Announcing support improvements, town hall meetings, transparency reports and more
Today, we’re excited to announce some major upgrades to our customer support system and processes for improved communication with the community!
First and foremost, we have launched a new Support Site to significantly improve our customer support, as it provides us with a managed infrastructure for top quality service to the community and makes sure that all issues get properly tracked and resolved.
At a quick glance, here are some of the reasons that we believe this integration will transform communication and interaction with the community:
- A unified email ticketing system that ensures every question, issue, suggestion or bug is logged, assigned to the right person, and resolved
- A new FAQ that is easier to search and edit so that community members can quickly find answers to common questions on their own
Yes, it is sad to see our long-lived help and support group retire (and thank you so much for all of the unbelievable community and volunteer support), but ultimately the lack of a proper ticketing system was causing too many issues to go unresolved and improvements were needed.
To address any potential concerns with transparency due to this upgrade, we are committing to the following:
Town Hall Meetings
Starting in October, we will begin holding quarterly Town Hall meetings where the CEO (@ottman), COO (@jack), Chief Admin (@nick) and other members of the Minds Team will present information about what was accomplished in the prior quarter and what is planned for the following quarter. The meeting will conclude with a designated time for Q&A with any community members who wish to join.
These meetings will be held on the first Thursday of every quarter at 11am EST in the Minds General chat room, which we encourage you all to join.
Here are some of the initial dates and times for reference (edited as of 1/6/22):
October 7, 2021 at 11am EST(completed)- February 17, 2022 at 11am EST
- May 19, 2022 at 11am EST
- August 11, 2022 at 11am EST
- November 17, 2022 at 11am EST
These meetings will hopefully make a big improvement to overall communication between the Minds core team and the community, so that everyone can be more aligned on progress, direction, and any outstanding issues can be addressed.
Transparency Reports
Additionally, we plan to begin publishing an annual transparency report that contains data about our support and moderation processes, such as the number of support requests received, the number of support requests resolved, the number of reports by reason, the number of admin actions by reason, the number of user appeals and more.
Please note that it may take us some time and development work to be able to gather the data required for such a report, but it is something we feel will help provide more insight for the community. We aim to publish our first one at the end of 2021, but there is still more work to be done and we imagine this will be a report that evolves over time based on community feedback.
Moving Forward
In the short term, we will continue to monitor the legacy Help & Support group and direct users to submit tickets into the new system, but ultimately we plan to sunset this group to ensure that issues do not go unresolved.
If you run into a bug, have a feature request, or any other inquiry that you want to direct towards the Minds staff, you will now be able to easily submit a ticket at https://support.minds.com and we will respond via email.
We are confident that this upgrade will transform the help and support experience on Minds and keep us more accountable.
If you have any questions or concerns, please drop your comments below!
Banner art credit to @neutronboar