Interaction with the Utopian staff is one of the elements that we, as a team, value really highly and want to keep as one of the fundamental elements that make Utopian what it is. Whether it's on our Discord server, through comments on the Steem blockchain or through our ticket system, we want to ensure your questions will always be answered and you'll receive all the help you need.
In this first post of the series, let me teach you a bit about how we operate and how to reach out to us if you need any help.
To ticket or not to ticket, that is the question.
Since a new Utopian front-end is on the way, we've also been working on making some needed changes to our ticket system which will enable us to provide faster and higher quality support to all of our users. Because of that, I figured it's good time to teach you how we operate, which channel is the best for the support you might need (discord, ticket, direct messages?) and why our decisions might sometimes be the way they are.
First, let's understand who will be helping you if you're ever in the need.
Who are the Community Managers?
On Utopian, every category has a Community Manager. Some have two, maybe even three (looking at you, Translations). Those wonderful people, myself included, are responsible for making all category specific decisions, but also are heavily involved in pretty much all other internal changes as well. We breath, eat and drink Utopian and we know more about it than anyone else, often even more than our CEO! We discuss rules, ask about opinions on specific issues daily and learn from those interactions to make sure the decisions we make for the end user all always fair and consistent.
We don't have a training per se, our training is reading through dozens of Slack messages on a daily basis. If we're unsure about something, it only takes a couple of minutes to get a second look at the situation for an another CM to tell us what they think we should do.
This makes Utopian a kind of a... hive mind. The decisions we make, the responses you read and the support we provide is always consistent, because we have the means to make sure the team agrees to what we're about to do. Thanks to that, you'll never see something that could seemingly be passed off as favoritism thanks to inconsistent decisions and unfair treatment of one user over the other.
Where should I look?
One of the fundamental building blocks of our systems rely on users utilizing the tools we give to them correctly. Why have a ticket system if we can all just chat in discord. Why have a discord server if we can all communicate through the steem blockchain comments? Surely there are advantages to each medium and I'm here to let you know when you should look into each and every one of these.
Steem Blockchain
The comments on the blockchain are a great way to get a hold of us if you have any specific questions about a topic we've covered in the post you're responding to. If we've just announced a new category and you want to know more about it, feel free to ask there - it's a much better place to leave your insights than our Discord server or tickets because your feedback will permanently be visible for anyone that might be confused in the same way after reading one of our blogs. We also reward insightful comments with some small upvotes, so what's there not to love?
Tickets
In case you don't know, you can get a hold of Utopian at support.utopian.io. This is a Zendesk ticketing system that we've set up to ensure your most important issues never get missed.
See, with the blockchain and Discord, there's always a chance no one sees your message. There might be too many to read through or the poor timing on either your or our part can lead to comments disappearing into the nothingness never to be seen again. This will never happen if you use our tickets. We tend to each and every one of them and even if the waiting time can be slightly longer, you can be sure we'll stay with you until the issue is resolved and there's nothing more to add.
You can ask about anything you'd like there, but to make sure our response time stays as low as possible and that you get your help as soon as possible, we recommend only using this tool if you need help with something of critical importance, like account suspension or technical issues preventing you from using Utopian. This is also a decent place to bug us about joining the VIPO list or talking about business in general.
Discord
Again, in case you're new to Utopian you might not know this, but our primary way of interacting with the community is through our Discord Server. We host weekly reports of the activity in all categories and the issues we work on internally. We answer your questions and help with easy and quick to resolve issues. We chat with you about open source, steem, programming and often any other hobbies that you might share with us. It's awesome and I recommend you join in to chat with us and get to know us better.
If you're looking for help here, go straight to the #help channel and ask there. There's dozens of Moderators, Community Managers and regular users ready to answer your questions about Utopian. As long as it's not an issue of critical importance and can be resolved really quickly, I recommend you check there.
If you need help with something not related to Utopian, worry not! #general is a great way to off-top about steem, programming and anything else that we and our community just might know about.
Next time, expect a post about how to actually write a good comment, message or a ticket!