Peter Kiem wrote: > Hi, > > Haven't seen any list traffic since Mid January. Is this list still > running? >
Peter - there was a problem with this mailing list that we've since fixed. Joey deVilla ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) normally manages and administers the lists, so any of you should feel free to drop him a note if you perceive issues with the forums in the future. List traffic continues to be light though - I think this is a natural reflection of the evolving nature of our respective businesses. Tucows puts a huge emphasis on interacting directly with our customers, but as we grow and mature, the style and method of communication evolves. For instance, our largest customers (by volume) each have dedicated sales reps and direct access to sales engineers and premium support. A lot of these customers used to be huge contributors to this list, but now they are interacting with real people inside Tucows on a one-to-one basis as their primary point of contact. Definitely a much higher value interaction for than that offered by this mailing list. The next group of customers (which is the largest number of customers) also have assigned account reps who they will interact with on a less frequent basis, but will also be their main point of contact for help and information - these customers were also very regular contributors to the mailing list that have now migrated to relying on higher-value channels for getting the information they need. We've also really beefed up in a lot of areas that people looked to this list to fulfill - our front-line tech support is light-years more substantial and experienced than it was when this list was at its zenith (largely due to the continued commitment of the people that have been staffing it before this list even really existed - I love the fact that we still have people in support that know what an "RCU" is.) The feedback we get about our support capabilities continues to improve and is overwhelmingly positive. The negatives that do rise to our attention are largely product-related and are finally becoming well-understood by the team - sucky APIs, the multitude of usernames, passwords and login pages and an assortment of functional limitations. Its great that our support, sales, engineering, etc. people can talk confidently about these issues when customers ask questions about them - and even better that our product development team has clear plan for dealing with these challenges in a timely manner. But bad for list trafffic. When I first sent in the NOC ticket to have this list created, I was looking for a way to have you all help me deal with the gigabytes of email support traffic that me and the team were dealing with (I think there were two or three of us at the time working on OpenSRS). We also built out a few other resources to help our customers help themselves - the FAQ, support notes (remember this? http://web.archive.org/web/20000608193839/www.opensrs.org/notes1999.shtml) and the docs - but that was about it. Now in addition to fourth, fifth and sixth generation iterations of each of those, we've also implemented and matured a whole raft of alternative communication tools and support resources like our Live Reseller Updates, System Status Notices, our Developer Relations projects (http://developer.tucows.com) like APIHelpdesk, our documentation wiki (http://hacking.developer.tucows.com) and The Farm (http://farm.tucows.com.) Today we're no longer looking for ways to have you shoulder our support burden for us - we're almost entirely focused on eliminating the information gaps that exist around our services. More data in your hands means less questions left-over for the list. This leaves very small customers (who we would like to engage with more and should put their hands up), those that have not engaged with account management and prefer the mailing list, those that have simply been missed in terms of engagement, those that left us and want to participate in a generally negative way, and those (both of them!) that are interested in domain policy. There are a couple of exceptions to this - the Blogware and Platypus forums are pretty busy, but a lot of what makes those lists more active was also true of this list at one point. I fully expect that as these services become better understood by us and our customers, and we learn how to deal with the challenges that you have with them - those lists will also decline in terms traffic. Which leaves me with at least one question - what should we do with these lists? Do they still have value to you all or have they become a comfortable habit that you don't want to give up just yet? Is there new value that we can bring to these lists that we should explore? Have we spread the traffic out across too many different lists? Do we need new types of lists? I'd love to hear more about how we can make this resource more useful to you each, or what alternative approaches we might develop that would give you a better experience. Keeping the list functioning is definitely a start - thanks for pointing that out! :) -ross _______________________________________________ domains-gen mailing list [email protected] http://discuss.tucows.com/mailman/listinfo/domains-gen
