One of the amazing/infuriating things about managing an OFN instance is chasing users around, isn’t it? Since people can just happily register their enterprise and start trading, we notice in the US that they tend to dive in without much forethought or knowledge of how OFN works, and then they possibly (probably) end up with a suboptimal setup that creates a lot of extra support work and may add to an assumption or opinion (which they share with other prospective users) that "OFN is Hard!").
So how do we make sure people’s enterprises are set up for success and minimal support using OFN, and keep from getting the reputation that OFN is “too hard” for people to use?
How do you get ahead of this in your instance? When a user actually talks to you before setting up, how do you help them set up in ways that make sense for both their business and the way OFN works without overwhelming them? We have the lovely quick start guides, but even when people read them, is there specific basic information people need to know about themselves and their business in order to set things up right (or have us set things up for them)? I am thinking of a questionnaire (started here) or something that will help prospective users think about how their business runs rather than having to think about all the million things OFN can do and then try to filter through those and put together a setup that works for them.
How do you handle helping new users get a good, useful setup right away?
We have set up a system where we get a ‘flag’ when a prospective user starts a trial. Then we can monitor these users and contact them. Its interesting that many people who sign up for a trial don’t end up setting up a store. So we contact them to offer support.
Lately we have been going through all user stores who have actively sold in the past year. We’ve been checking their storefronts (if active). We’ve done this because of the bug that changed many users from ‘visible’ to ‘hide all references’. So - when we see this in a storefront, we go fix it. We also try to look for anything else that seems it could be improved.
This year we also started the process of meeting (face to face if convenient, or by zoom) with users who are selling consistently. Especially larger hubs. I have found this very enlightening. They get a chance to ask about possibilities, we get a chance to tell them whats coming down our pipe… It feels like a nice thing to me - we see our users more as ‘members’ than just platform users, and this is in keeping with that idea.
I’ve thought it would be good to have a kind of cheat sheet of questions to ask a new user - somethings I don’t think to ask them something, and then miss something helpful in setup. There are so many possible set ups…
We put this spreadsheet together that covers the basics of enterprise creation (it was for creating a bunch of new enterprises) - it could totally be turned into a form or doc!
We’ve already got a lot of legacy cases whereby people have setup their Enterprises and chosen the wrong option for the ‘Sells? (none/own/any)’ question so we don’t even know what their real intentions are with the platform unless we talk to them directly. I’m quite sure there are plenty of other complications happening under our eyes but because the platform usage is so low at the moment we don’t really know what they are. Would be very useful to hear from more established instances in terms of the troubleshooting you see - a list of ‘set-up red flags’ we could be aware of and try to eradicate when we first come into contact with a new Enterprise.
You are so right @Evonne . We face the same challenges in OFN-CAN. Eventhough we have a system in place to ‘flag’ when a new user selects a trial package - lots of users just register without selecting a trial. We also have the problem that sometimes users get mixed up when registering, and they end up creating a second enterprise with a slightly different name than the first (because they can’t sort out their login and find the first enterprise.) Indeed, when a new hub is setting up - personally, I prefer to create all the enterprise profiles myself because it avoids problems.
It also seems to us that we need ‘enterprise gardening’ constantly. Continually reviewing the active and inactive enterprises and sunsetting irrelevant ones. We don’t contact each and everyone to do this. I think if somoene hasn’t had an open order cycle in a year - we should just sunset that enterprise.
I know that its not a problem for the database to store all this - but our backend closet is SO cluttered. And the irrelevant enterprises show up everywhere ( in all the dropdowns) when you are super admin. Its a super admin support problem for sure.
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