho:

- If your idea gets 100 votes, the developers will discuss it and describe the solution in the subject.

“If your idea gets less than 50 votes per year, we will close the discussion.”

Cons of the process

So that you do not create a false feeling that intimate communication with the user has only positive aspects, we will list a couple of minuses:

Zamylyvanie glance at first. You talk to a specific user → you solve a user's problem → you think that everyone has such a problem. Over time, this minus disappears, because you begin to better distinguish between general and specific problems.

A variety of channels of calls does not allow to count in one place all calls on the same type of problems. Technical support copes with this well, the guys give birth to a single base. But Laiki and UserEho stand by. We want to have a handy tool that does not require much time to count all the votes in one place. If you have already solved this problem for yourself or have found a convenient tool, write about it to us.

We have been working in Elba for 5 years and almost all this time we communicate with those who use our service. After that, you take writing more personally. You understand WHOM are helping. This is not a spherical horse in a vacuum, but the guy who pushes you in the topic. And he also wrote a post on New Year with thanks, which you reposted into the team chat team, and everyone pondered and, maybe, even started working with great enthusiasm.

In the end, you know that for the sake of helping hundreds, or even thousands of such good people, you go to work every day, and make better not only your product, but the world as a whole :)

List of calendar articles:
Try a different approach
Reasonable pair testing
Feedback: as it happens
Optimize tests
Read the book
Analytics testing
The tester must catch the bug, read Kaner and organize a move.
Load service
Metrics in QA service
Test security
Know your customer
Disassemble backlog