Improving customer care with a community perspective

Bitergia is providing services to many open source related companies and organizations, but one of the core aims has been always to provide something useful for the communities of those companies and organizations. So, how could we involve these communities in our customer care services?

First of all, let’s check what we are giving to our customers:

1. A public access to customer’s metrics through a public dashboard similar to grimoirelab.biterg.io, customized for customer’s ecosystem (defined by a set of projects and their data sources).
2. Automatically generated quarterly PDF reports.
3. Private access to a custom Kibana instance for visual data querying, charts and dashboards building, etc. This instance will include additional plugins like the network visualization in the next platform upgrade.
4. Private access to data produced by Bitergia Analytics through ElasticSearch API.
5. Training about how to use the public dashboard, how to use the private Kibana instance to build your own charts, and how to query the data through the Elasticsearch API; and basic level consultancy support.

The first logical approach was to set up a customer care email address or an specific mailing list that our customer’s contact people could email to report issues, requests, feedback, etc.

But time and experience has told us that we have been missing a big part of our target with this approach: customer’s community. Some examples of issues we have found are:

• Community might not be happy with default panels shown in the dashboards and might be interested in other ways to visualize their metrics
• Community might be aware of some issues about the people profiles information and willing to solve them
• Community might be interested in integrating Bitergia Analytics data with other tools or getting their own dumps of the data
• Community might be interested in adding missing repositories or data sources not taken into account

Dedicated GitLab groups for Bitergia customers

To face all these issues, we are now providing a GitLab group for each of our customers. The customer’s GitLab support group is our customer’s main interface with our support team. And, anyone from customer’s community and stakeholders can ask for membership of this group!

The customer’s GitLab support group hosts 6 main projects:

1. Support: where members can open issues to report bugs, ask questions, etc.
2. Sources: where the data sources configuration file is hosted.
3. Organizations: where the data about missing organizations and their associated domains is managed.
4. Profiles: where the data about people profile you would like updating in the dashboard is managed.
5. Reports: where quarterly reports automatically generated by the platform are stored.
6. Dashboard: where the configuration file for the side bar menu is managed.

Any of these projects can be made private and our customer can decide which ones.

In addition to this, we have set up a FAQ project to host general documentation. If you think something is missing, submit an issue!

We hope this will help the community members to be more involved in their Bitergia Analytics platform in a more community driven way.

If you are member of one of our customers communities and willing to be involved, let us, and/or your community manager, know and ask for project or group membership!