Building a strong community is a challenge few startups succeed at. Good news breeds questions, bad news breeds misunderstandings, and no news breeds anxiety. At SONM, we’ve gone through both successes and hardships — but the most important thing is that we’ve never stopped being transparent.
Community management builds a communication tunnel between the community and the company. Community managers are the avant-garde of the brand, both accepting praise and curbing negativity. The SONM community management team has been there in the front since way back during the ICO times. Many things have changed since that time, and the market has survived many ups and downs — but we’re still there, in the pinned Telegram chats and on the Bitcointalk forum, answering your questions. We are the first-line soldiers — some call us the “riot police” or “evil admins” — but we’re still here to greet you every day, solve your problems, and maintain order.
With SONM approaching the “going live” stage, we clearly understood that we needed to build a strong technical support team, as we had to get ready to cope with all the incoming requests. In the SONM support team, we focus first and foremost on clients and do our best to solve their problems, so we decided to invite technically skilled specialists to join us in the upcoming tech brainstorming. What have we got now? A strong team with some highly technically prepared members who are ready to help clients.
Meeting the demands of consumers, suppliers and token holders
At SONM, we have three categories of end users who come from different directions — consumers, suppliers, and token holders. Therefore, content diversification is necessary, but still, we succeed in establishing good relations with the sides.
Suppliers are individuals or companies of different sizes that wish to earn money by providing computing power. Traditionally, they want to put in the minimum effort and install the equipment as quickly as possible to make the maximum profit. For them, the sooner, the better. We’re well aware of this and work actively with every single supplier individually. We’ve submitted some detailed manuals for them for their convenience, and anytime they have any problems or doubts, our community managers are always there to help.
Customers are SONM users who wish to rent computing resources from other users (suppliers). Customers wish to perform some tasks in the most efficient way possible (the criteria may include speed, cost, reliability etc.). Customers are coordinated individually both by the support team (mostly technical support) and by other SONM departments, including business development.
We also have a wonderful group of SNM token holders, and in SONM chats they seek a place to chat, discuss prices, and blow off steam. These people are as smart as they come, lovingly chiding the SOMN staff, sharing their expertise on the unpredictable cryptocurrency market, and sometimes generating interesting ideas. We always welcome all their suggestions and even ask for their advice from time to time.
Get support in the most effective way
There are several ways to get technical support:
The SONM Technical Support Chat is a great place for users of SONM or those planning to investigate the technology and its options. There you can find not only our active support agents, who provide you with assistance immediately but also experienced users, who are familiar with installing and running SONM on their particular equipment and are also willing to assist newcomers or solve tricky issues. So, once you enter the chat, you can scroll back through the chat history and see lots of useful information with solutions, suggestions, and feedback.
To receive prompt aid without an information overload, kindly visit the SONM support bot and enjoy chatting personally with our technical support agent with no distractions from other users. The information you share with our agent will remain private, and no one else will have access to it. This means of communication is pretty convenient for tracking the history of your problems and solutions provided by our team. Still, do not forget that we are SONM support agents, not psychologists 😉
If you prefer communication by email, you can send an email to [email protected], and it won’t be long before you receive a detailed reply. All the inquiries are tracked in the Jira app, which we use for planning and managing tasks, so anytime you find a bug, it won’t take long until the developers patch it. This means of communication is convenient if you fail to find a fast solution to the problem and want to share all the logs and credentials in person. The response time is up to 15 minutes, which this is far from “All our operators are busy right now. Please hold for the next available person.” Once the issue is solved, you will receive an email with a request to rate your experience with the SONM support team. Please do not ignore this option and do provide your feedback, as it helps us improve our service.
For now, we have received an overwhelming majority of positive feedback, which makes us be pretty proud of what we do.
For self-supporting clients, there is a database resource (https://docs.sonm.com) where you can find important information about SONM, its technical concepts, installation guides, and the solutions to frequent issues. If you want to install and use SONM or solve your problems yourself, please take advantage of this great resource.
Now we can proudly state that we have established a 24/7 support team willing to assist both current and future clients.
You can share all your remarks and suggestions on how to improve our client support service with me personally via telegram @d_manin or email ([email protected]). Your opinion is of great importance to us.
Regards, Dmitry Manin
SONM Head of Customer Service
Originally published at sonm.com on October 16, 2018.
