Table of Contents
The Respond Tool is the tool that allows volunteers to respond to user reviews of Mozilla products received on the Google PlayStore. At the moment, the tool only supports Firefox Preview, but we plan to extend its capability to multiple products in the future.
The reviews imported to the tool are limited to only 1 or 2 star reviews and are often critical to help Product Managers to understand issues, bugs, missing features and general compatibility with other devices.
Help and Documentation
Signing up
Go to the Respond tool homepage and choose the login link. There are 3 ways you can log in to the tool:
- Firefox Accounts
- GitHub account
- Google account
Choose your name and language you can support if you’re logging in for the first time. You can then choose to Respond or to Moderate other contributor’s respond.
Understand your profile
In your profile, you can find a quick recap of your selected languages and your activities and achievements.
The karma system keeps track of your progress and performance including how your tone of voice is, how accurate your answers are and if your response is considered appropriate to be reused for the same issues by other volunteers.
Getting Started
It's easy to get started answering reviews. Don't worry, you don't have to be an expert to make a difference. Most questions are already answered by a Knowledge Base article and you can post a link. If you want to include a link to a SUMO KB article, use https://bitly.com/ to generate a shorter URL. We’ve also shared a number of common responses below that you can take, customize and use.
Selecting the right review
Start with the easy ones! When you first start replying make sure you select reviews that you understand and that you feel comfortable enough to tackle. You don’t need to reply to every review out there. Feel free to skip until you find a review that makes sense to you. Don’t worry, the more reviews you reply to, the easier it will become afterward to deal with more complicated issues.
Read the review
Before you reply make sure to carefully read what the user has written first. It doesn’t matter if that means it will take longer to reply. This is not a race! The more we understand what the user’s issues are, the better our replies will be. Do your research It is important that the solutions we provide to users are as technically accurate as possible. When you’re done with reading the review don’t jump into replying immediately, do a little bit of research first. Check the canned responses, ask the more senior contributors or staff members and only reply when you’re 100% comfortable with what you’re going to write.
Useful tools
When answering questions in Respond, you may find the following add-ons useful:
Side View (for Firefox for desktop) This allows you to split the screen so that you can see the Respond review on one side and use the other half the screen to do some research on the best possible response.
Grammarly for Firefox (for Firefox for desktop) This will help make sure your answer is spelled correctly and has a positive tone.
Getting Help from the SUMO Community
If you get stuck on a difficult support question here are some places where you can connect with other community members and get help:
Build your reply
- Greeting: Always provide a greeting
- Empathize: Acknowledgement of the issue they are writing and sympathizing are great ways to get the user working with you. Repeating back what you have understood the problem to be in a nice way can also help build common understanding. This can be a quick one liner to show we have understood their problem.
- Suggest: A good support experience starts off by understanding the problem at hand. Probe the user in a polite and friendly way if you need further information to help. Even if we are not always 100% sure we understand a users problem, presenting them with a solution we think might work can be better than nothing. Remember to always frame it in the context of the problem you think they might have. Let them know that we want to know if our solutions worked and we’re still here to help if they don’t.
- Provide a helpful link
- Ask for feedback (Optional)
- Sign it: Add your initials (Optional)
When you can use Common Responses
Canned Responses are just a template that can be used to quickly and easily get an idea of how to respond to reviews. It is always recommended that you customize all of your response, but it is important to at least personalize your response. The best way to do this is to refer to the specific problem the customer is reviewing.
Example
Customer: “I'm left-handed and the UI is not comfortable to be used with one hand. I know that only a small percentage of the population uses the left hand as primary, but we still exist. Could you please consider adding the opportunity to flip controls over the left side?”
Responder: “Hi [REVIEWER’S NAME]. Thank you so much for your feedback, we really appreciate it. We are always looking for ways to improve our browser, so we will pass this back to our developers and see what we can do about a left-handed UI in a future update. [Your initials if you like]”
IMPORTANT!! The anonymity of the internet causes people to act strangely. My mother and I have been called all manner of things in the process of customer support through no fault of our own. The thing to remember is that ranting and name-calling is unacceptable AND it’s also not personal. Especially when users are moving to other browsers. This is your chance to delight them and have them reconsider that choice. Always be friendly and assume the best. And don’t forget to do your technical research as well
