Sonic.net

Wonder if Sonic has IRC or Slack channel? <oem>

I guess not

I found Sonic support via Facebook/Message be great!

Suggestion to Sonic - consider hosting Slack/IRC channel(s) as compliment to this forum, it'd make Sonic look unique compare to competition and great way to support users, also I think support cost will go down !

@Dane

We have an idle one that we used to use for internal work, that I'm considering opening to the public. But, we wouldn't be able to commit to consistent staff participation or response, as we already monitor a lot of communication channels. Would it still be interesting, for customer chat?

My vote is YES

If we are voting: No

As a customer, I'd prefer not to have to monitor another communication channel. Even if it's only for customer chat, there will be a number of issues raised there.

Even if staff doesn't respond, someone will have to moderate it, unless you want to allow it to run amok.

virtualmike wrote:As a customer, I'd prefer not to have to monitor another communication channel. Even if it's only for customer chat, there will be a number of issues raised there.

Even if staff doesn't respond, someone will have to moderate it, unless you want to allow it to run amok.

The idea of a live channel is not necessarily to have "customer" support per se, but rather being able to ask/answer question with community of people around some set of issues and have it as "live" as well as searchable at later time. Good example would be pen source communities like ubuntu https://community.ubuntu.com/contribute/support/irc/

Moderation does take some effort, but I the overall cost would go down and it maybe beneficial to customers as well as to Sonic

Searchability is a challenge with Slack, because the free/community version only offers 10,000 items of history.

I wonder, would we want to limit chat to Sonic customers with valid usernames and passwords (for authentication)?

Since we have telephone, email, SMS, forums, and social media open for questions from potential customers, I would question if we wanted to give people a way around that which could open up the possibility of getting told something that is outdated or incorrect (whether by staff or another party).

Also, moderation efforts would probably go way up if anyone could connect and chat.

I think if we did opt to require authentication, it might open up our options to different solutions that might be less feasible if chat were open to the world.

The way that Slack can be set up is to limit access to folks with a valid email address at a domain, so we'd set this up allowing anyone to join who had an @sonic.net email address. But I don't expect that we'd have staff participation there in any coordinated fashion - we do that via SMS, email, Twitter and Facebook already, in addition to the call center, and I don't see a chatroom being a support venue.