Mozilla and other open source customer service better than I expected
I have used lots of open source software, but I have not been a good bug submitter. I have rarely submitted bugs to the developers, mainly because I never thought people would pay attention to them, nor did I think the developers actually cared. Odd to admit my arrogance, since when I write code I genuinely care about it, and I should assume others do, too.
Recently I bit the bullet and submitted a (small) handful of bugs to different projects, and have been 100% happy and surprised with the responses. The most recent bug I submitted was to Mozilla, in regards to what I thought might have been a problem with their implementation of the JavaScript delete operator. The bug was submitted on January 12th, 2009. The first day the bug was passed around to real people given the real sounding email addresses. Commentary about the bug appeared in my inbox in real time. You can check out the progress here. Commentary continues to this day. [The bug was confirmed as a real bug while I wrote this.]
What’s different is most likely my expectations given the situation. I expect commercial corporations, like banks, phone companies, rental car companies, cable companies, to treat people appropriately and handle our complaints with interest and genuine care. I expect to deal with real people who I could potentially talk to again and again, and not just be shuttled around the system with a “complaint identification number.” After all, if they show they care, they might just get more money from me. Sadly, that seems to rarely be the case anymore, as even my wife has gotten into corporate customer service bashing on her blog.
Of course the Mozilla Foundation is not exactly a poor, garage shop operation, but they are non-profit and they’ve never seen a cent of my money. They haven’t jumped up and down, patted me on the back and said, “Good boy! Good boy! Find that bug! Yay!” but that isn’t what I wanted them to do. I wanted them to take a genuine interest in the problem I had, and assign resources to investigate. They seem to have done exactly the right thing.
Are we at the point where commercial corporations could learn a thing or two from non-profits and open source projects? Or perhaps are we now experiencing the difference between dealing with people who genuinely care and have a stake in something — open source projects for example — and people who don’t give a shit except about clocking in the hours for their next pay check — aka. customer service employees at for profit corporations?
I don’t know the answer to those questions. I do know that I’m more open to submitting bugs to open source software projects, and that’s a nice change.
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“Of course the Mozilla Foundation is not exactly a poor, garage shop operation, but they are non-profit and they’ve never seen a cent of my money.”
Mozilla maybe has not directly gotten your money…but if you use things like google, amazon, yahoo, etc.. search they are making $ off you in that way. This is how it should be though! I’d much rather have them indirectly make $ off me for using their great product than charge me $ up front.