477801 - Add phone number to Contact Us page

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

I don't like this idea very much, but I also don't know how else to solve the problem.

Twice in the last month or two, our building's management office has gotten calls for mozilla people in the Toronto office who, for whatever reason, didn't have our toronto-local 416 number (or even our 650 number).  The property manager has taken the messages and walked them over to us, but that's not her job, and I'd like her not to have to do it.  I've given her my card and told her to bounce other callers, but that's still not a good solution for her.

What's happening, I strongly suspect, is that people who want to get in touch with someone at Mozilla are searching for our contact information, ending up on the Contact Us page, and when they fail to find a phone number, they are looking up the address.  This might even work for the mountain view case, I don't know, but for offices like Toronto which share office space, it's really not appropriate for us to be sending people to the landlord.

I'm sure that phone numbers were left off for a reason (we don't have general reception, they are likely to be tech support calls, no good can come of it, &c) but I really think we need to do something here.  Can we add the generic numbers to the site so that people looking for someone specific can phone-tree their way to victory?

Comment 1

[Eddy Nigg (StartCom)]

A serious company has published phone numbers in the contacts page. I'm surprised that this isn't the case!

Comment 2

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

We get mails all the time to webmaster@ complaining that they can't find a support phone number on our site. People are usually quite angry.

(In reply to comment #1)
> A serious company has published phone numbers in the contacts page. I'm
> surprised that this isn't the case!

Why? Why do we _have_ to offer phone support? Please note that such a proposal was turned down in the Impact Mozilla campaign already.

I personally don't like this idea, and I think you'll just end up making people (e.g., Karen) pretty upset that they can't get any work done because their phone is ringing off the hook.

Comment 3

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> (In reply to comment #1)
> > A serious company has published phone numbers in the contacts page. I'm
> > surprised that this isn't the case!
> 
> Why? Why do we _have_ to offer phone support? Please note that such a proposal
> was turned down in the Impact Mozilla campaign already.

Let's not scope creep this - I am not asking for phone support, I am asking for a way to not have our landlord answering calls for Surman or Shaver or any of the other people in this office who get direct, non-support-related calls.  Those shouldn't ever bother our landlord, and the fact that they have done so multiple times in the past month or two is a problem that needs solving.  I would welcome other solutions to that problem.

Comment 4

[Eddy Nigg (StartCom)]

I think it's within reason that a company like Mozilla (and its parent foundation) can be reached via a published phone number(s). Companies which don't publish them are usually fishy...

If this requires additional man-power or not isn't the issue here I think. Somebody will have to take of it (besides that I believe that most of the communication is conveniently performed otherwise).

Comment 5

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

(In reply to comment #3) 
> Those shouldn't ever bother our landlord, and the fact that they have done so
> multiple times in the past month or two is a problem that needs solving.  I
> would welcome other solutions to that problem.

I don't think it's a problem that needs solving at all costs. Maybe I'm underestimating our landlord's annoyance, but it doesn't seem like the 3 or so support calls we've received since moving into our new office are that much of a burden. I think it's quite likely that living with that problem is easier than dealing with a large influx of support calls, at least in the short term.

Comment 6

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

(In reply to comment #5)
> (In reply to comment #3) 
> > Those shouldn't ever bother our landlord, and the fact that they have done so
> > multiple times in the past month or two is a problem that needs solving.  I
> > would welcome other solutions to that problem.
> 
> I don't think it's a problem that needs solving at all costs.

Nor do I.  I hope I haven't given that impression?

> Maybe I'm
> underestimating our landlord's annoyance, but it doesn't seem like the 3 or so
> support calls we've received since moving into our new office are that much of
> a burden. I think it's quite likely that living with that problem is easier
> than dealing with a large influx of support calls, at least in the short term.

Easier for us, certainly, but I'm not really comfortable deciding that it's easier for her to deal with our problem than for us to do so. It's reasonably unprofessional of us as a corporation to be unable to answer our own phone, but I am of course quite sensitive to the fact that anything that looks like tech support will be swamped.  You'll note that my very first line in this bug was "I don't like this idea very much."

Are there ways to solve this that I'm overlooking, or are we really saying that unpaid secretarial work is implicit in Mozilla Corporation lease agreements?  I don't want to make too much of this, even if my count is higher than Gavin's, it still doesn't reach all the way to 10 incidents thus far. But it continues, and if we were any other 14-person office, or any other 250M-user company, we would have solved it a long time ago. If the best we can do is give her my card and apologize for not being a grown up company, then that's what I'll do, but it is a touch disappointing.

How did Netscape solve this? They didn't have end-user phone support, iirc? Shaver?

Comment 7

[Mike Shaver (:shaver emeritus)]

I don't know how Netscape solved it, but they had several thousand employees, so I'm not sure it's a lesson to learn regardless.  (I think they did have avenues for phone support, though.)

Giving these people the phone tree is going to frustrate them more, and I doubt it will keep the sort of people who find our landlord's phone number from annoying the wrong people regardless -- especially since nowhere in the phone tree is going to lead to them getting phone support!  I don't think you should be having them bounce to you, either: Cathy should simply be turning them away politely, like an unwanted solicitation, which I would think _is_ implicit in most places-with-listed-phone-numbers business.  The contact page is pretty crystal clear about where to go for support.  Some people would rather call the CEO's cell phone than complain to webmaster@ about a site problem too, I'm sure, but that doesn't mean that we should indulge them.

I disagree with a lot of the assertions in this bug (like that we're not a grown-up company because we don't want to encourage phone support calls, or that "any other" company would necessarily have made a different choice), but the way to solve "nowhere for people to get phone support" isn't going to start with "file a bug for a web site change", IMO.  It's not like the mozilla.com maintainers simply forgot to put a phone number there.  (mozilla.org also didn't have a contact phone number when the MV office was 14 people, for similar reasons.)  It's also not like listing the phone number will result in only these dedicated folks calling us; I would be pretty surprised if it wasn't getting north of 100 calls/day if we listed it.

(I was going to see how startcom handled phone support for its users, but I can't even get the web site to load, so I'm just going to let that speak for itself and maybe ask people to be a little less free with the hyperbole.)

Pretty tempted to WONTFIX, since this bug is such a wrong place to be proposing a change to our phone support situation, but I don't want to get in that fight either.

Comment 8

[Johnathan Nightingale [:johnath]]

(In reply to comment #7)
> but
> the way to solve "nowhere for people to get phone support" isn't going to start
> with "file a bug for a web site change", IMO.  It's not like the mozilla.com
> maintainers simply forgot to put a phone number there.  (mozilla.org also
> didn't have a contact phone number when the MV office was 14 people, for
> similar reasons.)

I agree, the intent was never to solve "nowhere for people to get phone support."  I can certainly tell our landlord to turn them away, it's just unfortunate that we are likely the only tenant to create such a situation.

Of course, we could also stop her from getting calls by not listing our street address, but I suspect we see value enough in that to not want to drop it. 

> (I was going to see how startcom handled phone support for its users, but I
> can't even get the web site to load, so I'm just going to let that speak for
> itself and maybe ask people to be a little less free with the hyperbole.)

I didn't intend hyperbole, as I said above, I *don't* want to make too much of this, it is a small number of nuisance calls, not an onslaught.  But I do think that most companies either of our local size or our global size would not create this situation for their landlords. 
 
> Pretty tempted to WONTFIX, since this bug is such a wrong place to be proposing
> a change to our phone support situation, but I don't want to get in that fight
> either.

Let's WONTFIX it because we can't solve it in a happy way, not because we don't want to offer phone support, since offering phone support was never the intent.

Comment 9

[Eddy Nigg (StartCom)]

(In reply to comment #7)
> (I was going to see how startcom handled phone support for its users, but I
> can't even get the web site to load, so I'm just going to let that speak for
> itself and maybe ask people to be a little less free with the hyperbole.)

Which site did you try? Considering that we issue certificates 24/7 and our offices are manned 24/7 too, there must have been something else.

As such, I think there could be various ways to solve the "support" problem which nobody suggests Mozilla should perform. On the other hand, show me another company the size and importance of Mozilla without a published phone number :S

Comment 10

[Mike Shaver (:shaver emeritus)]

www.startcom.org, it still doesn't load for me.  I can't show you another company like Mozilla in a lot of axes, but that doesn't mean it's appropriate for us to change all those things.  This bug is done.